Archive for the 'Orchestra Auditions' Category

A comedy of musical omens

Published
by
dtclarinet
on June 4, 2008
in Clarinet, Equipment, Mastery, Musician's Life, Orchestra Auditions and The Music
. 3 Comments

This past Saturday and Monday I spent 7 hours recording a CD of 10 orchestral excerpts to be used as a preliminary round for a major US orchestra, the NY Philharmonic. The hours between were spent mostly practicing those excerpts.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Playing in an orchestra is to skating in the Ice Capades what auditioning for an orchestral position is to winning the Olympics.

Olympic athletes don’t have lives; they have only their goal, to win the Olympics. They sleep, eat, play, love and breathe that goal. Nothing else matters. Nothing else can matter, for every electron of their being must be pointed in one direction consistently for years in order to achieve that goal. Or attempt to achieve it. Many do not even gain a medal.

I hired a professional technician to help me with the task of recording and then editing the CD. I’m glad I did. After 7 hours of recording, there were 2 hours of takes from which the best 10 had to be selected to comprise the final 15 minute CD. This guy was top notch. He took detailed notes of my random playing order for each excerpt. (I often gave up perfecting one and tried another, or several others, before returning to the first.)

To be able to play those 10 excerpts with the highest quality, I had tested 50 or 60 reeds and rejected most of them (at $2 a shot) to get one or two which would let my music making shine through. I had practiced those excerpts with numerous reeds, and each reed had to be played slightly differently to make it work. Each excerpt also tended to demand a different kind of reed. Now I sought the one reed to rule them all!

Recording those 10 excerpts is like performing a decathlon, the height of athletic performance for any human. One has to be nimble to play Mendelssohn’s sprightly Scherzo, powerful to lift the heavy drama of Verdi’s Tosca or Kodaly’s Dances of Galanta, rich and somber for the opening of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, sensual and luring for Ravel’s Bolero, and some of all of the above for Brahms 3rd symphony.

I also had to play parts one of the most deceptively difficult of concertos; Mozart’s. Mozart demands both the purity of expression of a child and the technical mastery of a great artist.

I recorded right up to the deadline, allowing several hours for my engineer to edit the CD. With the finished product in my hands, I dared not listen to it, fearing only the flaws would reach my ears, nothing else.

I reread the very specific directions for sending it, which said to clearly label the jacket with my name. I took out an indelible marker and wrote my name on the CD, instead of the jacket. Since this was to be a “blind” preliminary audition, they couldn’t see my name on the CD. I had to copy the CD to a fresh disk and follow the directions this time, labeling the outside. Not a big deal, but time was running out.

It was now 8:15 PM. It had to be sent 9 PM to have it in the NY Phil office by the next morning. To be sure it copied correctly, I put the CD in my stereo and listened to a bit of each track. My heart sank. In the first 16 bars of the Mozart Concert, I noticed a few slightly out of tune notes.

Musicians are both blessed and cursed with astoundingly powerful and uncompromisingly sharp self-criticism. Those few out of tune notes would be nothing in a live performance, nothing at all. They would be of little consequence in a recording with orchestra, when the listener is taking in the big picture and the shape of the phrase. But when there are hundreds of applicants vying for one of only a few hundred jobs in the country, those first 16 bars are CRITICAL.

I pushed aside the gloomy mood which encroached. I was exhausted, having barely eaten the past two days, surviving on nervous energy. I headed for FedEx Kinkos to send it off. I flipped on the radio, which was playing a recording of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The music came to the part where Till is about to be executed, as the whole brass section plays the doomsday march to the scaffold. It was appropriate music for my current mood.

Till, played by the Eb clarinet in this section, screams out in fear and desperation at impending death. After squealing out an incredibly high note, the parts calls for a low one. In this performance, that low note was flat as all get out! I bellowed with frustrated laughter. Ah, the painful irony of it all.

After mailing off the tainted CD, I returned home to focus on finding the cause of the deathly smell which had permeated my house. After sniffing around a bit, I located the little corpse of a chipmunk under my piano, the room in which I had been recording. (undoubtedly brought in by my cats several days earlier) Another ominously ironic sign? Death inspired music making? No wonder it was out of tune!!

I decided I had to get out of the house. I phoned a friend to meet me at a restaurant for a bite to eat, my first real meal in two days. On the way I turned on the radio again. I immediately recognized the music which had pulsed through my veins since age 12; Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

I also noticed several out of tune notes.

Audition Blast Off

Published
by
dtclarinet
on May 19, 2008
in Clarinet, Musician's Life, Orchestra Auditions and Practicing
. 0 Comments

If the Ice Capades are the musician’s daily life, auditions are the Olympics.

Tonight, to begin the process of learning “the list” for one audition I’m taking, I opened the xeroxed and stapled packet of required excerpts to the first page. Many orchestras supply the music to clear up any confusion regarding various editions, articulations, dynamics, tempos and specific sections to be used. This list was concise, serving as requirement for a taped, preliminary round.

I put on an acceptable reed (not a great one, to challenge myself), turned on the recorder and began to play from the beginning of the list. No matter what happened, I kept going, as if it were the audition itself. Most of these excerpts were familiar to me, both from previous auditions and from many years as an orchestral player.

My purpose in doing this exercise was to grasp the big picture of what needed serious work and what only needed tuning up, both in particular excerpts and my general technique. This test also honed my concentration toward the larger perspective of the whole list as the goal, rather than individual excerpts each with it’s own myriad challenges.

