jason heath – Audition Cafe

10 Preparation Strategies I've Learned from Audition Winners

Jason Heath — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 06:45:10 +0000

Written by Jason Heath, Founder & CEO of Contrabass Conversations

I’ve been doing a podcast about the double bass for the past decade. While I didn’t realize it at first, what I was really doing was creating an oral history from the best in the business.

I interviewed new bassists each week for my podcast. Soon, I had talked with hundreds of people. Principal bassists from major orchestras and world-renowned teachers shared their approaches to audition preparation. When a bassist won a major job, we scheduled an interview and talked through their preparation process.

I decided to compile this audition advice into a 4-part series called Winning the Audition. I divided the series into four parts:

• Part 1 – Preparing for Audition Success

• Part 2 – Practicing Techniques for Peak Auditions

• Part 3 – Preparation Routines That Work

• Part 4 – Sealing the Deal

Through this process, I discovered 10 strategies that came up repeatedly in these talks with audition winners. I hope that you find this list useful!

NO. 1 – SLOW PRACTICE

This is a fundamental technique for all audition winners I’ve spoken with. Like analyzing golf swing, slow practice allows you to hone in on all the details that you might glaze over at a faster tempo.

Audition winners are methodical in their slow practice and map things out over a long period of time. Here’s a quote from my interview with Andrew Raciti (Milwaukee Symphony, Northwestern University) about what slow practice does for him:

“That was a big breakthrough as far as being able to sit down and play, and even though I was playing faster in my mind I still felt like it was slow and relaxed, and I had the space. You know, that hyperawareness you feel in an audition, that often feels like a detriment, you’re aware of every time that you blink, and, “Oh my God, the hair on the string moved a little bit.” It changes it from that kind of panicked uncomfortable feeling to this extra space that you can sit in—the zone or the flow. You actually have space to phrase, or to feel this gesture and hear this crescendo. It’s very liberating—it’s a good place to be.”

NO. 2 – RECORD YOURSELF

Every audition winner I spoke with spent a great deal of time with a recording device. A recording is objective. It separates the act of performing from the actual sonic result. It shows exactly what needs to be practiced, and it builds confidence.

Ira Gold (National Symphony, Peabody Conservatory) shared this with me about recording:

“If I have the opportunity to set aside some time to record myself, I’ll do that. That way I can go back and listen to it and decide if what I’m hearing on the recording matches what I’m hearing when I’m actually playing. Sometimes those two things don’t match up.”

NO. 3 – NEVER PRACTICE, ALWAYS PERFORM

If you wait until all technical details are perfect, you’ll never end up practicing like you’d actually perform a piece. Audition winners practice everything—even scales—as if they’re performing.

Alex Hanna (Chicago Symphony, DePaul University) shared his thoughts about practicing versus performing with me:

“In the practice room, you should make every effort to perform all the time. You know, the word practice kind of has a mindless connotation for a lot of people, which I think is really bad. This is actually kind of a Bud Herseth quote: never practice, always perform.

My piano teacher used to tell me this too, when I would sometimes kind of come into a lesson and play something a little uninspired. She said that I had a “musical button.” And so she would just push my musical button, and you know, it’s kind of like that thing where you engage and you start to… maybe it’s like a right brain/left brain thing, but you always want to have that button turned on, whether you’re playing scales and Simandl or you’re playing the Koussevitzky Concerto, you want to be performing all the time.”

NO. 4 – DEVELOP TEMPO CONSISTENCY

How consistent are you with tempos when you play an excerpt? Gaining control over your consistency is crucial for taking auditions.

Jack Budrow (Michigan State University) has a great technique for establishing tempo recall for excerpts:

“I give metronome markings for every excerpt. And then, after students learn the excerpts and they’re playing them, I ask them every day, “when you get up, I want you to play the excerpt, and then I want you to turn on the metronome to see how close you get to this tempo. And then practice for just a few minutes with the metronome on, and then practice for a few minutes with the metronome off.”

I think the recall is good, because a lot of times people get into auditions, and they get the adrenaline going, and they try to play too fast. Occasionally they try to play too slow. So the recall of the actual tempo is pivotal, so that you know that before you start playing exactly how fast it’s going to be.”

NO. 5 – PRACTICE IN A LARGE SPACE

How much of your practice time is spent in a tiny space? Probably a lot.

