By now, most of the people who care have heard about the accident at the Toronto Symphony Cirque de la Symphonie performance on Tuesday. For the uninformed– and anyone who didn’t see the youtube video of the incident before it was pulled down by a copyright claim (I’m sure they were reeeeal worried about the copyrighted material in that video)– a circus performer crashed into a cellist in the middle of an act. Nobody was injured (and no instruments harmed), but it has set off some debate about the amount of acceptable risk for musical performers. (Warning: link contains Slipped Disc comments section, proceed with extreme caution :P) The TSO has this to say for itself:
We put the safety of all artists first and foremost. Cirque has an excellent safety track record. And today a safety review was also conducted post incident and their performance was altered to ensure no future potential risk to the audience, musicians, performers or instruments.
This is a pretty disappointing statement coming from a group of people who supposedly know something about music and art. “No future potential risk” is not a thing. Ever. People make mistakes. Musicians know that; no matter how good the player, sometimes something happens that wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes you go to the Toronto Symphony and someone misses a note. It’s not a big deal; nobody is hurt and the sun rises the next morning. The acrobat made a mistake equivalent to a musician making an embarrassing cack: he misjudged, and a noticeable mistake followed. Not because he’s incompetent; because he’s human. Any group of people doing difficult things with their bodies is going to have this happen every so often. If you’re lucky, all that results is a shaken cellist. If you’re unlucky, someone dies. The TSO statement is disingenuous because it doesn’t recognize this reality. When you sign up to be an acrobat, you accept a certain amount of physical risk. Circus performers know this, and their management knows this. Cirque du Soleil, for instance, has three levels of insurance on the performers in each show: their own extensive corporate liability policy, the required liability policy of every Cirque venue, and the organization also covers life insurance for all performers. (Source) Risk exists. It’s up to every individual to decide the level of risk they’re comfortable with before signing on to a risky job– and, crucially, it’s the responsibility of the employer to inform the employee of the level of risk. So the problem is not that an acrobat made a mistake. That’s fine and normal. The problem is that the people affected by the mistake never agreed to the level of risk they were being exposed to. “Be hit by flying limbs every so often” is in the job description of an acrobat, and it is not in the job description of a cellist. Apparently, nobody on the management level of the orchestras booking this show have ever considered that mounting an acrobatic production in a space not built to accommodate acrobatics is going to involve an increased level of risk to workers who normally do not experience that particular level of risk. Which brings us to questions of responsibility moving forward. What does the AFM think of all this? Health and safety is a traditional part of the interests of many unions, but seeing as musical venues tend not to be the sort of workplace where, for instance, WHMIS regulations apply, it’s probably safe to assume they’re a little rusty on that function. And it’s not exactly the kind of situation that’s made provisions for in the Occupational Health and Safety Act, as far as I could tell from a casual browse of the document, which I have to say is not exactly light bedtime reading. Finally, it’s also pretty unlikely that any orchestra would have specific enough contract language to have any sort of a basis for dealing with this kind of issue. So… should they? Brave new world, that has such contracts in it!
