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Missed notes in auditions are a no-no.
My audition days are long over and honestly, I do not miss them.
Yet, in the process of taking 30 to 40 auditions (and spending thousands of dollars) I did learn quite a bit. I won a few, came close a handful of times and I must confess, got nowhere more times than I care to remember. Given the statistics involved in orchestral auditions (Jason Heath has calculated something like a 4% chance), I am in good company.
I have been obsessively watching the Olympics – both on television and online – sometimes simultaneously. The online viewing experience of live feeds has been a revelation. The technology behind this experience, simply put, blows my mind. I highly recommend it: there is no audio commentary, you get to see uncut footage and behind-the-scenes views.
Comparisons and analogies between sports and the Olympics to orchestral auditions have been done many times and I wasn’t sure that I could bring anything new to the conversation. Yet, from this experience I became inspired with a few analogies of my own:
- Like auditions there is lots of waiting around. This is probably the worst part of the audition experience. Your brain gets thinking too much, you are anxious to perform or are waiting for results. (This scenario brings to mind the legend of the Sword of Damocles.)
- At least so far, China has the highest medal count. Like in other sports there is a home-town advantage. The same can be true for audition candidates. Sometimes a vacant spot in an orchestra has been covered by a local freelance musician for a period of time prior to the audition. That musician, being intimately familiar with the situation, has a tremendous advantage.
- As illustrated with 4×100 swimming relay, “talking smack” and “trash talking” (making negative comments to opponents to intimidate them) happens. In athletics it is a means to psych out opponents and to psych oneself up. This happens at auditions. While not common, I occasionally ran into blowhards that said the most amazing things. Sometimes this can backfire – the French 4×100 team’s smack-talk gave the American team a stronger motivation to win and smash the world record in the process.
- At the Olympic level, the world’s best athletes are chosen to compete. At this elite level, the competition is internal, not external – whoever makes the fewest mistakes wins. On any given day, any one of the top five athletes in any field could win the gold medal, but it all comes down to who slips first at one particular moment.
On the French horn in particular, accuracy is an issue to be concerned with. At auditions, committees and conductors do not want to hear cracked notes, and in many cases even one cracked note can be enough for them to eliminate a candidate.
A former teacher of mine would drone the comment, “do it again, this time with 100% accuracy.” At the time this drove me up a wall, but in hindsight I know this to be true.
Critics at the New York Times, regularly point out cracked horn notes in their reviews. An August 12th review illustrates an example.
The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind…
As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!
The critic goes on to discuss the many e-mail comments from horn players which rationalize horn player’s missed notes:
I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.
“Cornophobe” … that is genius word-smithing.
To win an audition, you cannot miss notes. You must think and train like an Olympian going for the gold. Mistakes happen, but they cannot be rationalized.
You either get the gold, or you don’t.
