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Yet more very timely insider information on taking auditions, in a post from the original HTML Horn Notes Blog dated 3/25/05.
Another little project for me now is listening to and ranking all the horn auditions for summer study at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina. We have some good, strong applicants; I look forward to the summer. As I did with the All-State auditions (see the topic below [reposted here]) I took some notes along the way which hopefully will be of use to future applicants, as follows.
Don’t give a dull performance of your solo work. Sound like a soloist! The auditions for Brevard are a mixture of taped live auditions and recorded auditions made by applicants. Many auditions open with a solo work such as Strauss 1 or Mozart 2 or 4, which are good choices, but please don’t be dull and bland. With the live auditions I suspect what happened is some applicants fell back into “default mode” and did not play their best. Auditions recorded by the applicants themselves were more puzzling to me though, as often the solo would be dull but immediately followed by well performed excerpts. In those cases I suspect that they had learned the solo long ago, probably in high school, and had never really worked on it again with their major teacher to bring it to a higher, more musically advanced level.
A taped audition needs to be perfect. I have to assume that an audition CD you submit for consideration is really the best that you can play, so if you are missing many notes, miss rhythms, or are out of tune I have to rate down the tape pretty hard in those areas. I can be more forgiving in a live audition.
Related to the above, rhythms must be perfect. People don’t just happen to miss a rhythm, usually it was learned wrong and has not been fixed yet in lessons.
Especially in the Tchaik 5 solo, you must be in tune with yourself. It is a pleasure to hear Tchaik 5 in an audition if it is in tune and played well. Surprisingly often the 23 combinations are tuned low. This I really can’t understand; you don’t need to compromise tuning at all in 23 combinations. I suspect that the players are just used to it being flat. Check it with a tuner to see if you have fallen into this trap.
Prepare your audition with your teacher or teachers. If this means finding extra lessons somewhere, find them! For many applicants the audition is pretty uneven. I know sometimes things get missed, some works go better than others, some days are better than others. But often I have a sense that the the applicant I am listening to could not possibly have worked recently on some of the works they chose with their teachers.
Put the best thing first. If you are making an audition CD, be sure that what you put first is great. If you are playing a live audition and they let you chose what you want to start with, be sure the selection you choose sounds great. If in doubt what to start with, consult with your teacher as to what would be the best starting work for you. While big, difficult works are nice, quality is more important than what exactly you chose to play.
Finally, if you apply follow through and give it your best shot. I am always waiting to hear players with that spark of musicality and an effortless quality, you could be that player. Good luck!
The one small update for 2010 being I no longer am on the Brevard faculty. But these ideas for sure hold up still for school and summer festival auditions.
