Young Musicians' Guide to the
Orchestra!
These pages are intended for musicians (of all ages)
who have an orchestral career in mind. I think it's very
important for such performers to become WELL
ROUNDED;
not just an instrumentalist but a MUSICIAN. I don't
mean someone
who can play many instruments, but one
who could blend ONE with all those instruments.
Thousands of young musicians of orchestral instruments
pour out of American music schools each year hoping
to immediately win auditions in a prestigious orchestra.
With only about 50 full-time classical orchestras
in the U.S. however competition
(and compensation) for them is relatively high.
So even for instruments with the highest turnover,
there are only a handful of auditions per year. So
to survive until then (and gain audition and performance
experience) players take any gig that rings their
phone and seek positions in regional, part-time orchestras
(which work less than half the year). Check our MyAuditions.com
for openings, articles, and networking!
So when you navigate the audition circuit, you'll
want to BE the best "musician" as well as
have the best "chops" in the warm up room! Here's what you do....
Listen to CDs and attend concerts! Meanwhile
you look and you listen, you think and you listen
again, you feel and you listen yet some more. You
discuss, you read, you study, you memorize and listen
even more.... You must become AWARE of something! And not until you've discovered something
NEW about the music do you really PLAY your instrument! Because
we need to live
with the music before we can bring it
to life.
What I'll try to do here is to suggest a number of
things to think about to become a more EFFECTIVE performer.
Keep in mind that while most of these ideas apply
to actual orchestral services, others may apply only
to an audition situation. I'll try to make these situations
clear.
One thing you'll notice immediately with these next
four pages is the numbers and letters that start each
item. Originally I wrote things down and collected
them into a numbered database. (I was going for 1001
but I started drying up around 160!) Later I began
to categorize them for the groups to which they would
apply. So s = string players, b = bass players, and
a = all players.
As I really don't have time to work these ideas into
a book or a cool interactive game of some kind, I'm
going to just throw them out there and hope you'll
email
me when you need some clarification. Since they ARE
so rough still, I haven't bothered to really weed
out the redundancies. Oh... and I also repeat myself
a little! I recommend you simply print these few pages
and write your OWN observations alongside for comparison.
And I promise I'll do better next time! Good luck!
