Young Musicians' Guide to the
Orchestra!
These pages are intended for musicians (of all ages)
who have an orchestral career in mind. But the
LAYPERSON may ALSO benefit from these my attempts to
articulate the music-making PROCESS! But I think it's very
important for PERFORMERS to become WELL
ROUNDED; to become not just an instrumentalist but a MUSICIAN.
A GREAT man once said, "There is NO WAY to be
PERFECT. But there are MANY WAYS to be
EXCELLENT!" HERE GOES!!
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
KEEN.
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 audition for 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 music before we can bring it
to life.
What I'll try to do here is to suggest a
LARGE number of
things for the interested musician to think about to become a more EFFECTIVE
concert performer.
Keep in mind that MOST of these ideas apply
to practice and performance, while only a FEW will apply
to an audition situation. I'll try to make these
differences clear. You will find my Philosophy of
Music Making contained herein: my LIFE'S study...
MODIFIED every now and again!
First thing you'll notice 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 hadn't had 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 people
will
email
me if they'd like some clarifications. Since they
are STILL so rough, I haven't bothered to weed
out some redundancies. I recommend you print these few pages
and write your OWN observations/reactions for comparison.
And I'll try to sell you a book NEXT time! Good luck!
