audition habits, part II

This is the second in a series on the audition advice of Thomas Freer, assistant principal timpanist and section percussionist with the Cleveland Orchestra. In the first part, I tried to set out some of his ideas on basic attitude, resumes, and getting past tape rounds. Some of Tom Freer's best advice is about organizing your parts and your practice time to be maximally efficient and productive in your audition preparation.

1. Bring your A list - wipe out your Bs and Cs

A first step after you get a list is to divide it into three lists: the A list, containing pieces you know very well, have performed, feel confident about; B, pieces you have some familiarity with, need some work on; and the C list, pieces you barely know at all. Categorizing in this way can help prioritize your practice time, making a long list of excerpts seem more manageable. The idea is to concentrate most on the B and C lists, with the goal of quickly getting everything into your 'A' list. Ideally the last 30 days can be used to practice auditioning, having already learned all the notes, bowings, articulations, etc.

In order to get there, it is helpful to actually design a practice schedule; focus your most intense practice time on the excerpts that need the most work, and be very disciplined about following your schedule strictly, even setting an exact amount of warm-up time, for example. If you know you only have fifteen minutes to work on something, find a single phrase or concept that you can focus on and bring it to A material.

If you have any "maybe" excerpts, things you hope they won't ask, not only will it test your luck, it will undermine your confidence going into the audition - you want to have an attitude of "bring it", ready for anything they could ask.

2. If you don’t know the tempo, you're wasting a plane ticket

One of the things TF was most adamant about was the need to develop tempo awareness and memory, just like pitch awareness. Playing an excerpt too slow will work against you - they'll think you're unexperienced, overly careful, boring - and playing too fast will be even more harmful. No one wants to sit next to the person who rushes like crazy in difficult passages, and committees hate asking people to "play it again, slower".

The solution TF offered was to be extremely fastidious about checking tempos, finding several different recordings and using a metronome with tap function to accurately measure the tempos in every section, then marking those tempos clearly in your parts. That way, you won't be practicing a vague idea of what the tempo might be, you'll be working from a tempo that a reputable orchestra actually used. Knowing precise tempos can also help evaluate recordings of your own playing, since you can set a metronome and see where you stray from the pulse.

In order to demonstrate that tempo memorization is an achievable goal, TF asked us to give him a metronome marking, just off the top of our heads. 131, someone said - he made little percussionist motions, imagining some piece - then tapped a Dr. Beat four times and turned it to face the class - it said 131. Someone else said 73, and the same thing happened, he hit it exactly. In the second class, he was given 42 and 147, and he wasn't quite as accurate - still, he was only off by 1 on each.

Another suggestion was to play along with recordings, and study the scores so you can really hear the rest of the orchestra when you play. A great tool is an iPod or other MP3 device, which can store clips from several different recordings for easy reference and study. TF told us he has at least five different recordings of each New York Phil audition piece on his iPod.

3. Organize the parts, erase the panic

Another often overlooked step is to organize and clean your parts. Every list is different, but in most cases it is a good idea to have two notebooks, one with the full parts and another with just the excerpts you know they will call. Most of your work will be on the short list book, but the full part book will help you to gain a familiarity with the whole piece, and be ready should they ask you to sight-read a non-standard excerpt.

After compiling your books, you might need to do some more secretarial work - in addition to marking accurate tempi, get rid of all the cluttered, gratuitous markings you or others may have added to the part. We've all seen these markings - don't rush, vibrate, the little tuning arrows, the cryptic scribbles... Last week I saw a horn part on which every phrase was labeled with some kind of dairy product: skim, heavy cream, buttermilk, etc. - apparently this is some kind of breathing system. If it isn't your bowing, phrasing, articulation, or beverage visualization tool, though, it's just a recipe for panic and distraction - erase it!

meticulous annotation, or fear writ illegibly?