Musicians communicate using sound waves. These sound waves behave differently in a small and a large space. In a small space, the sounds we create bounce back to us immediately. Therefore, we need to take every possible opportunity to play in a large space.

Here’s Brandon McLean (Pittsburgh Symphony) on this topic:

“It was relatively late in life that I really got to spend a significant amount of time by myself in a large space, in like a concert hall practicing. I’d been a real practice room practicer for a long time, and my concept of sound was based on the fact that things were bouncing back to me from three feet away as opposed to 300 feet away or more.

A really helpful thing for me was getting into big halls and putting a microphone a long way away from me, and realizing what I actually sounded like to the people that were listening on the panel a long way away from me.”

NO. 6 – DEVELOP YOUR STYLE PALETTE

Do you play with the same concept of sound for each of these composers? Do you change your articulation style, phrasing, and vibrato?

Developing a stylistic approach for each composer is critical. Jack Budrow advocates developing different sounds for each composer, and practicing playing one composer in the style of another for flexibility:

“I don’t agree that sound should be one sound at all. I think that’s the part of the style differences between composers, that you have a Mozart sound, then you have a Beethoven sound, and then the Brahms sound is a little different from that. And they’re all a little bit unique. Conductors love that.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but occasionally I’ll say to my students, “now play this Beethoven excerpt as if it were Mozart… how would it sound?” And then I’ll say, “let me hear this Beethoven excerpt as if it were Brahms.” And make them go from one style to another playing the same music, just so they stay flexible and they understand the this is really what Mozart sounds like, even though Beethoven wrote it. I just think it helps them stay flexible”

NO. 7 – VISUALIZATION

Mental practice, or visualization, is a powerful practicing technique. In fact, many find it to be almost as effective as physical practice. Combined together, visual and physical practice are incredible.

Ed Barker (Boston Symphony, Boston University) encourages his students to use visualization when preparing for auditions:

“There is a well-known phrase that I always like to use with my students: when you’re building your performance—you’re getting ready to perform and you’re practicing as if you’re performing—when you’re in the practice room, you need to imagine or visualize what it’s like to be where it is.

If it’s an audition, you’ve got to imagine being behind a screen, in a darkened hall, having walked down a long hallway first, before having to play this audition. You need to imagine that—you have to imagine this from your practice room setting.

And then, when you’re in the audition or the recital or whatever, you have to imagine that you’re back in your practice room.”

NO. 8 – ADVERSITY TRAINING

Adversity training puts you in non-ideal performing situations in order to learn how to manage yourself physically and mentally. It’s a similar concept to basic training for the military. Even though music is not a life or death situation, our primal “fight or flight” instincts kick in when we feel under pressure. Our stomach starts to churn, our muscles tighten up, our breathing gets shallower and we start to sweat.

How do we learn to deal with this? Ian Hallas (Lyric Opera of Chicago) describes what he does as the audition nears:

“10 days out, I’d do two things. The first is that every morning… I’m a morning guy, so I’ll get as much work as I can done early in the day. I’ll unpack the bass, tune, put a little bit of rosin on, and just run excerpts. If it’s an orchestral audition, I’ll run standard excerpts that I assume are most likely to be asked on a prelim round. So for example, it might be first and last movement of Mozart 35, it’s going to be Heldenleben [rehearsal] 9, some Brahms 2, Beethoven 5 scherzo/trio. And it’s so hard on the first day because it feels just awful. You might not have even stretched, you might not have even gone anywhere, if you’re practicing in your house you might have just gotten out of bed and done it.

But the goal is to improve your worst playing, because if you can do that, when you walk onstage and have to do it the first time, you’re going to know that you’ve done this work if you can pick up the bass without having warmed up at all and play your excerpts down at a high level. So that’s the first thing I’ll do—and I do record that—to get all the bugs, the hiccups, burps, and farts all out of there.”

NO. 9 – PLAY FOR PEOPLE

This is one of the most important techniques for successful audition. Every single audition winner I spoke with stressed the importance of playing for as many people as possible.

Matthew McDonald (Berlin Philharmonic) describes how important it was for him to play for people as he prepared for his Berlin audition:

“I think the audition was in April 2008, and I started practicing for it in September 2007, practicing quite a lot then. And then basically got it to a point about a month or two before where I was running it every day or two. I even played it for a bunch of four-year-olds once—I would just use anybody as an audience.

I would have lots of friends come out and listen, or I would go to them. I had some big run-throughs, run-throughs for a couple friends. I don’t know how many I did… dozens. So that by the time of the audition, I felt like I’d been through as many nerve-creating scenarios as possible, and I felt very free on the day.

