conservatory audition material - THE ANSWER

[hbcrandy]

Good advice, Bloke. I have, for years, been telling my high school private students that, if they want to try to make it as a professional player, to apply to the major music schools such as Juilliard, Curtis, NE Conservatory, Eastman, etc. In many cases, I get the response that these schools offer too much pressure and competition. My response is that if one cannot handle the competition and pressure as a student, one has little or no chance to win a professional audition where one is up against the best players available in the world today.

[WoodSheddin]

I might also add that buying into the mindset that you can simply practice smarter for 2 hours/day and achieve the same level someone putting in 5+ hours/day on the horn is ludicrous.

The guy who works the hardest wins. Are you working harder than every other tuba player in the nation/world who will be showing up? If not than save the audition money and step it up for the next audition. You are wasting your time and money and the committee's time and money. Either show up with the goods or stay home. Continuous auditioning and losing does no good for your confidence and does nothing for your future chances. If you lose several times over than take serious inventory as to your abilities and what is required to drastically improve them.

Also, regardless of where one goes to school, or how expensive/cheap that school might be. Get a teacher who does what you want to do and has a proven track record of placing students in positions you want to achieve.

There are literally hundreds of people teaching tuba all across this country but only a very very very small handful who have had multiple students achieve world class successes at auditions. Seek out those teachers.

No one wins auditions casually.

[MikeMason]

I would like to add to what Sean said.There is also a talent factor.Some people don't have to work as hard to achieve the same results.There's no doubt that people who wins auditions have superior work ethic,but to say that regardless of talent level,if you work hard enough you can win auditions,i think is misleading.There are neuro/muscular and psychological factors that contribute to the potential of a player.This goes back to Bloke's statement that a top teacher can tell an incoming freshman if they really have a chance at a full time orchestra gig.Having said that,there are many career paths that can keep you in the music business and still include alot of satisfying pro-level playing.Just a horn salesman's opinion...

[Dan Satterwhite]

The guy who works the hardest wins. Are you working harder than every other tuba player in the nation/world who will be showing up?

We've been down this road before Sean, and I still maintain that winning an audition cannot be boiled down to your simple statement above. As others have stated, TALENT plays a very big role. I could work as hard as humanly possible for years, and I don't think that I would be a world class jazz saxophonist...my talents do not lie there. I think that the talented guy(s) that work the hardest usually end up in the finals. These are the ones for whom accuracy, dead-on great intonation, and a beautiful, even sound in all registers and at all dynamics are all non-issues. The OBJECTIVE side of playing. Then, it comes down to SUBJECTIVE. Like going to the greatest steak restaurant on the planet. Do you want filet mignon or a t-bone? Two different tastes, both world class pieces of meat. The committee has to be buying what you are selling. And yes, I think FATE plays a part.

I know you won't agree, and your response will be, as it has been in the past: "No. The guy who works the hardest wins. Period." But speaking as a veteran of over twenty orchestral bass trombone auditions, including Cleveland, the Met, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, I believe you are wrong.

[WoodSheddin]

I know you won't agree, and your response will be, as it has been in the past: "No. The guy who works the hardest wins. Period." But speaking as a veteran of over twenty orchestral bass trombone auditions, including Cleveland, the Met, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, I believe you are wrong.

I am yet to witness an audition where the winner was not the one who worked at it the hardest to win. To think otherwise while preparing is to invite defeat.

How "working hardest" is defined is a challenging concept. IMO that involves much more than the 6 weeks leading up to an audition. This involves the years leading up to that point. Those last 6 weeks are simply the final packaging of years and years of "working hardest."

So in a short term one individual can indeed skirt along on 2-3 hours per day and win over the individual who put in 6 hours per day for 3 weeks. This was not due to talent, this was due to diligence over the long haul.

For anyone who is serious about succeeding, they have to come to terms with sacrifices involved to achieve the goal. If that means more time on the horn instead of behind the computer or Xbox than so be it.

For anyone who is not serious about succeeding, they have to come to terms with the sacrifices involved with not achieving the goal. If that means more time working a cubicle instead of behind the horn or horns than so be it.

Regarding the concept that the winner of the final round is simply the favorite flavor among several equal players is not generally the case either. If all the finalists sound on an even keel than that mostly results in choosing no one. Someone needs to be in that round and really stand out. Standing out from a half dozen world class musicians is not accomplished due to mystic talent.

Talent is the results of hours spent toiling away at your craft.

[Mark]

I am yet to witness an audition where the winner was not the one who worked at it the hardest to win. To think otherwise while preparing is to invite defeat.

Although it may never happen again, how would you explain Floyd Cooley and Sumner Erickson? I'm sure that they did work hard, but certainly not for years.

[TexTuba]

Although it may never happen again, how would you explain Floyd Cooley and Sumner Erickson? I'm sure that they did work hard, but certainly not for years.