The next installment contains more of Tom Freer's advice on audition preparation. Click here to read part I of audition habits of a highly effective percussionist. And many thanks to Tom Freer for the advice and editorial help!

playing with the Cleveland Orchestra

This weekend my colleagues in the Kent/Blossom program and I get to play with the Cleveland Orchestra, under the direction of Jahja Ling. We had a rehearsal on Thursday in Severance Hall, and all the orchestra members were very welcoming. One of the violinists, Erich Eicchorn, even found me at the break and complimented our Hummel last Tuesday!

another look at the Cleveland Orchestra's Severance Hall

I sat right in the middle of the bass section, between Kevin Switalski and Scott Haigh, the two assistant principals; Max Dimoff, the principal bass, is playing the Koussevitzky Concerto tomorrow, so he'll sit out the rest of the program. The bass players introduced themselves and asked questions about me, as well as letting me in on some of their inside jokes. It was altogether a really friendly, relaxed vibe, though at one point there was something that wasn't together with the horns and cellos, and everyone suddenly got very intense for a moment, trying to solve the problem. It struck me as an orchestra full of people who enjoy themselves when they play, but also take their music-making very seriously.

I was reminded of my first time hearing the Cleveland Orchestra, when they toured to Chicago in October 2002. It was one of the most powerful concerts I have ever attended - I was so entranced by their performance of Shostakovich's 8th Symphony, I barely registered what was happening when a man two seats down collapsed and had to be carried out in a stretcher. I didn't find out until a few days later that he had died.

Somehow the combination music and mortality that night left me intensely moved. I went upstairs in Orchestra Hall after the concert and locked myself in a bass storage room, where I practiced in the dark until 2 am, trying to recapture some of the sounds still resonating in my memory. I had a Civic Orchestra rehearsal there the next morning, and I thought about just staying through the night, but I decided that was a little overly fanatical so I took the 'L' home.

I'm not expecting anything quite so cathartic or deadly when we play Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol andl de Falla's Suite from The Three-Cornered Hat tomorrow evening. Still, it will be more than a little bit exciting to share a stage with such an incredible group of musicians!

audition habits of a highly effective percussionist, part I

The past two weeks at the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, Thomas Freer, the assistant principal timpanist and section percussionist in the Cleveland Orchestra, gave two presentations on audition preparation and techniques. Mr. Freer has had tremendous success in auditions, and is currently in the finals for principal timpanist in the New York Philharmonic, which might have led me to dismiss him as an obscenely talented freak.

However, I was greatly impressed by his ideas - he seems to have developed a system that takes much of the mystery and indeterminacy out of the audition process. The steps he outlined are challenging and time-consuming, but they are also extremely practical and effective. This is my first installment of a series of postings on the audition advice of Tom Freer (TF).

1. An audition = a competition for employment

Audition preparation demands an attitude of fierce determination, but often musicians go without a clear sense of purpose. The primary goal, obviously, is to win a job, with important secondary goals - to make good music, entertain your listeners, have fun. As TF puts it, an audition is like an exam in which you already know all the answers. Your job is to prepare yourself to regurgitate those answers in the most interesting and effective way imaginable.

2. Resume and tape rounds - be professional, not altruistic

Contact with the orchestra begins with your resume and, in many cases, a tape round - since you have more or less infinite opportunity to perfect these, they should be impeccable. In the case of the resume, this means simplicity, brevity, clarity - the name, address, and instrument need to be right at the top, easy to find, and the next thing should be what your professional experience and what you are doing now. Avoid padding with extraneous gigs and audition results - these can paradoxically make you look less experienced. Audition coordinators appreciate if you write your instrument on the outside of the envelope as well, but don't bother with the cover letter - a one-page resume with your contact information and instrument is all the explanation the audition coordinator needs.

TF’s advice on preparing a tape is first of all to recognize that this is an unfair system - anyone can digitally edit a tape to utter perfection, therefore perfection is the standard that orchestras expect. This means that you cannot afford to spare any expense in producing the highest quality CD or DAT recording - minidisc dubs are not good enough. Practically, this requires a concert hall or other high quality acoustical environment, the highest quality microphones available, and a recording engineer and/or a knowledgeable friend who can save time by operating the equipment and cutting you off on flawed takes. You want your job in the recording session to be just a musician, not worrying about supplies and production.