A lot of students make the mistake, they’ll run through it for their tape recorder or something, but it’s very different than playing it to your peers.”

NO. 10 – BALANCE

It’s easy to become obsessive in your practicing. I have struggled with this many times. But practicing to the exclusion of everything else in your life is more likely to harm you than help you. Keeping a healthy perspective and making sure to do other things outside excerpt practice is important.

Ju-Fang Liu (Indianapolis Symphony, Butler University) shares how she finds balance in her preparation:

“I don’t like to be overplaying, because the music or the excerpts tend to get stale if you over practice them, in my opinion. I think you want to have a pretty good balance. If you like running, you should keep running. Stress management is important. For some people, it’s like life and death. You want to get a job, and every one of us has gone through that, I’m pretty sure. So if you over-practice there will be anxiety issues, and you cannot perform your best.”

FINAL THOUGHTS

I hope you find these strategies helpful! Here are a few more resources to take your auditioning to the next level.

auditionhacker – Metrolopitan Opera Orchestra percussionist Rob Knopper’s awesome site

Performance Success – Don Greene’s manual for developing audition skills

Audition Success – a fascinating sereies fo intervews with Don Greene about auditioning

Fight Your Fear and Win – another great book from Don Greene to develop audition skills

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal text on peak performance

Jason Heath

Jason Heath is the host of Contrabass Conversations, a podcast devoted to exploring music and ideas associated with the double bass. His blog and podcast are highly regarded in the music world and have been featured as top offerings in the world of arts and culture for the past decade.

An active double bass performer and teacher, Jason taught double bass at DePaul University for seven years and served on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Bassists for many years. He also previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and at Trinity International University. Jason previously served as President of the Illinois chapter of the American String Teachers Association and as the Illinois Music Educators Association District 7 Orchestra Division Co-Representative.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Jason currently performs with the IRIS Orchestra in Memphis Tennessee, and with he Midsummer’s Music Festival in Door County, Wisconsin. He was a member of the Elgin Symphony for 16 seasons and has performed with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Grant Park Symphony, and numerous other professional ensembles.

contrabassconversations.com

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Top Mistakes Auditioning Students Make

Jason Heath — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 20:28:46 +0000

All of us, from seasoned professional to total beginner, struggle with balancing the various elements that go into audition preparation. When should I start practicing? What solos should I choose for the audition? What are people listening for in auditions

In my recent conversations with over two dozen double bass music professors, I discovered five common mistakes that students repeatedly make while preparing their auditions. Here are the five most frequently cited mistakes that students make and advice from these professionals on how to avoid them.

1. Poor Presentation

“Rather than citing any common thread of mistake, I think I would answer the question by saying [that] for me, I’m looking for potential as well as ability. I think most teachers would agree to some extent.

Therefore, intonation, rhythm, good tone. Of course, it’s always amazing to hear a student with an awesome [and] incredibly high level of technique. It’s equally impressive just to hear a fine Koussevitzky Concerto or some other standard piece with really good intonation, and very solid rhythm, and good musical feel. I would practice toward those ends.

The same with your Bach. It doesn’t have to be the most difficult piece in the repertoire, but it should be very well in tune and show good, diligent practice

I do see quite a wacky variety of presentation in [audition] tapes. Not so much live, but you see anything from workout clothes to a nice, serious, professional presentation, and I would highly recommend the latter. If you take a minute to look nice, and I’m saying this to all students, look professional, look serious, check your tapes to make sure you’re no too close to the mic, and that the sound quality is going to be nice to listen to.”

Timothy Cobb – Juilliard School of Music

2. Neglecting the Fundamentals

“The best advice I can give about college auditions is this: it’s not what you play that counts, it’s how you play. When Eugene Levinson and I were co-chairs of the Juilliard bass department, we decided that the best choice for a solo for a freshman would be two contrasting movements from a baroque sonata.

This would be a good way to show your ability to play in tune, rhythmically, with good tone quality, and in an appropriate musical style. Most freshmen have not studied long enough to be comfortable with one of our concerti.

Other schools sometimes ask for a concerto, but unless a bassist has studied with a good teacher from the age of 10, the chances are that it will not be played adequately.

Concentrate on simple repertoire played well. Choose an etude you like, and listen to an excellent recording of your chosen orchestral excerpt, or attend a live concert so you can see how the bass section is performing your excerpt.

