For classical musicians, learning how to audition effectively is critical. So much is riding on the line when you take an audition.
You’ve spent months preparing the music.
You’ve booked a flight and hotel, turned down gigs. You’ve invested an incredible amount of time and emotional energy into this event.
Then what happens? For so many musicians, they get nervous, flub a couple of notes, and then watch in panic as everything spirals downhill.
Finding ways to simulate the audition experience is key to developing these skills.
In my 2016 book Winning the Audition, I took advice from over two dozen professional orchestra musicians and wove it into a book that covered practice techniques, mindset, overcoming adversity, and other key skills.
More recently, I had the pleasure of being a “fly on the wall” for one of the San Francisco Academy Orchestra’s monthly mock auditions. This is a super-cool part of an innovative new program, and it is a great new way for people on the verge of a career to get that “final finish” to make it into a professional orchestra job.
About the San Francisco Academy Orchestra Program
This string-focused orchestral training program puts emerging professionals alongside San Francisco Symphony members, rehearsing and performing side-by-side throughout the year. This program was launched by Andrei Gorbatenko in 2000 and features faculty members from the San Francisco Symphony and Opera as well as various guest artists.
More recently, the Academy also launched an intensive, one-year Artist Diploma Fellowship that focuses on developing those skills critical to orchestral performance. The program offers weekly lessons, group excerpt classes, master classes, and mock auditions in addition to the side-by-side rehearsal and performing with San Francisco Symphony members.
A Look Inside the Mock Audition Process
I recorded a podcast episode about this whole experience, and you can check it out in its entirety below or on YouTube.
I arrived a half-hour early for the Academy’s December 2019 mock audition and sat down with mock audition coordinator Joy Fellows. Joy is a violist in the San Francisco Opera as well as the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. She also teaches viola through the Academy. Prior to that, Joy was a member of the Saint Louis Symphony and the Indianapolis Symphony.
Why Mock Auditions Help
Joy and I chatted about auditions in general and developing the process of centering, a concept popularized in the orchestral world by performance coach Don Greene. Deliberate practice toward centering to center yourself in the moment to accomplish the task at hand is key.
Dealing with the stress of an audition experience is a challenge for sure. Everyone has slightly different mechanisms for coping with these moments. Unfortunately, there isn’t one “magic bullet” that will universally address the panicky feeling surrounding an audition.
For more people, it’s eating a banana before the audition. Others moderate their caffeine intake, and some incorporate beta blocker medication.
Everybody is slightly different, and playing mock auditions is a great way to “practice the audition” and learn how to cope with these audition-specific challenges.
Common Audition Preparation Mistakes
Not having truly practiced the entire audition list is one of the most common preparation missteps that Joy has observed. Getting every excerpt to the same level is critical for an audition. Often, a player may focus so much on one of the more unfamiliar or challenging excerpts that they neglect the rest of the list.
Time management, planning, and being really organized and specific about your preparation will help tremendously with moving all of the excerpts to where they need to be in terms of preparation.
Recording yourself is an essential tool for audition preparation. For Joy, she would start recording herself every few days about three weeks prior to the audition. She would then listen back and take a lot of notes on how things were going and what work needed to be done next.
Taking notes like this is great because it reveals what really needs work. Focusing on just those spots identified in the last recording ensures that the focus is being directed toward what actually needs to get done.
This kind of preparation is great for calming the nerves. Because you’ve put so much thought and effort into what you’re doing, you’re less likely to be distracted in the audition itself.
Ideally, Joy wants to be performing the whole list for a variety of different people about a week before the audition. Family, friends, and colleagues are all great candidates for this. The experience of playing an audition list in front of another human is incredibly powerful, and most audition winners credit this as on off the keys to their audition success.
The goal is to get your worst possible performance and your best possible performance as close to each other as possible. Los Angeles Philharmonic bassist David Allen Moore refers to this as “your floor and your ceiling.” In audition preparation, we aim to raise our floor as close as possible to the level of our ceiling.
The Structure of the San Francisco Academy Orchestra Auditions
Mock auditions for the San Francisco Academy Orchestra are held at the Drew School in San Francisco. This private school in San Francisco‘s Pacific Heights neighborhood has a great auditorium and numerous warm-up rooms located below it.
The screen is set up across the stage, with mock audition “candidates” entering from a separate door on the left. The mock auditioners are divided into two rounds of A and B groups, and one group warms up as the other listens and writes comments.
I floated behind both sides of the screen, checking out the experience from both the committee and player perspective. It was great to see how different people warmed up and conducted themselves during the mock audition.
Several people were playing off of an iPad Pro, which I’ve also embraced as my music reading device. Others had a stack of parts and were jotting down notes and rearranging the music for their mock round.
Each candidate played a series of 4-5 short excerpts from the standard audition repertoire. Though nerves play a role in pretty much every actual or mock audition, all the candidates seemed quite composed. This is a good indication of the positive effect that doing regular mock auditions has on these artist diploma students.
There’s also tremendous benefit in listening to and receiving comments from musicians that don’t play your instrument. Violinists listen differently than bassists, for example—and vice versa.
Everybody behind the screen, including both mock auditioners and faculty members like Joy and Andrei, took notes. Everybody put their notes into piles for each candidate at the conclusion of each round.
The whole process was professional, seamless, and well-executed. I wish I had been put through a similar process back when I was studying!
Academy Members are Winning Auditions
After the mock audition, we all headed over to Andrei’s place for their annual holiday party. It was a ton of fun and great way for faculty and fellows to relax and spend time together.