Here’s the thing about freelancing. In music school, you learn how to do auditions. You learn how to do auditions because you do a lot of them; at least one a year, maybe two, just to be ranked in your core ensembles, plus plenty of others; youth orchestras, summer festivals, big solos, professional orchestras. If you do it right, you get pretty good at auditions. You acquire an internal locus of control vis a vis auditions, and maybe even start to enjoy them. By the end of music school, though, you’ve acquired not just an aptitude for auditions, but some specific ideas about their outcomes. Because school auditions aren’t like other auditions. One person doesn’t win and the others walk away with nothing. One person wins, more or less, and the next few people still get something pretty good, and the rest get a place at the bottom of the totem pole. If you school experience works for you, it’s likely that you start right at the bottom, and work your way up to the top, or near the top, as you advance. It’s a real good feeling. Having a hierarchy can be scary— but it can also be comforting. For the duration of your time in music school, you can point to a list of names on the wall and say “look! This is me. This is where I fit. I am better than these people, and these other people are better than me. If I keep working, I will keep rising. Life is fair.” The real world doesn’t work that way. First of all, obviously, that’s not how professional auditions work. The bottom 90% of candidates aren’t ranked; they’re just told to go home. The top 10% may well fall into a ranking (who got to the semis/finals/got a trial) but only one positions really matters, and it’s #1. Freelancing also doesn’t work like that, because not only is there no ranking, there’s no winner at all. Sure, there are people who get more gigs than other people. But how do you decide who wins? Is it the person who makes the most money? (Are they allowed to have a day job?) The person first on the sub list for the most prestigious ensemble? (Who decides what’s most prestigious? Does a symphony orchestra beat out an opera orchestra?) The person with the most students? (Are they actually a good teacher, or just enterprising?) There’s no way to decide. The ranking simply doesn’t exist. Everyone is just humans, trying to strike a balance between survival and artistic fulfillment. For a recent graduate of a music school with a defined system of ranking, this isn’t the relief one might think it would be. It’s like having the carpet yanked out from under your feet. Suddenly, you’re not owed anything. There’s not even anything you can do to become owed anything. And if you don’t wise up to that fact, things can get ugly. Instead of focusing on your own improvement, it’s easy to become subconsciously obsessed with reconstructing a ranking that never existed. Who’s in town? What gigs are they getting? Should I have gotten that gig? Wow, that person has a damn fine-lookin’ website. That person went to a better school than me, so they win over me. I once played with that person while they were having a bad day, so I win over them. Am I winning as much as I should be? How can I win more? A preoccupation with winning a nonexistent competition can be paralysing. When abstract victory is more important than concrete self-improvement, practice suffers. And when practice suffers, you guessed it… it sure don’t feel like winning. Is this music school’s fault? Nah. The system by which most schools rank and place students in ensembles is fair, and for many people, effectively motivates improvement. It’s just one of those many ways in which school can’t, and maybe shouldn’t prepare you for the real world. So, folks, time to log off and go practice.
I started the month of August feeling somewhat nervous over the fact that I had almost no gigs lined up. Fortunately, it picked up somewhat, and I’ve actually been pretty busy. On the 4th, I played a recital at the Belfountain Music Festival. Belfountain is an area in Caledon, Ontario, where violinist Zachary Ebin has put together an eclectic festival featuring professional concerts in multiple genres of music as well as a student division of Suzuki string students. It all takes place in the Melville White church, one of the few remaining pre-Victorian era timber frame churches in Ontario, which was built in 1837, in active use until 1964 and is now under restoration. I played the 2nd cello suite– turns out it still hurts the face if you’ve been playing it for years, folks– as well as Nussio’s Variations on a Theme by Pergolesi, the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No.6 for flute and bassoon, and a Handel sonata fashioned into another flute-and-bassoon duet. Two days after that recital, the Belfountain Music Festival featured a string quartet concert with a professionally-led campfire sing-along out back behind the church afterwards, to give you an idea of the kinds of things going on there! Pretty much immediately afterwards– close enough to the recital that I didn’t feel too guilty about leaving my bassoon at home and calling it “post-recital relaxation,” anyway– I attended as a delegate of the 2015 conference of the Organization of Canadian Symphony Muscians! OCSM is a conference of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM, aka the musicians’ union) which counts as member orchestras pretty much all the major symphony orchestras in Canada and many of the full- and part-time regional ones. For the first time, the Niagara Symphony was invited to send a delegate, so I hopped in the car and drove past more windmills than I’d ever seen in my life to Windsor, Ontario, where the conference was held this year. I learned a ton about orchestra contracts, negotiating, the AFM, and the way that other orchestras in Canada do things, met some super people from all over Canada, and had a waterfront view of Detroit from my hotel for five days. Creedance Clearwater Revival was playing some sort of reunion concert in Detroit the first night I was there, and there were people lined up all along the Windsor waterfront to listen. When I got back from Windsor, I pretty much just stayed on the road and spent a night in Kitchener before spending two days in Hamilton filling out the section for the final concert of this year’s National Academy Orchestra/Brott Music Festival. (It not even that much closer, but WOW, is it ever more pleasant driving to Hamilton from Kitchener than Toronto…) We played Carmina Burana, which contains my favourite Latin drinking song ever! I have two more one-day gigs and some private lessons to teach in Toronto before I go to the Interprovincial Music Camp to teach as a faculty assistant. And finally, I am moving for September! Into a slightly more expensive ($630 instead of $554– all good prices for downtown Toronto), but disproportionately more pleasant (I anticipate), co-op house. Woo-hoo!
