Thought for the day.
A colleague I admire was talking today about how one might make the lists of orchestral audition excerpts more diverse. I take a different view.
The professional orchestra audition process, especially in America, has got to be one of the hardest things any musician ever has to go through. The toll it takes on musicians’ self-image and emotional well-being is beyond enormous, and the process is hugely expensive and time consuming, and success is not, by any means, guaranteed.
With that in mind, I think we have a duty of care to make the process as humane as possible and to not make the audition requirements a barrier to good musicians with busy lives applying. The best candidates might have young children, elderly parents who need care, or are dealing with financial insecurity. Surely a panel with ears can tell everything they need to know with a mvt of Bach or Mozart, a contrasting solo piece and perhaps 3 or 4 of the most standard excerpts. Frankly, you can tell 99% of what you need to know from 30 seconds of Bach/Mozart.
In my view, the wellbeing of the applicants and the need for the orchestra to find the best colleagues outweighs all other considerations. I scarcely know a musician out there who isn’t keen to expand and diversify the repertoire. I trust them to take ownership of that work, and not to impose it upon them in the audition arena.
What do you think?
Of course, there was a time when actual sight-reading was part of the drill. That could be gamed, of course, and may be why the unions aren’t anxious to encourage it. Primrose tells of a student who nearly failed out of his class before they decided to spend two or three years working on nothing but nasty orchestra bits. When he got a job after graduation, his music director called Primrose and said “he’s not the very best player we’ve seen, but his sight-reading is amazing!”