Most teachers I know are shocked when a student attempts to play an excerpt without having ever listened to the complete piece.”

Orin O’Brien – Manhattan School of Music

3. Not Putting in Enough Deliberate Practice

“The most common preparation mistake that I see with students that are auditioning revolves around how quickly they try to go from zero to 100 mph on the material that they’re preparing.

The most important thing that you can do in terms of your preparation is making sure that you first go over everything very slowly. You’ve got to give the muscle memory a chance to kick in. You’ve got to memorize where your left hand needs to be on the neck and how that coordinates with the right hand. You’ve got to make sure that the coordination between the left and right hand is absolutely clean and sure, and that comes with slow, methodical repetitions. You’ve got to go slow to go fast.

If that leads to issues, like if a passage you’re working on is all spiccato, at a slow tempo your spiccato stroke is not going to be the same as when you take a passage up to tempo. Nevertheless, you try to go through all of your material slowly, slowly, slowly first and gradually move up the tempo.

It’s also important that at the slow tempo you’re not just thinking about technique, but you’re also incorporating those elements that you’re going to use at the brighter tempo: dynamics, phrasing. All of that you should be incorporating at a slow tempo. Really, really important.

Once you establish all of that and get your coordination between your left and right hand worked out at a slow tempo, then you can gradually increase the tempo to your performance to whatever your performance tempo is going to be, and you should be in good shape doing that.”

Chris Hanulik – University of California, Los Angeles

4. Playing Pieces They Don’t Know Well Enough

“I think what typically happens is students want to play pieces that are far too new to them. If they’re learning something going into senior year, unless they’ve had a chance to really get it out and perform it quite a bit, it tends to be something that maybe they just haven’t had enough experience with, so when nerves creep in, things can happen.

I would tend to err on the side of preparing early, getting as many performances in ahead of time as you can, and also choosing repertoire that maybe if you’ve played it 10 times, giving it that extra go for the college auditions might be the best route, simply because it’s familiar to you and not something super-new. That would hopefully give you the most confidence in your auditions.”

Brian Perry – Southern Methodist University

“One of the most common mistakes that I see when preparing for an audition is choosing repertoire that is too difficult for the current level. I would rather hear something not too difficult but played well with all the details, than very difficult pieces that are done poorly.”

DaXun Zhang – University of Texas at Austin

Don’t try to put in your mouth more than you can chew. I don’t expect you to play Brahms Piano Concerto on bass. Whatever you choose to play, make sure it represents yourself, it shows off the best that you have to offer at this moment.

I personally prefer if you play something easier, but do it very well, especially [in terms of] intonation and rhythm. Of course, show your dedication and motivation to become a professional.

Catalin Rotaru – Arizona State University

5. Waiting too Long Before Starting to Prepare

“The two most common mistakes [are] people aren’t ready early enough. They’re still working on the material in the final weeks coming up to the audition season.

The second is that they choose material that may be actually too hard for them technically, and they think that it will be impressive. It’s much more impressive to play something well and in your technical skill level than it is to play something moderately poorly that’s is beyond you. If you are not ready for a Paganini Caprice, don’t attempt one for audition season.”

Donovan Stokes – Shenandoah Conservatory

“In my experience, I notice that students often over program. They choose repertoire above their technical and musical abilities, hoping to impress rather than playing really well what shows off their best qualities. In auditions, professors hope to get an idea of how good a student you will be, and displaying good decision-making brings in lots of “extra points.

Another common occurrence is actually not in the musical preparations. Oftentimes, students fail to contact the professor for whom they are auditioning for a consultation lesson, or they fail to research the university, the community, and what campus life would be like.

You’ve got to remember that you are also auditioning each school.”

George Amorim – University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

FInal Thoughts

Auditioning is one of the biggest struggles facing any performing musician. Hopefully, the above advice will help you to avoid some of the most common pitfalls and come out on top at your next audition!

Jason Heath

contrabassconversations.com

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A Practice Journal System That Actually Works

Jason Heath — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 05:45:18 +0000

Written by Jason Heath, Founder and CEO of Contrabass Conservations

I’ve been keeping practice journals ever since high school. An entire shelf in my mom’s basement is devoted to them, in fact! I often page through these old journals, taking a trip down memory lane:

October 10, 1992

• stretching – 5 min

• open strings – 5 min

• 3 octave scales – 20 min

• Bach Prelude – 20 min

• BREAK

• Beethoven 5 – 20 min

Sometimes these entries would be incredibly detailed, with check marks next to each entry. Other times I’d write a few sentences about a specific piece or technique.