I’ve been living in Toronto for a little over two months now, and we’re well into the “mostly wasps with a 60% chance of stinky garbage” phase of summer. For better or for worse, most of my gigs at this point are either outside or in churches, meaning a trip to the Salvation Army to get some less-hot black clothes is probably in order! Thus far it’s been enjoyable, though, especially since some of the gigs I had in the past few weeks were at Casa Loma. Casa Loma is a large and impressive castle with equally large and impressive gardens built in the early 1900’s but Sir Henry Pellatt, who as far as I can tell (mostly by reading the informational signs inside Casa Loma itself) was kind of a pompous dick. Eventually he couldn’t pay his taxes and the city seized the castle, although not before it was used during World War 2 as a secret Allied research base– the sonar equipment used to detect U-boats was developed in the attic of Casa Loma, hidden from the public (who came to the castle for weekly social dances) by nothing more than a sign that said “Under construction, we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Anyway, Casa Loma has some pretty rad gardens, maintained by a whole army of gardeners, which includes a closed (and air-conditioned!) glass gazebo in which concerts are held every Tuesday. I didn’t take any pictures, but fortunately for once the publicity photo is exactly correct about what it actually looks like.
The music is great; we played an “Opera Hits” show, Beethoven 7, and the most recent Tuesday, a concert of mostly French Impressionism. The place is always packed-- even the Beethoven 7 concert, when it started pouring rain in the middle of the performance, people who were outside of the gazebo stayed to listen!
Tomorrow I have a different outdoor gig, at the Jackson-Triggs winery. I’ve played there once before, with NYOC in 2012. Jackson-Triggs has its own amphitheatre and puts on an entire summer concert series.
On my way through wine country tomorrow, I’m also planning on stopping at a meadery to buy some mead, which I haven’t been able to find in LCBOs and have been trying to for ever!
I also have some solo stuff going on; last Friday I played a kids’ show of my very own, consisting of the 2nd Cello Suite and Nussio’s Variations on a Theme by Pergolesi, with lots of explanations, jokes and tricks in between the movements of each. One of the teachers at the Niagara Summer Music Camp later told me that she had never seen the campers so attentive before for a single-instrument recital!
I’ll be playing the same rep again, plus the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6 (for flute and bassoon) and some Handel duets at the Belfountain Music Festival on August 4th.
Besides all that, I also got a job at a patient transfer company– the non-emergency ambulances that take patients between hospitals and from their homes to hospital appointments– and as a result of the lifting requirements of the job, have finally started lifting weights for real! I have been doing the Stronglifts 5x5 program at the U of T gym. I’ve been meaning to learn how to lift for… like, years, so this job is the kick in the pants I need :D I start my job training at the company in a few weeks!
That’s all, folks. Now, I gotta go work out/warm up/make reeds/ get supplies to make some jam with the huge excess of mulberries on the trees around my house!
I was waitlisted for Rice. Considering I started the process resigned to the idea of not even getting past the prescreening, I feel A-OK about that!
