The Summer Excerpt Project

A recent E-mail from David Wakefield reminded me a summer where I had a “special project,” an excerpt project, a great project for any student reading this during the summer who is not off at a summer festival or event.

It was the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years of college. I was playing in the Emporia Municipal Band, taking private lessons with Susan Rankin in the Kansas City area, and helping at the farm, but I had recently read in The Horn Call a pair of articles on audition excerpts. A version of one of these is still posted in the IHS site as “Audition Excerpt List” by Brian Thomas and Seth Orgel. Check the link while you can, as the site is being rebuilt and the article may not be there in this form much longer. I have a list of my own in my site as well.

That summer what I did was locate recordings and parts for as many of the frequently requested works on the list as possible and learned them. I am sure this work at that time on excerpts was a part of what won me my job in Nashville. There is no reason to wait to study excerpts; if you wait to be “ready” you will probably never be ready. While you must “cross train” in etudes and other literature, ultimately you learn the skills you need to learn to play excerpts well by actually working on excerpts.

My main suggestion for students is to build up a library of recordings and get the complete parts and learn them. But where to get the parts?

The E-mail from David Wakefield included an attachment, a document by his student Matt Taylor, which compared the Thompson Edition horn part collection to the Orchestra Musician’s CD Library. Although a bit more expensive, he gives the edge in his review to the new CD collection of parts with the caveat that there are no Strauss or Shostakovich excerpts in the collection.

In the “old days” when I was a student we used excerpt books and Xeroxed parts ourselves. This is still a workable tactic (I have a file drawer full of horn parts I refer to often) but most students today seem to opt for the Thompson collection. This new CD collection seems like a viable alternate. But whatever you purchase get going and don’t wait to learn excerpts if orchestral playing is your goal.