Goldfish Bowl

Manitobans like to boast that their Music Competition Festival, held in Winnipeg every year since 1918, is the biggest and best of its kind in the world. There seems to be little doubt about the bigness; tourist folders proudly proclaim that more than 20,000 children from the province's schools take part.

But some residents of the province wondered last week whether the statistics should not be revised downward. A Winnipeg mother, entering her living room unexpectedly, found her eleven-year-old daughter grimacing and gesticulating before a mirror. The youngster puckered her lips, fluttered her eyelashes, tilted her head, and went through all the motions of singing--but no sound came forth. When the puzzled mother asked for an explanation, her daughter said that she was practicing for her part as a "goldfish" in the music festival. Goldfish, it developed, are the nonmusical children who stand with their classroom choirs and silently mouth words while the really talented singers do the competing, unhampered by croaks, voice breaks, sour notes or unpremeditated riffs.

The first mother, much amused, did nothing about it. But other parents, learning about goldfish for the first time, began withdrawing their children from the competition. Richard Glover, a University of Manitoba history professor, took his eleven-year-old goldfish son out of the choir line-up for this spring's festival. Said Glover: "His reaction was that his school just wanted him to cheat the referee. I think he was right."

Festival judges denied that they had ever been deceived. They were always aware that some of the children on the festival stage were not singing, but they tolerated the practice of goldfishing because it enabled even tone-deaf children to share in the fun, and might eventually develop latent musical talent in some of the unpromising. There was also something to be said, perhaps, for the training in dramatics that the goldfish received. Reported one veteran chorister: "The ones who don't sing always have the most expression on their faces."

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