Well I study with Sumner, and I've asked how. It's actually a pretty good story. But the story is too long to post...and I'm too lazy to type!:lol: But I believe you had it right in your first sentence: "It may never happen again."

Ralph

[WoodSheddin]

I am yet to witness an audition where the winner was not the one who worked at it the hardest to win. To think otherwise while preparing is to invite defeat.

Although it may never happen again, how would you explain Floyd Cooley and Sumner Erickson? I'm sure that they did work hard, but certainly not for years.

Seeking out examples of success with little perceived effort as a means of comforting yourself might make you sleep better at night, but it is highly unlikely to reap rewards.

If you want to be successful, plan on working your *** off for an extended period of time to get there.

[Charlie Goodman]

I am yet to witness an audition where the winner was not the one who worked at it the hardest to win. To think otherwise while preparing is to invite defeat.

Although it may never happen again, how would you explain Floyd Cooley and Sumner Erickson? I'm sure that they did work hard, but certainly not for years.

Think of how many tuba performance students there are at any given university. Think of how many universities there are. That's how many NEW players come in. Now think of how many players there are still that went through university years before.



That happened TWICE.

That's two in many hundreds of thousands. That's not enough to even call a rarity. That's an outlier: data not even close enough to the mass of the samples to be counted.

[Mark]

Seeking out examples of success with little perceived effort as a means of comforting yourself might make you sleep better at night, but it is highly unlikely to reap rewards.

Don't get me wrong, I agreee with you that it takes a lot of hard work. I'm just arguring that there might be other factors involved in how well some one plays for an audition.

[WoodSheddin]

Seeking out examples of success with little perceived effort as a means of comforting yourself might make you sleep better at night, but it is highly unlikely to reap rewards.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that it takes a lot of hard work. I'm just arguring that there might be other factors involved in how well some one plays for an audition.

Nope, not really. It ain't rocket science. You play better than the other guy and you will win. If you gave it your best effort and lost than give it more of your best effort.

I have never known of anything which is perfect, including preparation. If you are honest with yourself then you can discover dozens of ways to improve yourself. Unless you are prepared to stop improving areas which you are already hitting, then those dozens of ways might entail more time to complete each day.

Telling yourself that this is all the effort I am willing to put forth because it doesn't matter anyway if that "talented" player shows up is simply giving up.

Much of what I am saying is not so much an absolute but in part a mindset which is required to push past the envelope. We have all hit the wall before or plateued. Diminishing returns is a fact. But there ARE returns even if diminished. If you can overcome the mental obsticles associated with such a high degree of dedication to a single task than great things can be achieved.

Try for 3 months to bury yourself in your work and decide for yourself at the end if you have not improved. It is similiar to trying to lose weight. The dieting and exercise can many times be a real downer. It takes a real concentration on the goal beyond mental distractions to reach the results wished for.

It ain't easy.

[WoodSheddin]

Then I guess how do you define hard work? I practice often, but hardly any of it I would call "hard." In fact, I find practice sessions relaxing.*

*Unless I'm trying to play that danged Capriccio by Penderecki.

Substitute whatever word you want there. Tireless, extended, far reaching, obsessive, voluminous, isolated, whatever.

[Tubadork]

Hey,
just thought that I would chime in. Don't get me wrong, I obviously don't have a major gig yet (although, one day I would like to) BUT, when I got to my undergrad I really sucked at playing the tuba. In fact I saw my audition sheet and all it said was:
Rhythm, tone very weak we need tubas c- accept
and this was at a small liberal arts college in NJ (William Paterson University, tuba teacher is Paul Scott, who is a fantastic teacher and a poster here on the tubenet, a heck of a nice guy and a Martin collector/ expert). My 1st year there Paul was not the teacher, a trombone player was and he believed that I had no talent for playing music. Once I got with Paul (and private lessons from Scott Mendoker, another great teacher from Rutgers) and got motivated, I was practicing 6hrs. or more a day (not including rehersals). Yeah, I wasn't sleeping much (about 2hrs. a night) I had a job (or 3 at one point, because the student loan folks said that my family made too much money, but somehow when I would ask my Mom for new shoes, she said she couldn't because she had to buy food. ) but I always made time to practice, even if I had to break into the Art building, risk getting picked up by campus police again, just to get my time in. Yeah, it might have been a little extreme, but it got me into Eastman as a performance major and the teachers assistant, with Don Harry. So, I even thought that I had no talent, but I was able to make something of my playing. Look, I still have a way to go until I get my dream gig, but I think in lots of ways Sean is right. Hard work will get you there, or at least competitive. Of course knowing what to work on, how to work on it are big factors, but with the right teachers, you can really go far.
Thanks,
Bill Pritchard