A is for "Auditions"

Hello again ―David Hennessee here. I heard that the opening night concert was wonderful. I was heartbroken that I couldn’t play because of illness. Here’s a “shout out” to Karen Loewi-Jones, who heroically filled in for me.

To read Jim Cushing’s review of the concert, click here.

You may have heard that Jim has been named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo. (Click here to read about Jim and about Poetry Month.) We’re so lucky to have Jim writing such informed, insightful, and poetic reviews of our concerts. There’s no more appreciative fan of the SLO Symphony.

Bernstein and West Side Story
I was going to post this link before the first concert. Here’s Bernstein conducting West Side Story:


And here he is conducting Beethoven’s Overture to “Egmont,” which is on the November 8th concert at the Cohan Center:


During my recent bout with death-flu, I had an idea to do a series for the blog: “playing in the orchestra from A to Z.” (I have no idea what the Z entry will be – Zoroastrians in classical music?) What follows is the first entry. Be warned: it gets moralizing toward the end. Recently I’ve been teaching Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Romantic poets, and when you’re steeped in those guys, moralizing happens. So, A is for:

Auditions.
A necessary evil for anyone in the performing arts. You practice your music, your monologue, your dance routine, but it comes down to whether or not you perform your best, on the spot, in front of folks there to judge you.

For musicians, auditions start early. In school bands and orchestras, they occur at the beginning of the year, for chairs: a ranking of all the kids playing the same instrument. These auditions place students in the right ensemble or section for their ability. School auditions don’t stop there. Oftentimes, you can “challenge” -- you and the person sitting ahead of you play the same piece for the conductor, or even the whole group. If you win, you move up. If not, you don’t. Challenges can tap into kids’ competitiveness as way to help them excel. For example, my sister JoLynn was a very fine clarinetist in her younger days, in part because she and her rival Denise constantly challenged each other for first chair in their high school band.

I never had to worry about challenges. Growing up in Oklahoma, I was the only violist in the school orchestra whose playing didn’t peel paint off walls. In high school we lost our cellist, so I had to learn the cello. You can’t challenge in a section of one. Since this time I’ve had enormous respect for cellists. For me, playing the cello was like wrestling an alligator.

In Oklahoma, statewide, it was a different story with auditions, and I quickly got drawn in to their competitiveness. There was, as in many states, an “All-State Orchestra.” High school students from around the state auditioned in November, and those who made the cut got to travel to Oklahoma City in January, stay in a hotel, and spend the week rehearsing for a concert. The first year I auditioned for “All-State,” I practiced my fingers to the bone. Everyone was surprised when I got second chair (in a section of fourteen violists), “beating out” a bunch of older kids. I’ll admit I was proud of myself. I hadn’t expected to do so well. Most of the proficient string players were from Tulsa or the Oklahoma City area – not out-of-the way places like Lawton – and they all knew each other. People kept calling me a “dark horse” (I thought they were referring to my tan).

I was in for a major let-down. In January we had to re-audition, and I was demoted from second to fourth chair. Two whole chairs! This demotion happened for a couple of reasons. First, we were playing two movements of Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis.” I hadn’t heard, so I worked on all four movements, wasting a lot of time woodshedding weird chromatic scales. Second, right after I played the second audition, the older violists descended upon me, turning a dank hallway in a three-star Oklahoma City hotel into a viola-feeding frenzy. Those hot-shot 17-and-18-year olds could smell blood. They demanded that I relate what the judges thought of my playing. Shy, naïve, just-wanting-to-be-liked, 15-year-old-me confessed, “well, they said the Copland should be more staccato, and the Rossini a little faster, and…” Armed with this advice, they knew what the judges were looking for, and I lost my chair. Oh the agony!

I got my adolescent revenge, and at the time, it was sweet. The next two years, I was first-chair violist in the All-State Orchestra. I reveled in my status as the best teenage violist in the great state of Oklahoma (in retrospect, I realize this is an honor on par with being the best pig farmer on the Upper East Side.)

My adolescent narcissism was further stoked when I won a statewide string competition. The best part: I beat out my dreaded rival, a lean-and-hungry violist named Matt. He knew he was better than me. I knew I was better than him. We were always seated on the first stand of the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra and the All-State Orchestra, and our rivalry turned every rehearsal into a combat zone.

I suppose I had a right to be proud of winning this contest -- I did practice a lot, and there was a cash prize that helped pay for college – but largely I was thrilled to have finally defeated the dreaded Matt. I felt like Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star. Poetic justice was served on me for my hubris, though. I had won by playing the first movement of the Stamitz Concerto, a flashy little 7-minute bonbon. For the recital featuring the winners, my teacher felt that I should push myself and perform Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata. The whole thing, from memory. All 30 minutes of it. It came at the end of a recital featuring the other winners, all six of them. Now, Schubert’s great, but his idea of development is to play the same exact thing in a different key, and then repeat it in a few more keys. I pulled it off, but afterwards the weary audience’s compliments included: “that sure was a lot of notes!” “how did you memorize such a long piece?” “you look so handsome in your tux!” and “is it a long drive back to Lawton?”

