Making music is like cooking. We have a cupboards full of ingredients and if we mix and cook these ingredients according to one recipe we get a dundee cake, another way we get chicken tandoori and another way we have strawberry jam. It's all food, just different.
Of course, the quality of the ingredients, the accuracy with which we measure them, the skill we use to mix them and the care taken over the cooking will determine how good the final meal is. But you can't make a dundee cake out of 1lb of chicken and some curry paste.
The picture shows the storage cupboards in our music room. In each of these cupboards we have a wide selection of ingredients to choose from. If we use one recipe, we end up with plainsong, another produces a symphony and yet another produces barbershop. Style is the word we use to describe what kind of end product we have and the Barbershop Style is just one of an infinite number of possibilities.
Most audiences are really only interested in the quality of he ingredients but the Music judge has the added task of making sure that there are no cherries in your Dundee cake!
So, when making music, we choose our ingredients with care, we make sure that they are of the highest quality and that we cook them with attention to detail. Now go and explore the cupboards in the Music Room.
Just in case you can't see the picture or clicking on it doesn't do anything, the cupboards are labelled