facing the music

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

- Joan Didion, Preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I read this a few weeks ago, and it seemed an omen of mortifying things to come. You see, back in November I spent a long time talking with New York Times reporter Daniel J. Wakin, both in person and on the phone, as I prepared and took an audition in Buffalo. Wakin wasn't small or inarticulate - he's a very friendly, unaffected, and pleasant guy - but he was unobtrusive in a way that made me forget that I was, in effect, laying my soul bare to everyone destined to read the Sunday, February 18th edition of the Times.

Maybe you're one of those people, too - click here to read Wakin's article, "The Face-the Music Academy". You can also read a post I wrote about the interview back in November.

Wakin told me that I would be prominently featured in his article, which kind of made me nervous. I sort of consciously avoided him the last time he visited Miami, which I feel bad about now. It was the evening he talks about at the end of the article, a new music concert with HK Gruber's conducting his zany piece "Frankenstein!!". As Wakin writes, "After the concert many of the players gathered at Zeke's, the cheapest watering hole along Lincoln Road, where beers are $3." I didn't, actually - I walked back home alone, after talking briefly with Wakin and giving him the quote that ends the article, and then wrote another rambling blog entry.

I guess I was concerned that I'd say something even more revealing and embarrassing about that audition in Buffalo. But I shouldn't have worried so much. Not only did Dan Wakin not make me out to be the sad reject character I expected, he actually made me seem almost - likable?

Well, definitely obsessive, but possibly likable. People have been teasing me, saying I'm a 'celebrity' or a 'hero'. They want me to autograph the newspaper, which has a big picture of me (above). I can't quite understand how a failed audition made me so popular. Still though, I think Dan Wakin did me a great favor, listening to all my audition stories and neuroses, and using them in his article. He opened me up, got me facing some of the scary, funny, embarrassing things about auditioning - and reading the article now, I realize they're the same things everyone faces. Just as he says, I'm "in some ways a typical New World fellow." He wrote a great story, and best of all, he didn't sell anybody out.

I'll probably have more to say about the article as I digest it. Maybe I'll fill in some details about that audition that I didn't tell Dan Wakin, or that didn't survive the editing process. For now, check out this photo, which I thought was eerily similar to the one in the Times:


That's Peter Seymour back behind me, and also Ranaan Meyer, who I just saw this evening (see below). Also pictured is Jeff Beecher (now principal bass of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) and John Harrison. The photo was taken at the National Orchestral Institute in 2000.