Hello, hi. Good morning. I’m just going to jump into it. I would like to once again put to paper some remarks about orchestral auditions. This is sort of reactionary to some conversations I’ve had with colleagues and some acute experiences I’ve had recently as an auditioner and an orchestral trumpeter.
The topic at hand is this idea of a “note accurate” audition, or even an audition philosophy of accuracy more generally. I will not *condemn* this philosophy, but I would like to expound on my thoughts and experiences about this and how it works in my prep/practice.
I will start with saying something I think everyone needs to hear: auditions are not accuracy competitions. Maybe read that again, out loud, and let it sink in (like I do, every time I begin work on excerpts). A refrain we are all familiar with: I played a perfect round, but didn’t advance. I myself have said this, more than once. On one level, it sounds like a valid concern… accuracy, time, and intonation are the most common denominators when a committee is deciding whether to advance a candidate or not, right?
But in the context of the “imperfect audition,” it has some real limitations. There are other things, like is this person’s playing exciting? There is a certain sound quality that many people have when their primary concern is accuracy, and that is usually mutually exclusive from “exciting.” And my feeling is that a committee member might be perfectly inclined to completely ignore a smudge or two as long as the performance is passionately driven by style, song, and what a candidate’s ears have been telling them throughout the prep process. This does not preclude working on accuracy, coordination, correct notes, correct rhythms, intonation, etc. It’s that these itemizations are part of the bigger picture. I think that, when we are painting a vivid picture in real time, smudges are probably inevitable. And a committee is so much more likely to not care about small blips and bloops because the end product is so fun to listen to.
About a year ago, I started an experiment where I decided I was going to stop “working on” excerpts. I was going to work on the skills and fundamentals that I needed to play them, but minimally work on the licks themselves. It sounds like a reasonable approach, right? And indeed I did improve in some ways. I did advance at the audition or two I took in that time (and even won one). But, the audition experience became a minefield of technique. I remember listening back to my pocket recording of an advanced round and quite literally being bored by my own playing. So the last few months, I have continued to work “excerpt adjacent” on skills, but combining that with some time spent (as I think of it) fantasizing about what the most interesting, musical expression of a passage might be, singing that, then playing it, without negotiating with my technique or the trumpet in any way. Imagining and singing the most interesting sound. Maybe imagining or singing the way a mentor might play. I intermittently live in a magical land where song and wind is the coin of the realm, and I am rich beyond measure.
I think the observer would be *amazed* by the result. You might realistically expect an exciting if slightly sloppy rendition that, when practiced, might improve, but that is not what happens. The results are usually immediate and amazing. Better technique, better sound, infinitely more interesting to listen to, and infinitely more interesting to play. I also found that over time it put me in much closer touch with my creeping tensions, I think because I had a more vivid picture of what a base level of relaxed music making feels like. And it is easier to channel that through long phrases, excerpts, rounds, and performances. I think there are still some moments we negotiate with the trumpet or our perceived technical boundaries, but when the baseline is wild commitment to singing, to me these feel maybe just a few inches outside of my comfort zone, and not a big reach. It also radically changed how I practiced. I’m not sure why, but I play in much smaller bits, often much slower. Most of the time only a note or two. It feels like Trumpet Narnia is created with micro-transactions, not one big beautiful spell. Then when I play the thing start to finish, it often feels like time slows down. To quote Wayne Dyer, “[I] see it when [I] believe it.” I believe this also builds a stronger relationship with the act of visualization. I do not pretend to have a great understanding of this process, but I do think I have begun to “see” and “feel” a result ahead of time.
That’s my take, anyway. So it makes sense to me why someone might play a note-perfect round and not advance, and why someone who did not play their “best round” can. It gives us the license first to work on our inner musician, and then for that voice to come through the instrument. I think that has the potential to be such a more compelling product.