Orchestras may forbid digital editing, and even ask for an entire audition recording to be done in a single take. Until they begin asking for digital video recordings, these requirements are unrealistic - an imperfect audition tape may be a testament to your honesty, but it will also be a waste of time and postage.

Coming up: Dr. Beat, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tap Function

My summary of Thomas Freer's audition advice continues in a later posting - click here to read it. You can read a related post I wrote about a masterclass by Philip Myers, principal horn of the New York Philharmonic.

Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra 

WCLV reviews Kent/Blossom's orchestra concert

Last Wednesday's orchestra concert was reviewed by two critics from Cleveland's classical music radio station WCLV 104.9. Their reviews are also published on the web; click here and scroll down to read them.

My favorite comment from Jerome Crossley's review is "what the pizzicato "Scherzando" section of the Allegro assai lacked in polish it made up for in pertness." Classical music critics love to damn with faint praise. The other WCLV reviewer, Kelly Ferjutz, writes that in Beethoven's Symphony no. 8 "the 27 string players were again evident, although seated differently than they had been for the first half." Thanks, Ms. Ferjutz - we do our best to be evident at all times. She had a terrific blurb for my roommate here, who was the concertmaster of the orchestra:

The first-chair violinist, Jakub Cernohorsky of the Czech Republic, exhibited all the makings of a future concertmaster. His solos were assured and tuneful.

my assured, tuneful roommate Jakub

following up on last night's concert

After writing yesterday about our performance of the Hummel Piano Quintet (see below), I realized that two other musicians in the group, violist Davis and violinist Morgan, also blogged eloquently on the same subject. We're still searching for the blogs of the page turner and the noisy marker art guy in the audience, but at this point it seems safe to say that in terms of web visibility, we pretty much kicked that Smetana quartet's ass.

I've recently adopted a policy to restrict my blog profiles to people who are dead or can't read English, so that I won't offend anyone or incite stalkers. (I might need to be careful of zombie foreigners, though.) I'll make an exception for Morgan and Davis - these are two of the smartest and funniest people I have had the good fortune to meet. And both from Kansas, oddly enough.

some memorable Kent graffiti

Davis is an evangelical Christian, which caused some awkward moments when I first started raving to him about Jose Saramago's novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which is fantastic and quite blasphemous. However, he explained to me that he could not be offended - whatever anyone might say, he could either accept it as true and learn from it, or dismiss it as false and forget about it. I suggested that maybe if someone told him they were going to go burn his house down, that might be offensive; so we agreed that the only really offensive statement is one that presents an imminent threat of harm to oneself or others. I didn't mention to Davis at the time that by that standard most of President Bush's platform could be considered hate speech.

I originally met Morgan at Spoleto in May, then I met her again here in Ohio, and was beginning to wonder why I kept meeting people named Morgan until I realized she was the same person. She sort of has this way of metamorphosizing into a different person without warning. Or maybe I'm just really dumb. No matter which person she happens to be, she seems to always remind me how wonderful it is to make music - at our dress rehearsal, she announced that she was planning on picking out someone nice in the audience, and pouring her heart out in a personal statement to just that person. I asked, what happens if they leave halfway through? I guess next to Morgan, I'm a jaded cynic.

Bassist blogger San Bei Ji added to the flurry of Hummel-blogging at his excellent website.

Schoenberg and Hummel in Kent

I've been trying to think of a good analogy for being the bass player at a chamber music festival. It's a little like being the pinch-running expert on a baseball team, or maybe the sommelier at a restaurant, or a tax preparation specialist - we're not needed all that often, and when we are it's pretty much always for the same few things. Maybe an anesthesiologist at a hospital, or a bouncer at a bar - except I can't break up fights, and I do my best to avoid putting anyone to sleep.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that the past couple weeks - really, the whole Kent/Blossom festival up to this point - has been the exception to the rule. I've played all sorts of strange unfamiliar stuff that I'd never done or even heard of before this summer. This includes the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony no. 1, op. 9, which I performed last night, as well as the Hummel Piano Quintet this evening.

