Orchestra 101: The Sound Check

One of our goals with Horn Matters is educational, and with the background provided by the first two articles in this series we can move on to some specific situations I get asked about by students and also situations that relate to other pet peeves of orchestral playing. One of those is the sound check right before a concert.

Conductors in educational and amateur settings just love sound checks. They may wish to argue with this point (setting up the group in a new hall, allowing recording engineers to set up, etc.) but in my opinion they are primarily just a way to sneak in an extra dress rehearsal.

Before I played in the Nashville Symphony I must have had situations where conductors had sound checks before concerts, but really I don’t remember them. In Nashville they were very rare and looking at the Master Agreement from when I was there the topic was not addressed. If we did a sound check it was most likely the official beginning of the service and the concert was a short one set to end by 2.5 hours after the beginning of the sound check. [See UPDATE]

After the years playing in Nashville sound checks tend to grate on me a bit. What they effectively do is lengthen the service. Let us say that there is a 1:30 call for a sound check for a 3:00 concert that won’t be over until after 5:00. Instead of a 2.5 hour service you are actually looking at a service pushing toward four hours in this scenario. The longest allowed services in the Master Agreement were occasional opera performances which could extend to 3.5 hours with two breaks, but even then three hours was the effective normal maximum for long works.

In the case of opera, ballet, musical theater, and choral works …  a three (3) hour service is permitted for one (1) rehearsal and for all performances of the event.

I would much rather warm up to be ready for the concert itself rather than warm-up for a sound check long before the actual concert with no proper break that defines the sound check and the concert as separate services. There is a difference between a dress rehearsal and a sound check. A dress rehearsal is a full service and according to the Master Agreement,

There shall be three (3) hours guaranteed break between the conclusion of a dress rehearsal and the performance of a concert.

On faculty recitals with colleagues they often want a short sound check and I must admit that on my own faculty recital this past weekend I had a short sound check. That was OK with me! But it was short (something like five minutes, just before when the hall was opened to the audience) and I expended little energy on it, which is what you should make a sound check look like if at all possible.

I am sure many out there could chime in with their own stories of sound checks past. Suffice to say at the professional level in the United States they are not common occurrences, which I think is how it should be.

UPDATE: I did finally find the contract language in Nashville. In short, sound checks were only possible on run-out concerts, were limited to one hour, and “will be paid extra at overtime rates paid on contracted scales.” My memory says however that there were a couple situations where what was effectively a sound check was the official beginning of the service which ended 2.5 hours later. The concert started after what would officially have been an extended break.

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