I participated in my very first concerto competition! A few weeks ago I flew to Toronto for a day to play in the finals of the Orchestra Toronto concerto competition. The winner ended up being a flutist that I went to McGill with (3/4 of the finalists were McGill people, interestingly…) but I was still very happy with how I played. Because of the competition, I ended up pulling out of the opera audition I was going to do around the same time after realizing that the job sounded good in theory but would actually be extremely inconvenient in practice. Plus, I could do the competition without missing out on any services in Thunder Bay, whereas for the audition I would have lost a few days worth of pay for an audition that didn’t serve my interests anyway.
I went to a barn dance at a farm in Neebing the other night with some symphony friends! Merrie, our principal trumpet, is also a Ceilidh dance caller, and her husband is a celtic fiddler who was playing with a guitar player visiting from Quebec. It was awwweeesome.
The symphony season ends on the 3rd of May, but I am staying an extra week to play a show with my wind quintet! It will be at 3 PM on May 9th at the Foundry. The title of the show is “Music of the Americas,” despite my mostly-joking suggestion of “Nothing European.” Entrance is by donation.
I guess I technically have two symphony seasons to play the ends of– I haven’t been in St. Catharine’s very much this year, but I’ll be with the Niagara Symphony for the last concert of the season on May 17, in which, bizarrely, we are playing one of the same pieces that we played in my first concert in Thunder Bay– Christos Hatzis’ Lamento, sung by Sarah Slean. This will be our last concert in Sean O’Sullivan theatre at Brock– next season, we will be moving into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, the new PAC in downtown St. Catherine’s. (FirstOntario is apparently a credit union that made a major donation, but it’s kind of a snazzy name for it, isn’t it?)
For the TBSO’s Music in the Classroom program, today I was in schools with a wind quintet. Among many other things we played the Adagio from Hetu’s wind quintet, and the kids were asked to think during the movement about what kind of scene would belong to that music in a movie. One tiny kid confidently raised his hand and said, “D-Day.” Hear for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CspMEPqJro
Maybe you remember this:Written by former oboist/person-who-tried-to-poison-Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy’s-garden Blair Tindall, it chronicles how, with diligent use of poor sexual and substance-related choices, any promising young musician can succeed in succumbing to a fate fit for a rock god.
Now, it’s on TV!
The pilot episode came out in the summer, and the 6 of us at the Brott Qvintetthaus (we had a full woodwind quintet, plus another horn) proooobably watched it… about five times. Every time someone came over to our house, they would have to sit down and watch it: the young oboe student texting his friend that “I wish my dick was a woodwind,” actual Joshua Bell playing with the not-so-actual New York Symphony, the young and ambitious Maestro Rodrigo (take a guess), and a party featuring some kind of excerpt spin-the-bottle game and a device called the “ganjanome” (it’s one of them old-fashioned metronomes with a joint tied to the arm). When we left our heroine, the young oboist Hayley, she had just rushed to a surprise New York Symphony audition on a rickshaw (making a reed on the way– hey, nice Landwell.) The audition ends before she gets there, but she decides to play to the empty hall, where Rodrigo is still lurking, making out with his assistant. The episode ends with him in awe of her amazing oboe skillz.
I am going to have to watch the rest of the episodes. It’s gonna happen. No turning back.
So, what happens in the next one?
Coming back to reality somewhat, Gloria– the NYS’s head honcho who seems to be simultaneously all administrative positions at once– remembers that musicians are unionized, and you can’t just replace oboists at random. Dudamel Rodrigo says fine, we’ll just play Mahler 8, and hires Hayley as fifth oboe. She skips down the street, which is also what I would do if I were playing Mahler 8, so +1 realism point. -1 that same realism point for the fact that Mahler 8 has no 5th oboe part.
Hayley’s roommate has a somewhat flawed understanding of what practicing entails, and is irritated that hearing the same passage of Mahler over and over distracts her from her extremely important bong hits. (Hayley is practicing oboe, not English horn… the plot thickens!) So Hayley goes to make out with a dancer she met in the last episode instead.