I knew there was value in doing this, but I’d never found a way to reference back to what I had done in the past. Every time I began working an excerpt, I struggled to remember what the issues had been with it in the past. Was my spiccato stroke uneven? Was my phrasing out of whack? Did I always rush a particular bar?

Also, I never could seem to keep track of previous comments from teachers, master classes, and colleagues. All this advice blurred together in my memory. As a result, I kept making the same mistakes over and over.

Rob Knopper’s Brilliant Solution

I was putting the finishing touches on my book Winning the Audition when I interviewed Rob Knopper. Rob is a percussionist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and runs auditionhacker, a site dedicated to developing audition skills.

We had a great conversation about Rob’s journey on the audition circuit, developing his audition skills, and the inspiration to start auditionhacker.

Rob recently wrote a post describing his practice journal system, which was a revelation to me. This system makes so much sense!

Here’s the portion of our conversation where we dig into Rob’s practice journal system. You can listen to the complete interview here.

Jason Heath: Something that’s on your site is how you approach practice journals and organizing excerpts in general. Can you talk through how you approach the audition binder system?

Rob Knopper: Yeah—you always hear how you’re supposed to take practice notes, and the classic way to think about it is you have one of those exam books for school and like:

Day One

September 30th, 2016

8 am – I practiced 14 scale exercises – check!

10 am – I practiced my Mozart 39

But I tried that, and it didn’t allow me to have all the information I needed at the time I needed it. It was irrelevant. I could flip through a bunch of days and learn nothing.

I wanted to be organized by piece. It doesn’t matter the things I did yesterday, the things I did the day before. What I really want is when I take out a piece, and I’m working on a specific measure, I have all of the notes that I have made on that piece in terms of notes I’ve made when working on it, exercises that I’ve written out for it, lesson notes from my teachers, and notes from listening to records and tempos, or which recording is best. I want to have the relevant information from my past, so that I can, if I’m having a problem, look back and see “How did I fix that last time?” Or maybe I didn’t—maybe I never had to deal with that.

The way that actually looks is you go to a lesson, you record it—always record it—it’s precious information, you go home, you transcribe the recording or at least write down the important bullet points, and then you organize it by piece. Each piece has general comments and measure-specific comments. You date that, and you save it into its own file. What I would do it print out the “October 13th lesson with my college teacher from sophomore year on Delécluse 1.” That would be my notes from that lesson.

When I go into the practice room for the rest of the week, I would take the notes from that lesson and put it on my stand on one side and the music on the other side, so as I’m practicing I’m revisiting every single topic or concept or bullet point that my teacher was talking about, so that I can ingrain it and have a better chance. At the very least, it’s like self-preservation. You want to go into your lessons without your teacher yelling at you for forgetting what they said.

But then, fast-forward to two years later. You’ve now played that piece for that teacher twice, you’ve played it for a visiting teacher once, and you have notes that you took on your own that are also dated. You have this chronological packet of notes that you’ve taken on that piece that you can apply to your work now. You may not be looking at that stuff constantly, but it’s all right there, exactly in the place you need it, and sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from working on a measure, not knowing how to fix it, and just being like, “I wonder how I figured that out last time?” Flipping through and being like, “oh, my teacher said something then that didn’t really make sense to me, but I get it now, and I’m going to try it, and maybe something else that I’ve learned along the way helps me synthesize that concept and apply it to that new thing.”

What that ends up looking like in terms of a practice journal is every piece has the music, it’s paired with all these old notes—lesson notes and my notes and exercises and research—and it’s alphabetical. They’re going to come back again, so you have this storage of all of these pieces you might play one day and you’ve played in the past. And then you have the current pieces you’re working on, where you just take out each of these plastic protectors that are getting thick by this point with notes. You have your four or five pieces you’re working on right now, or maybe 30 if you’re working on an audition, and you have everything that you’ve ever done on those pieces.

It’s awesome, because I have this going all the way back to high school. I’m like a pack rat for information. I’m like a hoarder, and this is the way hoarding information works. I don’t hoard other stuff, but information is precious. I’ll never throw it away. I hoard emails. I hoard documents on my computer. I hoard old contracts. Because at that desperate moment when you’re trying to work through something that sucks, you might just need to search for how to fix it in the collection of information that you’ve learned in your life that you may not remember.

