The Toughest Job Interview On Earth

Beginning this Thursday, the stage at Orchestra Hall will be playing host to more than just our weekly concerts. It's one of those weekends that come along several times nearly every season, in which we hold auditions to fill one or more open spots in the orchestra. In this case, we'll be hoping to hire two new first violinists, and you can bet that there will be dozens of applicants, perhaps more than 100. (There were 122 violists at my audition here, also with two openings available.)

Auditions are a strange and terrifying business. Musicians worldwide complain mightily about them, and it often seems that not a single major orchestra audition can go by without someone, somewhere, claiming that it was either rigged or unfair or that the person hired didn't deserve the job. (Most of the conspiracy theorizing was confined to conservatory lounges when I was in school, but these days, the Internet makes it possible for all kinds of nasty things to be said right out in public, and anonymously, too. It's not my favorite online innovation, I must say.)

The way that auditions work at most American orchestras is this. An orchestra with an open spot places an ad in the national trade paper of the American Federation of Musicians, as well as on a few select web sites. The ad states the position that's available, the dates of the audition to be held, and the date that the position will be available to the audition winner. Applicants who believe they have a shot at the job then send resumes to the orchestra. At this point, several things can happen, depending on the orchestra:

1) The orchestra might send out complete audition information to all applicants, and assign them an official audition time if they wish. (This is the procedure the Minnesota Orchestra follows in all but a few extraordinary circumstances.)

2) The orchestra might decide to restrict its audition to a few select candidates, either specially invited by the music director, or culled from the stack of resumes received. Very few orchestras go this route anymore, except in cases where a "cattle call" audition (or multiple such auditions) has yielded no winner.

3) The orchestra might invite some candidates to audition based on their resumes, and ask others to submit CDs of themselves playing an assortment of solo and orchestral repertoire, so that it can be determined whether they will be invited to the live audition.

Eventually, the orchestra's personnel office will send out a repertoire list for the audition, which will usually consist of at least one major concerto, at least one other solo work, and a collection of 10-15 excerpts from orchestral works. The excerpts will always be examples of the most difficult playing an orchestral player of that instrument would be expected to do, and will cover a ridiculously wide range of styles and technical challenges. It is considered more or less standard to allow candidates at least a couple of months to prepare the list for the audition, so these packets are usually shipped out far in advance.

Taking an audition, it should be said, is not cheap. Candidates pay their own way, and there is no expense reimbursement for anyone, win or lose. If you're not close enough to drive, you fly. Woe betide you if you are a cellist: that's two plane tickets, one for you and one for your instrument. (If you play bass, you're probably not taking any auditions that you can't drive to.) Once you're in town, you'll often have to spend the better part of a week in a hotel, and if you want to stay close to the concert hall you're going to audition in, there probably won't be many cheap options. You could stay farther out in a discount motel, of course - if you want to pay for a rental car or God knows how many cab rides. All told, you can easily blow $1000 or more only to get knocked out of the running in ten minutes or less.

That's right, I said ten minutes or less. Because when it's your turn to audition, you don't get much time to prove yourself. You show up at the hall at your assigned time, and if you're lucky, you'll be shown to a private practice room to warm up. (If you're unlucky, and the orchestra you're auditioning for doesn't have great facilities, you'll warm up with everyone else in a big noisy room.) Roughly fifteen minutes before you'll be brought to the stage, a proctor will knock on your door, and show you the list of works the audition committee wants to hear in this first round. (These will all be taken from the larger list you got in the mail.)

A quarter of an hour later, you'll be escorted to the stage, where you will be greeted, in most cases, by a giant curtain separating you from the audition committee. (The committee, by the way, is made up of orchestra members, mainly from your instrument group, plus the music director, who usually won't show up until the final round.) The proctor will announce your entrance to the committee, and identify you with a number. You won't speak at all, lest the anonymity guaranteed by the screen be compromised. The screen, by the way, was originally put in place to force all-male orchestras to abandon the ridiculous argument that women just couldn't cut it in the music world, even in a fair audition. As a glance at any American orchestra today will tell you, it worked quite nicely.

You might get a "good morning" from a disembodied voice behind the screen, but probably not. You'll begin with your concerto, and you'll play until the voice tells you to stop, usually no more than three minutes after you started. Then it's on to the excerpts, and the voice might return to ask you to repeat one or more of them, often with specific instructions as to how the committee wants to hear them played. If you screw up, and want another crack at an excerpt, you can signal the proctor, who will ask the committee if you can try again. They may allow you a second shot, but they may not, depending on whether they've already made up their mind about you. Less than ten minutes after you walked on stage, the disembodied voice will call out a brusque, "Thank you! Thanks very much," and you're done. Now it's back to your dressing room to await word on whether you have qualified for the privilege of doing this same thing again two or three more times over the next several days.

I've taken a grand total of six auditions in my professional life, which is way under the average. I won my first job in the second audition I ever took, and won my position in Minneapolis two auditions later. That means I'm a pretty decent musician, yes, but what it really means is that I've been damned lucky. I have friends who I consider to be outstanding musicians who have taken literally dozens of orchestral auditions with little to nothing to show for it. Some of them have given up, and either turned to playing weddings and pick-up gigs to scrape by, taken up teaching full time, or carved out other niches for themselves in the increasingly diverse and varied music world. Others continue to plug away, which can either result in long-delayed elation (one close friend of mine auditioned four times unsuccessfully for the Minnesota Orchestra before finally being handed a prestigious titled chair on the fifth try,) or a long, painful slide into the realization that it's just never going to happen.

It's a brutal, awful way to have to win a great job, and picking yourself up off the mat after a hard-fought loss and knowing that you have to limp home and start working immediately on the next excerpt list can be soul-crushing. That's why I call myself lucky: I know my own nature, and I just know that I wouldn't have been able to sustain the level of dedication it takes to keep auditioning through more than a few consecutive losses. The difference between a career in the Alabama Symphony and a career in the Minnesota Orchestra (and the $70,000 difference in salary between those two ensembles) was, for me, a total of thirty minutes of stage time over one long November weekend in 1999. Now, did I work my tail off for that audition? Yes, I did. Did I come home from five-hour rehearsal days in Birmingham and put in another three hours on my Minnesota excerpt list until I thought my shoulder was going to separate? Sure. Did I win the job here fair and square, and beat out a lot of lesser players? I believe I did.

But the fact is that, no matter how prepared I was, I could have just had a bad day on that long weekend. My hand could have slipped in the first excerpt I played, and freaked me out badly enough that I couldn't recover. I could have been cold, or tired, or hungry, or gotten the shakes, or been unable to get my spiccato bowstroke to work. It happens to everyone. It's happened to me.

That weekend, it didn't happen. And so here I am. And this weekend, a desperate flock of violinists will try their best to make the same glorious thing happen to them. Two of them, at most, will succeed.