John EricsonYesterday one of my recent students made the finals in the Principal Horn audition for the Arizona Opera Orchestra. Winning would have been better but I am still proud and happy of this achievement, it was his first time in the finals. This shows that he is on the right track which is an encouragement.
As with other “first times” in life, I recall the first time I made the finals as well. It was about the third audition I took. I say “about” as I used to have a complete list of all the auditions I took and I have not been able to find it for several years. The first time I made finals was for Principal Horn in Memphis in 1986. The audition was right after school was out, when I would have been “walking” if I had attended the graduation ceremony for my MM and Performers Certificate from Eastman. I know I had taken an audition for a position in the Alabama Symphony not long before and had bombed that and I think there was another in there, I would need to see the list. (I did not include summer festivals and such in the list; I actually was Co-Principal horn in the National Repertory Orchestra later that summer).
So a first point to note is you will bomb a few, and there will also be some that you don’t bomb but still don’t advance at. Thinking back on all the auditions I took (quite a few!) I made finals probably close to a third of the time, advanced maybe another third, and did not advance at least a third of the time.
A second point is you know that you are beginning to get there if you can spot people that will certainly not advance when you hear them warming up. Don’t dwell on it, it puts your mind in the wrong place, but there seem to always be a few that I don’t know why they sound as they do except that they must not have played the excerpts beforehand for a competent horn teacher. The related point being, work out your excerpts with a competent horn teacher! Or even better yet several of them; each one will hear different things and request different things, but if you are a truly advanced player you will bring it all together into a good compromise that will sound convincing to an audition committee.
A third point is that when you advance at all in an audition you know you are on track, you are setting your playing apart from the crowd for the right reasons—rhythm, style, nuance, etc.
Back to my first time, that particular audition I made the finals and in the end no one was hired. But on the positive side, they had another audition later in the summer and I was specifically invited back to audition again. At that audition I made the finals again (!) but they opted to hire someone else. So I moved on but it did really help to see that I was on track to something, even though it actually took me another five year to win my job in Nashville in 1991.
This leads me to my final point, stick with it. It really did take me five years from the time that I first made the finals to the time that I won an audition, five years of steady horn lessons (with several different teachers), a major embouchure change (early in my Doctoral studies), and varied performing experiences. It may be easier said than done but I would say this specifically to any of my other students that took the AZ Opera Orchestra audition, I know you are all on track in many ways, we just have to keep putting the package together. And to those that are not my students now but looking for schools, do consider ASU, we will work toward building that successful audition package.