Thursday, July 3, 2008

walking the line between mockery and self-deprecation

I've been losing taking auditions lately. And while most have been unremarkable, I've come across a few things that were... peculiar. Orchestra names have been omitted to protect the innocent.1

1. A lot of auditions have been opening with a solo lately. I had been led to believe that this was more of a semifinal/final round thing, but apparently times are a-changing. It's kind of refreshing, actually.2

2. Why would any orchestra take their audition materials out of an excerpt book? I mean, it's a good resource for students, but one would think an orchestra would want the actual parts for an audition. It just makes me uneasy when I pull out my copies of the original parts and the organizer starts to look worried.

3. In my (admittedly limited) experience, the first round of most auditions is usually less than five minutes. Between five and ten minutes seems a bit long, but certainly not unreasonable. Twenty to thirty minutes is right out.3

4. When there aren't very many people auditioning, I can see how there might only be one round. Deciding to e-mail everyone the results later instead of making a decision that day was a little unorthodox, but didn't really bother me. Announcing that the finalists from that first round will each play a trial concert with the orchestra before a final decision is made isn't unheard of, but seems a little odd for a small per-service group. When all of this adds up to an acknowledgment that a final decision probably won't be made until close to a year after the audition? Man, I dunno. I'm not complaining, just... baffled.4

All of these observations are made purely in a spirit of love and compassion and personal amusement, I swear. And if anything mentioned here is actually perfectly common and normal and I've been horribly misled? Please, let me know so I can be prepared for the next time it happens.





  1. I mean, so far they've all been really nice people, and I don't want to imply that any of these things caused me to lose any auditions. No, that was all my doing.[↩]

  2. I'd probably be happier about it if I didn't hate our solo literature so much.[↩]

  3. Honestly, I should have been cut after the first five.[↩]

  4. Yes, I am one of the finalists, which is how I know about this. I really wasn't expecting it after how I played.[↩]


posted by freestyle tacet at 9:10 PM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...now I'm really wondering what's up with those people. As you probably know, they did the horn audition straight out of excerpt books, too. And not even for nonstandard pieces: everything on the list is easy to find, and only one of the pieces doesn't fall squarely in the public domain. Even worse, whose idea was it to choose the sloppiest, most error-ridden excerpt books in the library?

I didn't end up doing the audition (I had too many things going on for about two weeks beforehand), but I'm just as mystified about their process as you. One thing strikes me as particularly strange, though: the horn list, played in its entirety, could be done in 10-15 minutes, depending on how long the player takes to empty their water (and how often). Why the hell would they have you play for a half a damn hour?

July 5, 2008 at 1:11 AM

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