Afterwards, as I listened to the playback recording, I found with relief that I wasn’t too far off the final target. Tempos were fairly steady, pitch good, tone good. A few of the excerpts were less deeply ingrained for me, being “tutti” parts, where everyone is playing, rather than the more common solo parts asked at auditions. Those definitely needed some wood-shedding to get them up to the level of the others.

The most important lesson I learned from this crash debut practice session was the need to work on consistency, probably the most elusive of the musician’s skills. I remember Olivia Gutoff, my Junior High School band director in 1974, saying to me, “You cannot just practice until you play it right; you must practice until you cannot play it wrong!”

Those wise words have stuck, like a broken record, deep in my musician’s soul.

I did a google search for Olivia Gutoff, and found her Artistic Director’s summary of the ‘99-’00 season of the Maryland Classical Youth Orchestras, a position she held for many years. After several congratulatory paragraphs, she ends with some suggestions as to how her students might spend their Summer vacation.

It is also time to make scales more fluent, in-tune, and beautiful. And don’t forget that chromatic scale! Take music books you don’t generally work out of, and sight-read often. Ask your teacher to help you sight-read. It also helps to play duets, either with your teacher or with a friend.

One can never be over-prepared for an audition! Keep in mind that obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

Ah, Olivia, you haven’t changed a bit! And I am a better musician for having known you.

Moving On?

Published
by
dtclarinet
on April 27, 2008
in Clarinet, Mastery and Orchestra Auditions
. 3 Comments

While Columbus decides if it wants to have a real orchestra, I’ve decided not to wait for that outcome, as some others in the orchestra have already done. Sometimes bad things happen for a good reason. Perhaps it’s my time to move on.

I auditioned for St. Louis Principal Clarinet opening a year ago, the first audition I had taken in at least a decade. I could feel the old, deep instincts sluggishly resurging in my veins. While practicing hours of excerpts, like soliloquies from a play, the familiar convoluted logic of making music minus 80 began to resurface.

I not only had to be in top mental and physical condition, but my equipment also had to be world class. Compared to playing one or two difficult excerpts during an average concert, to play all the big excerpts one after the other was like taking a 5 year old Audi with 60,000 miles for a race at the Indianapolis 500. Though a great car, it probably won’t win, and certainly not if in need of a tune up. No, I don’t blame the outcome on the instrument or barrel or reed or mouthpiece. It’s just one factor which inhibits the fastest race. Anyway, equipment issues began to settle before the audition, but not in time for me to be completely comfortable before the audition date.

My own physical conditioning had also sagged during years of driving on auto pilot. Living as a musician is like being a professional skater. You need to stay in shape. But doing it week after week you learn to prepare enough for tonight’s performance, not winning the Olympics. Few can do that over and over. Musicians maintain a great deal of flexibility to play one or two different styles on a few days notice. But the “Olympics” of music is auditioning, when one must do it all, top to bottom, side to side, now!

Even a soloist has time on her side, playing the same music over a series of performances, opportunities to fine tune and improve. The audition taker is not privy to such luxury. He has to perform a multitude of varied and even conflicting styles and techniques at the drop of a hat, in succession. A tall order for anyone.

Hundreds of applicants seem to feel up to the task, though, since auditions are always peopled by a herd of regular faces who are convinced they will win the jackpot if they put in another quarter. I don’t feel that way. The few auditions I took in the 80’s were successful, meaning I was at least a semi-finalist if not a finalist. I prepare for auditions with every cell in my body, mind and spirit. It takes years to prepare the foundation, then as the date nears, it becomes my life for months.

St. Louis was not meant to be for me, or perhaps I wasn’t meant for St. Louis. I wouldn’t have hired me! I was frightfully insecure and doubtful, not a good way to win. I’m sure my playing demonstrated my abilities, but certainly not at an Olympic level.

Someone recently told me she avoided broadcasting their intention to audition, especially to non-musicians. Even a good player loses more than they win. She recounted how frustrating it was to be asked innocently by non-musicians of the outcome of her “job application”, then have to explain that repeatedly failing, even chronically failing to win an audition is a relatively normal event in a musician’s life, unlike applying for a clerk or server position. One oboist I know took some 49 auditions before nailing a top 10 job. Something akin to building the Pyramids in Egypt, day by patient, persistent day.

So now I begin, again, to take auditions. This time I have secured (most of) my equipment to a high and stable level of quality. For the past year I have also gained, or perhaps refreshed, my self-confidence using all available techniques, including good old fashioned positive thinking and supportive friendships. I’ve also practiced and performed more solo works to put myself under more pressure.

I got “the list” a week ago. The list of music required is your map to the treasure, the puzzle to be unlocked. A lot can be learned from the list. Most big orchestras keep their lists fairly short, perhaps eight or ten excerpts. And most will specify the sections they wish to hear. Some will even make copies of all the parts they require, to clear up the often confusing issue of various conflicting editions of any one composition. This list cites 18 entire pieces, without any indication of movements or sections to be emphasized.

Clearly, they seek a Federer or Rodick for the job. Somehow I am not daunted. Since I have played principal clarinet for 25 years, I have played all the music they request in its entirety. I am as experienced for this position as anyone.

It’s one thing to be experienced, however, and another to be ready. To be ready to play any of those pieces any time, day or night, I must increase my endurance, flexibility and consistency. I have two months to do it.

The first thing I did was pull out a scale book, the most advanced I have, and began a daily regimen of several hours of basic technique. So that’s where I am as of this report, in audition “boot camp”.

I will report regularly on what and how I’m practicing. See you soon. I’m off to do scales.