Auditions (and a little musing on the US Open)

Tonight, after attending the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana's Arts Awards dinner, honoring my friend Howard Abrams as this year's recipient of the Mayor's Arts Award, I returned home very quickly. Normally, I play tennis on Thursday nights (except on nights we have Philharmonic rehearsals), but tonight I wanted to get home to watch as much of the US Open Quarterfinals match between Andy Roddick and Nolan Djokovic as I could. Alas, even though he played great, Roddick lost in a tight 4th set tiebreaker to the very talented Serb. Even more sad that Djokovic made some pretty disparaging remarks about Roddick, who had apparently quipped earlier that Djokovic was "playing with 16 injuries". If there was poetic justice it was in the New York crowd's heartfelt reaction to Djokovic's remarks -- the resounding unanimity of 20,000 booing spectators!

I digress - back to getting our season, and the Beethoven cycle, launched. I've been wanting to write for the past few days, but was mired in marking Wind, Brass, timpani parts for the Beethoven 7th (see my previous post). This past weekend I, together with Tim Smith, the EPO personnel manager, and a handful of EPO musicians, embarked upon a crucially important task: auditioning new musicians for our 2008-09 season. Because we are not a full time orchestra, and because so many of our musicians are at the early professional part of their careers, we have a fairly large annual turnover of personnel, especially in our string sections. This season we also had a number of Woodwind openings -- 3rd Oboe/English Horn, 2nd Flute/Piccolo, and 3rd Clarinet/Bass Clarinet -- and a section percussion vacancy. Auditions for those openings occurred last Friday, and we had a strong turnout of candidates for each instrument. Players came not only from this region, but from as far away as Chicago (the winner of the percussion spot) and Rochester, NY (a finalist for the Flute position who is in her senior year at Eastman School of Music, but who would have flown into Evansville for every cycle because her father is an airline pilot!). My colleagues, principal clarinet Thomas Josenhans, principal oboe Elizabeth Robertson, and principal percussion Bill Shaltis joined me for the day, and we listened to these musicians audition from 9 AM to after 5 PM. All the first rounds of these auditions take place with the auditionees playing on stage and the audition committee seated in the balcony behind a screen. Each auditionee is identified only with a number -- it is the ultimate objective hiring process as we don't (until the final round) know who the person is, what they look like, nor do we see any physical idiosyncrasies in their playing. It's only been in the last few years that the Philharmonic has (like most orchestras) started to employ a screened audition process, and I will be the first to admit that it allows us to focus completely on what their playing sounds like, which is, after all, what we want -- to select the player that sounds best! [Picture shows this committee in one of our lighter moments of the day.]

The following day, Saturday, an audition committee of three string principals -- concertmaster Gared Crawford, Principal violist Craig Bate and Principal Cellist Kevin Bate -- joined me in Bloomington to hear another full day -- again 9 - 5 -- of Violins, Violas, Cellos and Basses. We hear those auditionees together with Nicholas Palmer, Music Director of the Owensboro Symphony and that Orchestra's audition committee. The EPO and OSO work carefully together to avoid conflicts during the season as we share a fair number of the same musicians. Doing joint auditions helps bring the greatest pool of auditionees together as they prepare the same audition list and only have to play one audition. Each orchestra's committee then conference separately and choose players for whatever vacancies they have in each string section. It's interesting that we often select the same musicians for the open spots, but sometimes a very different ranking order results -- an interesting phenomenon considering that the applicants just played the exact same audition! At the end of the day, I'm pleased to say we filled all but one of the vacancies, all with very fine musicians. And from the prior day, four excellent musicians for the woodwind and percussion vacancies, including a new member of Tales & Scales and a former EPO musician, Elizabeth Telling, returning to our oboe section.

The audition process is a nerve wracking ordeal for the musician, no matter where one is in his or her career. The competition is very stiff and the odds are against your getting the job -- in the case of the wind and percussion, at least eight players competed for each spot (do the math, you have a 1 in 8 chance of getting hired!). And, it is an exhausting couple of days for the adjudicators as well. Ultimately though, this process ensures that we assemble the best possible Orchestra each season -- our returning musicians are joined each year by a new crop of very talented and eager musicians. It is this infusion of new players combined with our longstanding musicians that produces the energetic dynamic the EPO has each season.