The all-important first rehearsal! Hayley’s cellist friend (the principal cellist in the prestigious New York Symphony who inexplicably has to take weird off-Broadway musical gigs after symphony concerts, which appears to be how she met Hayley) introduces her to various characters, such as the dudes effectuating drug transactions backstage (the seller offers her propranolol “on the house”, how nice!) and a guy who complains about the change in repertoire and worries that opening the season with “a composer suppressed by the Nazis” sends the wrong message. Oookay then. Yes. That is the only relevant piece of information about Mahler.
Hayley meets the principal oboe, who informs her that “I had tits once, I just didn’t play my oboe with them.” Buuuurn.
Ah yes, and here is Hayley sitting in her 5th oboe chair, which is located somewhat suspiciously right next to the principal oboe.
Then the concertmaster stands up and for some reason the rest of the orchestra does too. Then a parrot appears and poops on Rodrigo’s shoe. Then the 2nd/5th oboe gives the A while the 1st makes a masturbatory motion with her oboe, and rehearsal can start. Seems legit.
Due to sweaty hands (WIPE THEM ON YOUR PANTS, GURL) Hayley manages to throw her oboe on the floor and yell “motherfucker!” Yeah, I hate when that happens. The episode ends with our heroine packing up her oboe on the steps of the hall while mouthing swearwords.
The first time I saw Into The Woods was at the very first production put on by Music Theatre Montreal. It was late 2011 and a strike of the unionized support workers at McGill meant that all of the campus groups that had bookings at Moyse Hall– the main theatre in the Arts building– were out in the cold as far as spaces for their shows went. Since I was on the executive of such a group– The McGill Savoy Society, which usually books Moyse for a two-week run of Gilbert and Sullivan in February– this was obviously concerning. MTM was the first theatre group to have to face the problem, and despite every expectation that the show would be canceled, everyone involved in the production pulled together and managed to book a different venue and put on the show, a great success. I remember wishing that I was playing it, but since I was doing both Sweeney Todd and The Gondoliers that year, I wasn’t too deprived on the musical theatre front. The second time I saw Into The Woods was a few days ago, a Disney blockbuster with actors so famous, even I had heard of some of them! Okay, two– Anna Kendrick, who might as well have been filming an audition for the role of Cinderella with the music video for “Cups” (aka the Carter Family’s “When I’m Gone”), and, of course, Johnny Depp. My dad said that he thought Johnny Depp was becoming a caricature of himself: possibly true, but I don’t know what else can be expected of him from the role of pedophilic forest animal. The best thing about this movie, I think, is that it exists. Although it might seems a little bit pessimistic to say, I think it’s true that a lot of people who would never buy a ticket to a production of a Sondheim musical will see this movie. And that’s not necessarily because of any antipathy in modern culture for live music; it could be just price. Pretty much the only way to mount a top-notch production of a show and sell the vast majority (IDK, possibly excepting IMAX or whatever premium movie theatre tickets some people might buy) of the tickets for $10 or less is to make it a movie. There were some parts of the movie, too, that not only did the musical justice but actually improved on anything that could be done in a theatre: probably the highlight of the entire movie for me was the song “Agony,” in which Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes compare their hardships as the true loves and saviors of their respective difficult women. The song is over-the-top and ridiculous, and the ability to make it ridiculous in a cinematic way only improved on the humour. (They splash around in a waterfall overlooking the kingdom, striking poses and ignoring the water damage to their presumably expensive riding boots.) The main problem with Into The Woods as a movie, then, was that it was just too damn long. Or rather, too damn long to not have an intermission. The structure of the acts in the show basically demands an intermission: at the end of the first act the characters all get their wishes and everyone lives happily ever after. Applaud, go buy a $6 Häagen-Dazs bar from the concession stand, and rally for the next act, which has a lot more weirdness and body count (which was diminished by one for the movie: Rapunzel lives.) With both acts run together, I was wishing it was over about 45 minutes before it actually was. With both Into the Woods and Mr. Turner-- a movie about British artist J. M. W. Turner– in theatres now, I eagerly await Hollywood’s take on Sunday in the Park with George.