I chatted with Andrei about the origins of the academy and the more recent development of its artist diploma program.
For nearly twenty years, the Academy program has given young professional musicians to work alongside members of the San Francisco Symphony.
Six years ago, former San Francisco Symphony Assistant Principal Viola Don Ehrlich and Andrei came up with the idea for the Artist Diploma program. This program serves as a response to the ever-increasing music tuition costs, this program is designed to be efficient and focus on the essential skills for obtaining employment in an orchestra.
The program consists of:
- weekly lessons
- group excerpt classes
- master classes
- mock auditions
- side-by-side rehearsal and performing with San Francisco Symphony members
The results have been remarkable.
Academy Fellows have recently won auditions or have been awarded contracts with the following orchestras:
- Pittsburgh Symphony
- Dallas Symphony
- Rochester Philharmonic
- St. Louis Symphony
- Calgary Philharmonic
- Annapolis Symphony
- Philharmonia Baroque
- Austin Symphony
- Santa Barbara Symphony
- California Symphony
- Santa Cruz Symphony
- Berkeley Symphony
- Monterey Symphony
- Oakland Symphony
- Marin Symphony
- Santa Rosa Symphony
- Symphony Silicon Valley
- Stockton Symphony
- Sacramento Philharmonic
- San Jose Chamber Orchestra
Many of them have also been called to sub in the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet Orchestras.
Faculty
In addition to Andrei, the Academy the faculty consists of:
- Dan Carlson, violin
- David Chernyavsky, violin
- Melissa Kleinbart, violin
- Matthew Young, viola
- Joy Fellows, viola
- Amos Yang, cello
- Charles Chandler, bass
I also did an in-depth interview with Charles Chandler about his career, the academy, auditioning, and much more:
Auditioning From the Violinist Perspective
I also spoke with San Francisco Symphony violinist and Academy teacher David Chernyavsky about the program while at the holiday party. David moved to the Bay Area in 2009 and has been involved with the Academy for the last decade.
David works on a weekly basis with the Academy fellows in the Artist Diploma Program, concentrating on the audition repertoire needed to prepare them for real-life auditions.
David has observed that, surprisingly, many string players leaving school have not focused enough on orchestral repertoire and training for taking auditions.
During the past few decades in the United States, the requirements to get a job have shifted more toward successful execution of orchestral excerpts.
Before that, there was more of an emphasis on solo repertoire. For example, auditions in the 1960s might have consisted of a concerto movement and some orchestral sightreading. This is quite a different setup compared to today’s audition process.
There are multiple levels on which people are listening to excerpts. Take the first page of the violin part of Don Juan, for example. The challenge is that this is an orchestral part, so you have to keep in mind that you have to play it as if you were in the first violin section. This means that you cannot play too virtuosically. You have to play more rhythmically.
On the other hand, you have to sound good playing an orchestral part alone. In as section, you are playing with up to 20 other people, while in an audition you are playing this tutti part as a solo instrument.
The main objective is to not rush and have a strong sense of rhythm and tempo.
Executing a Mozart concerto is a different skill set. David likes to tell his students to imagine singing it, or to imagine a soprano singer singing this music. A lot of people try to play Mozart concerti with short articulations, making a lot of accents and with a dry approach.
David finds Mozart concerti to be much more appealing with a song like approach to the line and phrasing. This can be a bit counterintuitive due to all the articulations in the part, but in the end it sounds more flowing and cohesive with a songlike approach.
Charles Chandler on the Academy experience
San Francisco Symphony bassist Charles Chandler and I chatted about the San Francisco Academy experience in our 2017 interview. Here’s Charles on his experience working with the Academy students:
“It’s mostly graduate students, and it’s a program that costs a lot less than going to a conservatory. You have an experience of playing in orchestra, but most importantly take lessons, and actually all of the teachers are members of the San Francisco Symphony there.
You get to work with them on a one-on-one basis, and in a orchestra class setting as well. it’s great—it’s really great. I really enjoy it. The students have all been fantastic players and students, and I feel like I’ve learned a whole lot from them, frankly!”
Thoughts from the students
Finally, I chatted with current San Francisco Academy Orchestra students Michael Minor and Yu Chen Liu.
Prior to her time with the Academy Orchestra, Yu Chen Liu attended the San Francisco Conservatory, where she studied with Scott Pingel for her master’s degree. Yu Chen loves the city of San Francisco: the people, the lifestyle, and the weather. She has gotten a lot of the monthly mock auditions (this was her 12th for the program), the studio classes, and the orchestral experience.
Mock auditions are one of Yu Chen’s favorite aspects of the program. She records herself every time, and she can hear the improvement from audition to audition each time she listens to the recording. Each time, she can hear herself getting better, not only technically, but also in how she reacts to the pressures of the mock audition experience.
Michael Minor is another former San Francisco Conservatory student, and he’s enjoying the training he’s getting with Charles and the warm, open approach he takes to music making. Getting to play with the Academy Orchestra is an inspiring experience, and having Andrei, a fellow bass player, as a conductor has been a rewarding experience.
Mock auditions are also a favorite part of the program for Michael. Playing in front of peers can be a scary experience, and these regularly scheduled mock auditions go a long way toward normalizing this process.
Learn more about the Academy
Andrei spends much of the academic year touring the United States, listening to auditions for the Academy, working with university ensembles and speaking with students.
Visit the San Francisco Academy website for more information, and follow along with them on Facebook for the latest updates.
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