The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University

Auditions

Well, here I am, the world's worst blogger, finally back for another very delayed post.  In my own defense, since my last post I have bought a house, renovated and sold a house, moved, and played "Salome," so you can't say I haven't been pretty busy.  I’ll keep working on posting more regularly.

 It's audition season here at Peabody.  We're getting ready to hear the auditions of Peabody applicants next month.  Many current Peabody students are also in audition mode themselves, as they apply for summer festivals or graduate programs.    Plus there's always those audition notices everyone's got their eyes on in the union paper.  Auditions are a tricky thing: they are the primary way that we get to do what we want and love to do (play music), and they do demonstrate our talents in many ways.  But they are also an inherently artificial environment, and they emphasize certain skills that are a very minor part of being a musician, while underplaying very important skills we need to play well.  For example, we hardly ever need to play music from every era of Western music in the space of 10 minutes, but in auditions we need to play Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Bartok in rapid succession.  And auditions don't test our ability to adjust our rhythm and intonation to another player at all - probably the single most important (and difficult) thing musicians must do.

It's easy to get a little cynical about auditions.  I certainly was when I was a student.  I was respected and admired as a player by my teachers, peers, and orchestra conductors, yet I didn't see all that positive feedback leading to good results when I auditioned.  I eventually accepted that I needed to work on the skill set specific to auditions and master those skills.

Like them or not, auditions are the gateways to most performance and educational opportunities in music.  We all need to come to terms with them and better understand what they are (and aren't) if we want to succeed.  I'll be posting more on this topic later.  In the meantime, feel free to contact me and let me know what you think on this (or any) topic....