How I’m Implementing This Solution

I love this piece-specific solution so much! What a simple and brilliant way to make practice notes useful.

For me, going as paper-free as possible is important for all areas of my life. I’m notoriously bad about losing notes, and I know that any paper-based solution would break down for me.

Also, with the technology we have available to us, I knew that there had to be a way to combine audio recordings of lessons and master classes with paper notes for specific pieces.

All of a sudden, I realized the perfect way to do this: Evernote!

How to use Evernote as a practice journal

I have used Evernote for nearly 10 years to organize all areas of my life. It’s an incredibly useful tool. I write all my blog posts in it. My receipts are organized there. All my podcast planning, to-do lists, and web clippings are contained in Evernote.

Setting up Evernote as a practice journal

There are two methods I’ve found for setting up Evernote as a practice journal:

Method #1: One Notebook per Piece

If you’re only using Evernote as a practice journal and notching else, this method will work:

1. Create a new notebook for each piece

2. Add all recordings, notes, scans of the piece itself, MP3s of favorite recordings, and other content into that notebook

3. Tag each piece with information like:

1. Name of person you played for

2. The Audition you’re preparing for

3. Most valuable comments

4. Best performance of that piece

Evernote has a powerful search function. You can even create saved searches to call up information for frequent queries.

Using this system, you can call up all comments you’ve ever gotten from a particular teacher or everything you did for a specific audition. Tagging the most helpful comments allows you to quickly reference old information or add new information.

Method #2: Practice Journal Notebook with Tags

Another option is to create one notebook called “Practice Journal” and then tag each note with the specific piece. That allows for more flexibility since one note can have multiple tags.

If you use Evernote for multiple areas of your life like I do, you’ll probably want to use the tagging method. Just make sure you’re consistent with your tags or you’ll wind up with a giant mess.

Recording in Evernote

Evernote allows you to record audio inside the app. That audio becomes a new “note” that can be annotated, shared, and exported. I used to use the voice memos function on my iPhone to record audio, but I soon realized the usefulness of keeping all of this content within Evernote. I started recording my practicing and taking notes in the app, and I found it to be a much tighter way to integrate all of this.

Taking paper notes and scanning them in

Evernote allows you to take a photo of anything and save it in the app. It will even do optical character recognition (OCR) on scanned notes.

Even though I’m a “digital guy,” I tend to take a lot of handwritten notes. I’ll scan these in and include them along with all the other content for a specific piece. I’m amazed at how well it interprets my horrible handwriting!

Evernote is free to use, with paid options for more features. If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Evernote in the practice room, check out this talk that I did for the Illinois American String Teachers Association in 2015.

Jason Heath

contrabassconversations.com

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Can I win an Audition While Working a Job?

Jason Heath — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 16:02:05 +0000

Many people think that the only way to win an orchestral audition is to block off several months and do nothing but practice. While that sounds great in theory, most people don’t have the luxury to sit around and practice all day.

While many of the people I profiled in my recent book Winning the Audition had a “student schedule” when they won their job, several people were also holding down full-time jobs or had an otherwise busy schedule outside of the practice room.

Though everyone’s situation is different, there are five basic categories that most people who are auditioning fall into:

In school
Apprenticeship Program (New World, etc)
Full-Time Orchestra Job
Freelancer
Full-Time Non-Performing Job

So… can you successfully audition for an orchestra while also holding down a full-time job?

The short answer: yes, but it depends on the type of job.

Each of these modalities has certain advantages and challenges, which I have detailed below.

1. Auditioning While In School

A large percentage of the players I interviewed for Winning the Audition fell into this category. A particularly common time to win an orchestra position was during a graduate degree program. Often, it’s as if the stars align, and an audition works out just as a graduate program is wrapping up.

A much smaller percentage of people win jobs right out of an undergraduate degree. This was more common a few decades ago. These days, it appears that a few additional years of “finishing school” are required before a player connects with an orchestra position.

There are several obvious benefits to auditioning while in school:

Time – This is likely to me the most discretionary time of your adult life.
Fewer “Adult” Obligations – Kids, marriage, car and mortgage payments are likely to be a few years off for most people in school.
Regular Access to Lessons and Studio Classes – Your “job” in music school consists of audition-related activities like lessons and studio class.
A Group of Peers on Your Same Path – If you’re looking for a pair of ears to play a mock audition for, all you have to do is walk down the hallway.