The Schoenberg is a piece I had heard before, but I was never lucky or brave enough to attempt to play it. Luckily, we had an able conductor here, Cleveland Orchestra Assistant Conductor Andrew Grams, and a lot of talented and motivated musicians. The Opus 9 seems to stretch every musical parameter to its breaking point, from tempo to tonality to the very definition of chamber music - there are 15 parts, sometimes scored as densely as any Brahms symphony; yet just one musician is on each part, and the piece requires the flexibility and transparency of great chamber music playing.

Our coach for the piece was the Cleveland Orchestra E-flat clarinetist Dan McKelway. he had a great story - speaking of stretching to the breaking point - about performing the piece on a tour of Musicians from Marlboro. In every one of their six performances the second violinist broke a string on the same note, a fortissimo pizzicato midway through the piece - which really pissed the horn players off, because it meant starting the piece again from the beginning. At the final performance, in Carnegie Hall, the stagehands were not around to open the stage door to let the violinist get a new string. So he sort of wandered around the perimeter of the stage, pushing on the wall panels to find one that would open.

Our second violinist didn't break any strings in the performance, though if he had, I would have been happy to start over again, because I had a great time playing the piece. I only wish our performance had been a little more settled, less jittery. Our horn player Mike said something I agree with, that a piece like that is easy to make sound hard - the real challenge is to make it sound easy and fluid. Sort of like when a great sculptor makes you forget that marble doesn't come out of the ground textured like flowing silk, it has to be meticulously chiselled to look like that.

Tonight we played the Piano Quintet by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, which was a lot more exciting than you might think. Our violist Davis blogged amusingly about it last week. I admit I was a little skeptical of the piece at first - after we first read it I said, "This piece is sort of a joke, right?" and I found ways to sneak the word "trout" into most of my subsequent comments. The piece has the same instrumentation as Schubert's famous Trout Quintet, and in fact Schubert wrote his quintet for a group that he heard rehearsing Hummel's piece. I'm sure Schubert meant it as a tribute to the older composer, but it probably had the effect of driving Hummel's piece into obscurity.

Like his piece, Hummel seems to have spent much of his life associated and often eclipsed by greatness. He studied piano with Mozart and composition with Haydn, and eventually took over Haydn's job at Esterhazy. For a while he was a minor celebrity in Weimar, as the New Grove Dictionary of Music reports:

Hummel settled into a thoroughly bourgeois existence, complete with house and garden. Through Goethe he met the leading figures of the intellectual world and soon became one of Weimar's tourist attractions: without seeing Goethe and hearing Hummel play, no visit to the town was complete.

He had something of a rivalry with Beethoven for a while - they were the most respected pianists and composers of the time, and their disciples had a little bit of Viennese gang warfare going. They patched up their differences, though - Hummel seems to have been a very pleasant guy, which shows up in his music in a tendency to give everyone a nice melodic solo towards the end of the piece, except the bass player. Hummel was a pallbearer at Beethoven's funeral, and at a memorial concert he performed an improvisation on the prisoner's chorus from Fidelio. It must have been a touching moment, sort of like the end of West Side Story, when the Jets and the Sharks decide to get along, or when they spill the bottle of malt liquor over the grave in that Boyz II Men video.

I'm maybe getting a little sleep-deprived and stupid, so I'll spare you my commentary on Hummel's later years. Performing his Quintet was really a delight, and we all developed a great fondness for the piece. We decided that all it lacked to reach the Trout's popularity was a good fishy nickname, so I proposed calling it the Gefilte Quintet - like gefilte, it has a sort of a pungent mixture of textures and styles. We were coached by pianist Jerry Wong, an insightful chamber musician and fashionable dresser in all seasons.

Jerry Wong and the fishy five