AUDITIONS, AUDITIONS, AUDITIONS….

In my many years of performing professionally, I have seen the audition process from both sides.

As a young performer, I chased jobs by going from audition to audition. Some were more successful than others. It really was a case of you win some, you lose some.

The success or failure of an audition at such a young age has a profound effect on how you see yourself as a musician, on where you believe you fit into the profession.

It wasn't until I joined one of the major orchestras in Germany that I began to understand the process from the other side, what players thought they were looking for, which candidates tended to fare better than others, where the members of an orchestra became divided in their opinions, and ultimately just how random the process is.

Fast forward 20 years, three different jobs, years of experience leading major orchestras, and the good fortune to be married to a leading expert in performance psychology, and I think I've finally cracked what it's all about.

As students, we are all taught to self-analyse, to self-criticise, almost to deprecate our achievements.

There will always be someone "better", more experienced, for me these days, younger.

The fact is that these are all fairly abstract and unhelpful ways to approach what we are doing. Ultimately, there's space for each and every one of us to express our musicality and communicate our message, whatever that may be.

The rot sets in when we start to believe that because we're not at the same on the same path or trajectory that someone else is following, we are no good or not good enough.

For many young players, chasing that elusive job becomes the only thing that matters, and in working towards that goal, they forget that the very thing that will help them find the perfect job or career path is the experimentation and searching for their own truth.

What ends up happening is that their own individual voice becomes blurred in the attempts to create an almost machine-like perfection.

I can promise you that the worst thing to listen to on an audition panel is perfection.

I'm not advocating for a lack of preparation, but there is a right kind of preparation and a wrong kind of preparation.

In my career, the times I have been most successful in auditions have been the times I thought I'd be least successful, the time things the times things went wrong, probably because after a mishap I just threw my heart and soul into what I was doing, because I felt like I had nothing to lose.

The fact is, even a perfect execution of a passage doesn't guarantee a successful audition.

Ask yourself this: if you change the way you wanted to play from expressive to functional in order to win an audition, are you prepared to spend the rest of your musical life playing in the same way?

And if the answer is yes, then why are you even a musician in the first place?

I definitely didn't become a violinist in order to play everything correctly.

It's primarily a means of self-expression. It gives me the opportunity to have a unique voice. It just happens that music is the easiest way for me to express myself.

The audition process isn't about you proving yourself worthy of a job.

It's about seeing whether your values match with those of a particular group of people.

Every orchestra is different. Every orchestra should be different. Otherwise, what is the point?

If you always approach an audition with the attitude of "This is me. Will our values match?” instead of “How can I make myself like what I think they want?”, you cannot lose.

Be yourself. Somewhere you'll find your place. It could be where you least expect it.