I have watched many of my students perform in Winners’ Recitals—in Singapore and in competitions around the world.
One thing has struck me repeatedly.
The programmes often contain a remarkable number of Asian names.
I remember one student who won a competition in Vienna and travelled with her family to perform in the Winners’ Recital. Looking around the programme, I noticed that many of the performers came from Singapore and neighbouring parts of Asia.
It made me curious.
Why are competitions so compelling to so many young Asian performers and their families?
I don’t think there is a single answer.
And I certainly don’t think competition is inherently unhealthy.
Competitions can provide structure, motivation, performance experience and opportunities to meet musicians from different cultures. Singapore’s own national music competitions, for example, have explicitly been designed to develop performing skills, musicality and talent.
The question is not whether we should compete.
The more interesting question is:
What are we hoping the competition will tell us about ourselves?
The Performing Arts Are Supposed to Be Individual
There is a paradox at the heart of competitive performance.
We enter competitions because we want to distinguish ourselves.
And yet competitions inevitably require some degree of comparison.
A panel of judges listens to several performers playing or singing the same repertoire and evaluates them according to particular criteria. The criteria may include technique, musicality, interpretation, tone, accuracy, stage presence and artistic maturity.
This can be useful.
It gives students something concrete to work towards.
It provides feedback.
It creates a reason to prepare seriously.
It can push a performer beyond the level they might have reached without a deadline or external challenge.
But there is another possibility.
The performer begins to learn what a “good” performance is supposed to sound like—and gradually begins to reproduce it.
The danger is not technical excellence.
The danger is confusing excellence with conformity.
The performing arts are ultimately about human expression.
If every performer makes the same choices, produces the same sound and expresses the same interpretation, we have achieved technical uniformity at the expense of artistic individuality.
Why listen to a human being when a recording could reproduce the same thing perfectly?
The imperfections, choices and perspectives of the performer are precisely what make live performance worth experiencing.
When the Score Becomes a Mirror
A competition gives us a score.
That score is useful information.
But it is not a measurement of our value.
This distinction sounds obvious until we watch what happens to young performers after the results are announced.
A first prize can become:
“I am good.”
A second prize becomes:
“I am not good enough.”
No prize becomes:
“Perhaps I am not talented.”
And suddenly an adjudication lasting a few minutes has become a verdict on an entire human being.
This is where competition becomes psychologically dangerous.
The problem is not losing.
The problem is allowing the result to become an identity.
Why External Validation Can Become So Powerful
Many young people grow up receiving messages about achievement from the adults around them.
Be good.
Get good grades.
Enter the best school.
Win the competition.
Be better than the other children.
Make us proud.
These messages are not necessarily malicious.
Often, they come from love.
Parents want their children to have opportunities. They want them to succeed. They may believe that achievement provides security in an uncertain world.
In many Asian families and educational environments, academic and artistic achievement can carry particularly strong social significance. But Asia is enormously diverse, and there is no single “Asian psyche” that explains how families approach achievement.
What we can observe, however, is the power of achievement-oriented environments.
When external standards become the dominant measure of success, a child may gradually learn to ask:
“How did I do?”
before asking:
“What did I discover?”
That is a very different orientation to learning.
From “Am I Good Enough?” to “What Am I Learning?”
There is nothing wrong with wanting to win.
Wanting to win can be energising.
Wanting to improve can be transformative.
The problem begins when winning becomes the reason we believe we are worthy.
A healthier performer can enter a competition with a different set of questions:
- What have I learned through preparing for this?
- What can I communicate through this piece?
- What part of my artistry has developed?
- What did I discover about myself on stage?
- What would I like to explore next?
- What can I learn from the other performers?
The competition then becomes a laboratory for growth rather than a courtroom in which worth is judged.
The Illusion of Control
There is another reason competitions can be emotionally difficult.
We can control our preparation.
We can practise.
We can choose our repertoire.
We can work on technique.
We can prepare mentally and physically.
But we cannot control the judges.
We cannot control the other performers.
We cannot control the acoustics.
We cannot control the mood of the room.
We cannot control what happens on the day.
And we certainly cannot control the aesthetic preferences of another human being.
This is why the healthiest competitive mindset is surprisingly simple:
Control what is yours to control.
Prepare as well as you can.
Perform as truthfully as you can.
Then let the result belong to the competition.
Competition Without Losing Yourself
I don’t think the answer is to remove competition from music education.
For some students, competition provides exactly the challenge they need.
For others, it creates unnecessary pressure.
The teacher’s responsibility is not to decide that competition is universally good or bad.
It is to understand the individual student.
Some students become energised by a challenge.
Some become paralysed by comparison.
Some thrive under a deadline.
Others need space to develop without being watched.
Some students genuinely enjoy winning.
Others discover that they love performing but hate being ranked.
All of these responses are legitimate.
The goal is not to make every student competitive.
The goal is to help every student understand why they are performing.
The Competition I Would Choose
There is one competition that I believe every performer should enter.
The competition against yesterday’s version of yourself.
Can you sing something today that you could not sing six months ago?
Can you perform with greater freedom?
Can you recover more quickly from a mistake?
Can you express something more honestly?
Can you stand on stage without needing everyone to approve of you?
Can you listen to another extraordinary performer without deciding that their brilliance diminishes yours?
These are victories that no adjudicator can award.
And they are often the victories that matter most.
The Artist After the Applause
Eventually, the medals are put away.
The certificates gather dust.
The recital ends.
The judge’s comments become a memory.
What remains is the performer.
What remains is the relationship with the instrument.
What remains is the joy—or anxiety—we have built around performing.
What remains is whether we still have something we want to say.
That, to me, is the real measure of a successful musical education.
Not whether a child has learned how to win.
But whether they have learned how to remain themselves while being seen.
Competition can be part of that journey.
So can failure.
So can rejection.
So can applause.
But none of them should be allowed to answer the question:
“Am I enough?”
That question was never theirs to answer.
The artist’s work is simpler—and harder.
Prepare deeply. Perform honestly. Learn generously. Let the result go.
And then return to the music.