Right now I am in the middle of getting familiar with some music that comes in chunks larger than I’ve ever played before. The first one is the Nutcracker, which the TBSO is performing with the Minnesota Ballet soon; 34 pages, all of it… well, written by Tchaikovsky. I went back and read Barry Stees’ post on the subject, where he says:
This juggernaut of a piece for the orchestra confronts many musicians at this time of year. If it were played just occasionally it would be universally hailed by musicians as one of the greatest pieces of ballet music. Instead, many musicians look upon it as a chore.
This strikes me as incredibly true. This performance will be my first time paying the piece, so I don’t feel any of the “ugh, this again” that lots of people seem to feel. That response seems to be pretty much the standard from musicians to the Nutcracker, which objectively doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is a piece that demands to be taken seriously; it’s difficult, long, written by a famous and well-loved composer, and performed every single year– what other piece of music gets to be performed on that kind of a schedule? But familiarity breeds contempt, of course, and for people with permanent positions in ballet orchestras… well, I would imagine they get pretty darn familiar with it. I’m also working slowly but steadily on an entirely new set of repertoire: my first opera audition! Opera, and opera auditions, seem to occupy a somewhat unusual space in the lives of orchestral musicians, especially younger ones. For some reason, the orchestral excerpts one is expected to learn at music school rarely include opera excerpts. Thus, whereas at this point in my life I generally expect one or two new-to-me excerpts on a list for a major orchestra, this, my first opera audition, features a whopping nine new excerpts to learn (and a few more that I’m only vaguely familiar with.) Then, of course, there’s the issue of listening to recordings of the excerpts. Thus far, the only way I’ve found to reliably locate an excerpt in the middle of a recording is to listen to the whole opera with a score. So, I figured that as long as I’m doing that, I might as well be organized about it. For each opera, I am going to choose a video reference and an online score (oh god, I hope I can find scores online for all of them) and take notes on the recording; where various landmarks in the score happen, and so on, so that I can easily come back to the excerpts later, and also locate other parts in the opera more easily, if I ever need to play an excerpt from the same opera, but in a different place. Ideally, I will end up with a collection of easily navigable video references for operas with common bassoon excerpts, that will also be useful to me if I have to actually learn the whole opera. So far, I am almost done with Cavalleria Rusticana. As well as timing notes, my document on it also contains a lot of notes about cuts the recording takes (which takes an extreeeemely long time to figure out, when you’re going along merrily and all of a sudden the recording is somewhere else…) and also errors in the score, such as pages being omitted or uploaded twice. So, a large part of the difficulty is dealing with the pedagogical shortcomings of the available materials. But, since The Orchestral Bassoon website doesn’t have most of these opera excerpts yet, someone’s gotta do it! Of course, it will also pay off in that I’ll be better prepared for an opera audition the more thoroughly I know the repertoire. And, of course, better prepared should I get an actual opera job! Basically, it seems like opera auditions have a higher barrier to entry than symphony auditions, because not all of the people who are familiar with symphony lists are familiar with opera lists. So I want to use this audition as an opportunity to break into the “people who can comfortably do opera auditions” club, and after having done the huge amount of initial work on this one, every opera list after this will have fewer and fewer new excerpts to learn from scratch. Perhaps after this I should get familiar with some ballet excerpts too… although, it seems like I’m doing that now– the only list turned up through a google search for “ballet bassoon audition” is all standard symphony stuff, plus generous helpings of the Nutcracker!
I just got back from Chicago!
I was in Chicago for the same reason every other bassoonist was– to audition for principal bassoon spot of the Chicago Symphony. This was something I decided to do during the Brott festival, more as a scheduling decision than anything else. I had all of September free, the audition was at the end of the month, and I figured I needed something motivating to do for the month after Brott ended and before Thunder Bay started. So, that was it. I booked a plane ticket from the computer at camp, once I decided I didn’t want to give myself the option of not doing it. (Sure enough the week before the audition I was cursing/thanking my past self for not giving my pre-audition self the option of backing out…)
My audition was on the 29th. There were, I believe, 80 people who played on that day, and there had also been two other days of preliminaries. They worked in groups of 8 people, announcing after every 8 who was invited back for the next round in January. Nobody in my group advanced, and I only know the name of the one person who advanced from the group before me, so I don’t really have any idea of how many people might be invited to the finals.
