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Behind the Curtain
by Jane Bowyer Stewart
Can you imagine winning a job before you’ve uttered a word, after spending your day answering to a number? Musicians have this curious experience every year at the NSO. As you will see, the orchestral audition bears scant resemblance to a typical job "interview." However, the process arguably creates a true meritocracy.
GETTING TO THE AUDITION
Every month aspiring orchestral players scour the International Musician, the union (American Federation of Musicians) newspaper, for notices of the latest orchestral vacancies. (These coveted jobs usually come open only following a retirement or a death.) When the NSO has an opening, eager applicants, perhaps hundreds, send in their résumés. The audition committee must comb through the pile and identify the most promising candidates, if there would be too many to hear in the three full days of a typical audition. Ideally candidates will have significant professional orchestral experience, but sometimes a dark horse or exceptional graduate student will end up leading the pack. The committee strives to be as inclusive as possible with finite temporal resources.
All candidates travel to the Kennedy Center and stay in hotels at their own expense. (They could stay with friends or relatives, but it is usually too stressful to simultaneously prepare for an impending audition and be a polite guest.) Cellists usually have to buy a second seat on an airplane, as their instruments would be inadequately protected in the cargo hold. Jauvon Gilliam, NSO Principal Timpani, drove his own set of drums from Winnipeg to DC for his audition. Bassists also often drive to auditions, even long distances, to avoid shipping their instruments. Lately even violinists and violists, due to TSA restrictions, have a hard time ensuring that their instruments make it inside the airplane cabin; these musicians will opt to take a different flight if their instrument cannot stay with them on their regularly scheduled flight.
AUDITION DAY
Imagine you are a musician auditioning today. There’s no point primping for the preliminary round. An opaque curtain hangs between you and the audition committee, made up of a dozen or so tenured NSO members, who all too well remember being behind that curtain. They listen without knowledge of your age, race, gender, or appearance. In the past, candidates often walked onto the stage on a temporary carpet or removed their shoes; the committee wanted to make sure no clicking or stomping of heels gave away gender. (Interestingly, once orchestras started holding “blind” auditions [in the 1970s], they hired women in ever-increasing numbers. This trend led one non-PC conductor to comment that the Kennedy Center was “starting to look like a kitchen”!) These days, women are widely welcomed in American orchestras and nobody seems to find the barefoot precaution necessary. Nevertheless, the committee knows you by number only.
At this point nobody cares who taught you, where (or even whether!) you went to school, or what kind of performing reputation you enjoy. Letters of recommendation? Rave reviews? Irrelevant. It's all about how you play today. The committee wants to hear you play a specific set of orchestral excerpts—including the famously tricky parts, of course—to evaluate not only your beauty of sound and your command of technique, rhythm, and intonation but also your flexibility in adapting your playing style to the music of Mozart, Brahms, Debussy, or Shostakovich. A musician, like an actor, needs to exhibit both exquisite phrasing and the versatility of a chameleon.
You play the exact same excerpts as the other invitees. You know that they, like you, have practiced this list five or six hours a day since the audition was announced, often months ago. You have listened to recordings and studied scores, worked painstakingly with a metronome and a tuner, analyzed recordings of yourself, and taken mock auditions before friends and teachers. All of this on top of your umpteen years mastering the instrument, of course.
The first round might last only 10 minutes—or less. Most orchestras darkly warn, in their audition notices, that they "reserve the right to dismiss immediately any candidate not demonstrating the highest professional standards." They don't like how you tuned up, or you botched the first excerpt? “Thank you, Number Forty-three. Next!”
THE “SEMIS”
You may be one of the dozen or so players chosen to proceed to the next round, another alarmingly brief demonstration of everything you've learned in your many expensive years of study, if a little longer than the “prelims.” After the semi-finals, if you’ve prepared scrupulously and are the proud owner of steel nerves, you just might be one of the elite and ecstatic handful still in the running.
Should you be "eliminated," you may well go home with no constructive comments and no clue as to whether you were pretty close or hopeless, much less whether your musical outpouring touched anyone. Although making music is usually an extremely personal and emotional endeavor, playing snippets of masterpieces into a curtain can feel—and unfortunately sound— impersonal and dry.
DEALING WITH THE PRESSURE
To compose yourself before your crucial ten minutes, you can choose from an array of coping techniques. Perhaps you will rely on yoga, meditation, or deep breathing. Can the potassium found in bananas calm you down? Will ingesting tiny doses of beta blockers keep your hands from shaking and knees from knocking? Maybe you’ll try those visualization exercises touted by sports psychologists. Few musicians claim to play their best under pressure, but the winner of an orchestra audition will need good stress-busting strategies for concerts too.
THE FINALS
For the final round at the NSO, the Music Director arrives and the curtain comes down. The committee learns your name and even sees your résumé, but you still exchange not a word with them. For this segment, you and the other finalists are no longer playing identical music. You begin by playing part of a concerto of your choosing (after a quick run-through backstage with the accompanist you’ve just met). Your solo artistry can expand the committee’s glimpse into your unique musical soul . . . and then it’s time to nail several more killer excerpts.
After the committee’s discussion and vote, two musicians might be invited back to play yet again (the “super-finals”). Finally somebody might get that thrilling job offer. (Or nobody does. That happens too.) Players might have a trial period of a week or two playing in the orchestra. All newly hired players will have a two-year probationary period in which their colleagues and the conductor evaluate their ensemble skills before they are either awarded tenure or sent on their way. Still, triumphing at an orchestra audition—the result of harnessing your brains, heart, and courage—makes for a euphoric day indeed.