In college, I learned that auditions are about more than expressing adolescent narcissism. When you’re auditioning for a paying gig, the pressure is ramped up, and it’s all about details. In auditions for professional orchestras, there may be hundreds of people competing for one spot. How can the judges make the tough calls? These are musicians who’ve been trained at the best music schools, and they’re all highly qualified, brilliant players. It’s a real shame that they can’t all find work and instead some have to find part-time day jobs or even change careers. I had a friend in Seattle, a very fine violinist, who trained at the North Carolina School of Performing Arts and the Brooklyn Conservatory. She tried to “make it” in New York for several years, but eventually gave up, moved to Seattle, and became a landscaper and later an ultrasound technician. One silver lining to this situation: the competition for limited jobs is making regional orchestras better than ever. (Click here to read an article from the New Yorker that describes this trend.)

As I mentioned, I got a taste of the competitiveness of professional auditions in college. In the late 1980s, the Oklahoma Symphony disbanded, and the Oklahoma City Philharmonic was reformed in its wake. To replace the string players who’d moved way, they hired college students from the area. A freshman at the University of Oklahoma, I auditioned for a spot on the sixth stand of the OKC Phil. I lost it to an older OU student, Kelli, because the conductor felt that my high e-flat was a little too flat (I still got to play as an “extra/substitute.” When you’re 18, you take what you can get.) A few years later, I lost another audition to Kelli, for a spot on the OKC Phil’s fifth stand, because the judges felt her ricochet bowing was a little bouncier than mine. Kelli and I were always good friends. She could do some things better than I, and vice versa – but at the auditions, we were competitors, and it came down to what we did at that moment and the finest of points.

I’ve done a few more auditions since then. Unlike when I was younger, for these auditions I didn’t think about “winning” or “beating out” anyone. I just wanted to play my best. I knew I was competing against my own limitations. Consequently, these experiences felt a lot… cleaner, somehow. Practicing for them felt like trying to get as close as possible to my viola. I did wonder, though, where was that devil-may-care, egotistical, competitive, hot-shot violist I was at 15?
Maybe he’s still alive and well in some parallel universe where it’s still 1986, and I hope he’s happy. Maybe living on the West Coast for 14 years has mellowed me, because these days, for me, music isn’t about winning, “challenging ,” or “beating out” others, or showing off (unless you’re a professional soloist – a lot of them have Hummer-sized egos, and they need to).

One great thing about the SLO Symphony is its lack of competiveness, politicking, rivalry, or hierarchy. The strings rotate seating; principal players don’t boss around section players; anyone can ask Michael a question, and he leads with encouragement and humor, not with the intimidation and condescension that too many conductors employ.

In a way, I’m glad that I was more competitive and egotistical when I was younger, as I’m sure that motivated me to practice harder. But these days, I feel differently about playing music. For example, recently I performed Schubert’s Trout Quintet with Margaret Berrio, Jan Carpenter, Clif Swanson, and Ina Davenport. We’ve done the Trout many times now, and it’s started to “gel.” When performing with these guys, I felt as if I wasn’t playing music, but being played by the music. Time stood still. The only reality was Schubert’s music and the people I was playing it with. I observed our playing, feeling a sort of purposeful, fulfilling, peaceful-but-exciting joy. It’s a hard feeling to describe. I think Wordsworth describes it in “Tintern Abbey,” where he writes about...

...that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Maybe I’ve read too much Romantic poetry lately, but I often feel something like this when playing the viola, alone or with others. I imagine I’m not the only one. As Wordsworth would say, these feelings, are, for me, “abundant recompense” for my younger, egotistical, competitive ideas about performance.

But then, in the real world – a place quite different from David Hennessee’s thousand-points-of-light imagination – there are competitive auditions, and you have to perform well, or else. When you’re a kid, if you blow an audition, you still have friends, school, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Clearasil, and dating. Auditions are just a part of the game, and if you lose one, you can always challenge.

Growing up, we learn that life is not a game, and the audition itself is the challenge. We all face on-the-spot pressures – auditions -- musicians and non-musicians alike. Job interviews and performance reviews, presentations to the board, sales pitches to prospective clients, paying taxes, or just a family waiting to be fed dinner. The best advice I’ve heard on facing pressures like these comes from Frances McDormand’s character in Almost Famous: “be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” Recently, I heard this advice echoed when visiting with principal French hornist Jane Swanson. She related Jennifer Dodson’s teacher’s advice on stage fright: “Just shut up and blow.”

Auditions – in whatever form – can be intimidating, but we can take away their power if we just “shut up and blow” – if we just do something. Something is better than nothing. It negates nothingness, despair and fear. It plugs us into the vast network of something-ness all around us, what Wordsworth calls the “mighty sum of things forever speaking.” And maybe our efforts add to that sum.

Perhaps that competitive, narcissistic 15-year-old boy trying to win auditions, get first prize in competitions and beat out others -- perhaps he added to that sum. If we’d had Facebook and MySpace back then, he probably would have been online, “friending” people. Instead he was befriending the forever-wooden Pinocchio who would someday help him become a real boy.

Well, that’s enough knock-off Wordsworthian moralizing. Here’s a viola joke: what’s the difference between a viola and a vacuum cleaner? You can tune a vacuum cleaner.

DH
P.S. up next, B for Bowings!