However, as we all know (do we all know this? Gabe Radford said this at NYO, and I think it’s true. You’ll know now!) the most important part of an audition is what you write and reflect upon afterwards.
(An aside, a quotation from Gabe’s audition seminar handout:
“Simply going to the audition is often the biggest hurdle. What will keep you going back to auditions with a happy and balanced approach is how you react to success and failure.
Start writing down some thoughts. You will never have greater clarity on the level of your performing than in the days after an audition. Refer to your notes before your next audition.
Whether it is a certain technical concern that keeps cropping up, or something specific that phases you on the day, if you jot it down after an audition, it will help you immensely for the next one.”)
For me, this audition had an element that I had never encountered before (besides, you know, being for an orchestra so famous that it feels ridiculous even to say you’re auditioning for.) Instead of giving you the excerpts that have been chosen shortly before you go onstage, and letting you put your music in order and warm up accordingly, they just told us that the first item would be the Mozart concerto, and we were to take only that on stage. All of the excerpts were then the CSO’s copies placed on the stand by the proctor during the audition.
This outlined a fairly serious flaw in my audition procedure: I rely way too much on visual cues! On one hand this can be a strength. Usually what I do is write a set of instructions on the music or on a sticky note on the page, which I read before beginning an excerpt every time. This has the advantage of a) reminding me of what I need to do to play the excerpt successfully, and b) providing a mandatory “downtime” between excerpts, where I can get into the mood of the next one. This is technically known as a “process cue” in sports psychology, although often mine also involve instructions that aren’t necessarily process cues (for instance, reminders to check the status of my whisper lock, Ab-Bb trill mechanism, or blow out my bocal.) So, these little notes I believe generally do me good. However… what happens when I can’t see them?
Usually, at auditions, I am very deliberate about the time in between excerpts being a good preparation for the next excerpt. But somehow, with the whole routine of my excerpt binder/process cue note thrown off, I suddenly became very bad at using my time in between excerpts. When the proctor placed the first movement of Tchaik 6 on the stand after Figaro, instead of calmly moving to switch reeds I felt sudden shock and panic: “oh god I have to use a different reed now shit my water container isn’t open oh god what if I drop it I wonder if it’s still soaked from the warmup room, better dunk it just in case oh god I’m taking too long they think I’m a moron, they’re wondering what the hell I’m doing that’s taking so long, look at this place I can’t believe I’m even here, hmm I wonder what it would be like to actually play Tchaik 6 in this hall, okay jam that baby on I need to start this damn excerpt right now let’s go…” Needless to say the first note of Tchaik 6 was not all that I hoped it would be.
So, based on that experience: writing stuff down is great, and if I were advising a young student on how to prepare for an audition with known repertoire I would probably advise them to give my note system a try for a while. However, after a certain point– say, maybe the point where you start auditioning for the Chicago Symphony– maybe a process cue needs to be able to be solely internal. The key to internalizing the process cue, however, will need to be doing it every time. There can be no skipping of steps in practice, because if I do, I might forget the step in performance. As an example, my process cue note for Rite of Spring looks something like:
-Lock off, Knob off (“Knob” is how I refer to by Ab-Bb trill mechanism. Because that’s what it is.)
-Blow out bocal and reed
-Hear first 2 bars in head for tempo
-Breathe 2 beats out, 2 beats in, begin note with no tongue but distinct beginning.
