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A post from the archive of the original HTML Horn Notes Blog dated 9/4/06. With a 2021 UPDATE and story at the end
Every fine horn player has experienced some poor audition results. These experiences are an essential part of how we learn to play a good audition, both by learning how to better prepare the elements we can control and recognizing better the elements we can’t control.
As the semester begins college students all over have taken or are taking seating auditions for chairs in ensembles at their schools. For a wide variety of reasons some will have bad auditions or for reasons out of their control get poor seatings.
Do less than desired audition results mean you should quit horn? I would say no. Horn students who succeed are the ones who when they fall down get back up and keep trying to do their best. Over time you learn preparation tactics that will work for you and also the audition situation itself gets more and more familiar and comfortable.
Unfortunately, there are players who find it hard to keep going for whatever reasons. To varying degrees I have seen it in most every audition I have ever been a part of as a student or as a professional.
For some players I do recognize that a change of direction career-wise would be in order; talking everything over with mentors is very important. But, without getting into any specifics, I would just encourage those out there that have had bad audition results, don’t over react. Pick yourself up and try to figure out what you need to do to have a better result next time.
UPDATE: Working through the site in the summer of 2021, looking over articles, I was thinking this one would have a bit more context of my thinking. There is a story.
Years ago, the person in line to audition for Eastman right before me was a trumpet player who was the brother of someone I knew. That person told me that if they did not get into Eastman they were going to quit trumpet.
That moment has stuck with me forever. I did not see them at Eastman the next year. I hope they did not absolutely quit trumpet. It clearly was a bad mindset to have, and I hope no matter what bad results you have had you can go forward and still enjoy making music.