Really, lack of professional experience is the only drawback for people auditioning in school. Playing in a professional ensemble each and every week tends to change the entire audition mindset, and this is something that is difficult to replicate in a school environment.

College (particularly the graduate school years) is an ideal for auditioning. If you’re currently in college, treasure these moments and leverage this freedom as much as possible. You’re unlikely to have a better setup for auditioning later in life!

2. Auditioning While in an Apprenticeship Program

Orchestral training programs serve as a bridge between student life and professional orchestra life. While the New World Symphony is the most obvious example in the United States, there are a few others that serve a similar function:

Outside of the United States (particularly in Germany), apprenticeship programs sponsored by specific ensemblesm exist that fill a role similar to the New World Symphony. These programs offer ensemble experience, lessons and coachings, and other opportunities for players to hone their craft. In my interview with Philharmonie Südwestfalen principal bassist Eric Steffens, we dig into the details of his Lubek-based apprenticeship program.

These programs are a great synthesis of a school and professional environment, offering lessons and coachings along with the a professional orchestra playing experience. Opportunities to participate in these programs are scarce, so treasure these years and maximize their value if you are able to connect with one of these programs.

3. Auditioning With a Full-Time Orchestra Job

While a professional playing job reduces your available practice time, it can also give you a huge leg up over people without that experience. There’s no way to replicate the experience of actually sitting in an ensemble and playing the orchestral repertoire.

In my recent interview with Detroit Symphony principal bassist Kevin Brown, he described how spending hours each day playing repertoire at tempo in an ensemble profoundly changes the way that you perceive performing. This is something that is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate while in school, and it’s something that is clear from the committee perspective.

The obvious disadvantage for people with full-time orchestra jobs is, of course, time. In addition to the hours consumed by the orchestra job, “adult” obligations like marriage, kids, house repairs, and the like enter the picture further reducing available practice time.

In my interview with Cleveland Orchestra principal bassist Max Dimoff, he described his extremely busy schedule while in the Seattle Symphony and how he still managed to find time to practice. In attain to playing in the orchestra, Max had a young child during this audition. He would frequently tell students who bemoaned how busy they were that, if he could prepare for an audition while holding down a full-time orchestra job plus taking care of a young child, they could certainly find the time to do the work.

Max would break his practicing into 90-minute chunks, practicing before rehearsal in the morning, after lunch, and in the evening if there wasn’t a concert. These focused 90-minute chunks kept him fresh throughout the practice session.

Most people auditioning while also holding down an orchestra job play mock auditions for members of their orchestra. Having a group of professional performers available that have successfully gone through the audition experience is another major benefit for players who have full-time jobs.

4. Auditioning as a Freelancer

For the purposes of this comparison let’s define “freelancer” as someone combining multiple income streams together to earn a living. These income streams could be performing, teaching, driving for Uber or Lyft, working projects on Fiverr, or any other number of options.

There are pros and cons to auditioning as a freelancer. A couple advantages include:

Having more control over your schedule.
The ability to schedule uninterrupted blocks of deep work.

While you may not have the ability to play through as much repertoire on a professional level as someone with a full-time job, the benefits of a flexible schedule are significant. You can schedule lessons, mock auditions, and coachings more easily. You can more easily align your practice time to coincide with your preferences (morning person / night owl).

The biggest disadvantage to freelancing is not knowing where your next dollar will come from. Taking an audition (and canceling work as a result) may have a bigger financial impact than someone with a full-time job.

Also, if you’re not able to perform consistently with high-level musicians, your skills and motivation may stagnate. Not having a group of motivated peers around you can negatively impact your progress. These factors can be mitigated, but it takes a little more work than someone with a full-time job.

5. Auditioning With a Non-Performing Full-Time Job

This is, by far, the hardest modality for people looking to find success on the audition circuit. I remember working summers at Citibank in while in college. I’d come home exhausted, unable to summon the motivation to play even a scale. It can be very challenging to schedule an uninterrupted block of time for necessary “deep work” when you’re holding down a full-time job.

With discipline, it is possible to make progress on the audition circuit while holding down a full-time job, but it’s the exception rather than the norm. Former Boston Symphony bass trombonist Douglas Yeo is a good example. Doug won his Boston Symphony position while holding down a band director job. He’d use the band rehearsal room to play through his excerpts after school.

Jason Heath

contrabassconversations.com

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