(When I actually played Rite of Spring, my instructions to myself got a little out of control, to the point that the 2nd bassoonist commented on the “novel” appearing at the top of the page. I erased the whole mess, simplified and re-wrote it, recognizing his important (if perhaps unintentional) point: if your process cue is too long or complicated, when you get to the performance, your adrenaline is going to prevent you from actually reading/internalizing the instructions. At least personally, I know that Performance Me doesn’t have a lot of intellectual power, so simpler is better.)
The first instruction– “lock off, knob off” is something that appears at the beginning of all excerpts: these two things I always check. (Obviously, it doesn’t always say “off”; sometimes it says “on”, for the ones where, well, I want one or both on.) That’s easy to internalize: before beginning any excerpt, at any time, practice or performance, I will always check the status of these to “presets” of my instrument. No exceptions, or I’m training myself to forget.
“Blow out bocal and reed” are similarly generic instructions, although might not be necessary for every excerpt (more planning and reflection needed on this count!)
The third instruction is different for every excerpt, but similar in form; I always choose a set number of bars to hear, so in this case I just need to remember how many bars of what I want to hear in my head. I don’t always choose the beginning of the excerpt; if it’s more appropriate I’ll choose to hear another instrument’s line, or a section from later in the piece (for instance, for the sixteenth notes in the last movement of Symphonie Fantastique, I hear the theme starting at 64 to get the tempo, instead of trying to pull the tempo of the bassoon part from thin air.) So, that element is different for every excerpt but memorizing what to hear in my head before I start playing can be made part of the process of learning the excerpt.
The last instruction is similar, in that it’s different for each excerpt but I always decide in advance the number of beats I will breathe out and then in.
When I’m practicing excerpts, though– and here’s the challenge with internalizing the process cue– I don’t always go through the whole process. Most often, I skimp on the “hearing” step; after all, I reason, if I just want to practice being able to play the excerpt, it doesn’t matter if I don’t hear it first to the exact extent that I’m planning on doing so in the audition– right?
BZZZZZT. Wrong!
Like I said– Performance Me is dumb. All she knows how to do is mindlessly reproduce whatever happened over and over in the practice room. And hey, that’s fine! As long as she can do that reproduction accurately, Practice Room Me can take care of the rest. Which means giving meticulous instructions to Performance Me by doing it the same way, every single time. (Unless the first way sucked, in which case she has to change the way, and then do the better way the same every… blah, blah, blah, you get the idea.)
So, that was one of the things that I took away from this audition! Obviously there were many other thoughts I had, which I recorded in my physical notebook immediately after the audition ended. This was the first time that I had been to an audition of this size, which is of course normal since there aren’t that many auditions of this size– which is partly why I felt compelled to go, and see what the real world is like.
In Canada, we are both privileged and in some ways hampered by our system of national/international auditions. On one hand, national auditions are great, and overall I think a positive force for music in Canada: they give orchestras the chance to find a qualified person in Canada first, which is awesome! Often people are frustrated when orchestras don’t hire from the national audition, but I prefer to think of it this way: National audition went nowhere? Cool! All the Canadians just got the advantage of having not just a mock audition, but a whole practice audition before the real audition, complete with the real performance space, list, and panel. How sweet is that? And then, of course, sometimes they do hire from the nationals, and that’s awesome.
The downside of the system, for me and people my age, is that it gives young Canadian musicians starting out in the audition scene an unrealistic idea of what the competition is like outside of the country. Canada has fewer people in it than the US, and thus proportionally fewer musicians on any given instrument competing for a job. Which is sometimes great! But then, it can be a bit of a shock to the system to go from Canadian national auditions for major orchestras that pull in maybe 20 bassoonists– all of whom probably know each other– to a big American orchestra like the CSO, which based on the number of people were on my day of preliminaries, I would guess had between 200 and 250 bassoonists audition. This is probably why there’s a strong tradition of Canadian musicians (and probably people in in other professional, merit-based fields) doing undergrads in Canada and graduate degrees in the US: it’s good to see what’s out there. Because it seems like mostly what’s out there is… a hell of a lot of other people.