Music competitions

[tbdana]

I've always disliked music competitions, whether it's anything from school band auditions to the Grammys or whatever. Music is art, not a sporting event. It's not Dodgers vs Yankees, or Tyson vs Davis. The question isn't who is better/stronger/faster. The question is does this artistic expression move my soul and move the souls of others. Competitions are antithetical to art. And besides, I believe that once you get to a professional level there is no such thing as "better"; there is only "different."

However, winning a music competition can assist one artist's career. So, while such competitions don't help art, they do help the very occasional artist. And if that artist can make more money, they have the space to create more art. So that's something for the lucky few, I guess. But that's about money, not music.

I learned about those career benefits in the 1960s, when I competed in the Hollywood Bowl Battle of the Bands. We were good, and I thought we would win, but we got beat out by this quirky little jazz group with a piano, a tuba, and drums. They were called the Richard Carpenter Trio. They beat us, and largely on the strength of that win they got a record contract and changed their name to The Carpenters.

I'm also not a fan of orchestra auditions for the same reasons, and I do not believe that orchestra auditions always or even most of the time find the best person to fill that particular chair.

Tell me how wrong I am.

[ghmerrill]

piano, a tuba, and drums

So you got beat by what was fundamentally just a rhythm section? Ouch.

[WilliamLang]

Just picking and choosing on vibes alone comes with its own massive set of problems. There's no good system for this, but fair auditions that place music first (which are extremely rare, and maybe don't exist at all) might be the best possible compromise.

Everything that involves a choice or selection implies that a competition has happened somewhere.

[ghmerrill]

I'm also not a fan of orchestra auditions for the same reasons, and I do not believe that orchestra auditions always or even most of the time find the best person to fill that particular chair.

Tell me how wrong I am.

Not about to say you're wrong ... but I'd be interested in what you think would be a viable alternative.

As a comparison, consider you own/manage a major league baseball team and need to hire a shortstop. I don't think they use much of an "audition" process.

[BGuttman]

I'm also not a fan of orchestra auditions for the same reasons, and I do not believe that orchestra auditions always or even most of the time find the best person to fill that particular chair.

Tell me how wrong I am.

Not about to say you're wrong ... but I'd be interested in what you think would be a viable alternative.

As a comparison, consider you own/manage a major league baseball team and need to hire a shortstop. I don't think they use much of an "audition" process.

Actually, they do. Scouts go out and evaluate various shortstop candidates and the reports are compared.

Any time you have to fill a position from more than one candidate you get into the "audition" (read "interview") process. There really is no other choice. We don't usually hire the first candidate for a skilled or technical position (as opposed to a "grunt" worker who can easily be trained).

I do agree that competitions for the sake of glory are not necessarily beneficial in artistic endeavors. Recognizing greatness is a good thing, but comparing apples to oranges (like who's the best singer: Beyonce or Maria Callas) is not a fair comparison to either.

[ghmerrill]

Actually, they do. Scouts go out and evaluate various shortstop candidates and the reports are compared.

I don't feel that this is strongly analogous to an audition process -- more like initial screening. For one thing, the subject doesn't know that he/she is being "auditioned." And while this may be done for initial hiring into a farm system, I'm not at all sure that this is the case when hiring experienced MLB or NFL players. But I don't really know.

Another helpful comparison (and closer in some respects) is that of hiring university faculty. There is more here to slice and dice than in the athletics analogy. Criteria and processes depend (again) on what "level" you're hiring at, and perhaps the sub-discipline in which you're hiring (and some notion of "balance" with respect to the current ensemble). At the lower levels (a new Ph.D. fresh out of graduate school, with little or no "track record", being hired into an "instructor" or Assistant Professor position), a wide screening process will take place and the pool of candidates narrowed down through interviews and discussions. A select group will typically then be selected for something of an "audition" (presentation of a recent paper or work, usually to a mixed audience of department faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, followed by dinner, etc.), and then final decisions will be made based on the aggregate of all of that stuff.

But if you're hiring an experienced Associate Professor, that process will be much more focused from the beginning, and there may be very few candidates. And if you're hiring into a senior position, then most likely the department will have agreed beforehand to target an individual and make a serious pitch to him/her -- without any "audition" at all.

And all that may vary a bit if the position is intended as one for a "teaching professor" vs. a "research professor."

As a very brief summary of this, "lower" levels of positions almost always include/require some sort of "audition" prior to an offer. "Mid" levels may or may not. Upper levels almost never do -- but MAY if there is some concern about personal "compatibility" in one sense or another, or if you want to gauge something like student interest and interaction with respect to a candidate. But usually all that is known beforehand.

[harrisonreed]

If someone is getting a better career or more exposure out of it, it can't be bad now can it? Music for an audience is essentially a vain and very subjective pursuit.

Peter Steiner got beat in one of these competitions, and he is amazing. It happens all the time.

Basically it just sucks to suck, at every level of ability.

[GabrielRice]

The comparison to baseball is kind of interesting.

Billy Beane revolutionized traditional scouting with sabermetrics - putting aside eyeball evaluations of skills in favor of objective analysis of statistics. This is a lot like a blind audition in a lot of ways (except for the sample size). Using this method he was able to take a low budget team into contention, but notably he was NOT ever able to win a championship.

A few years later, Theo Epstein GM-ed the Red Sox into their first World Series win in 86 years by using sabermetrics but tempering it with consideration of clubhouse dynamics, personalities, etc. Not to mention having the budget to spend more than the A's ever could to sign players who checked all the boxes.

This year's Yankees blew the doors off the stats but ended up losing the series because their baseball fundamentals were not up to the standard of their slugging percentages. And the teams with the 2nd and 3rd highest payrolls were in the World Series. Again. So maybe it IS all about money after all...who knew?

I guess what I'm getting at is that you can find great players with a blind audition, but you don't necessarily find people who work well together - or with other people at all, as evidenced by the recent high profile situation in New York. I'm not suggesting we should go back to the old way of teachers referring their favorite students for private auditions in conductors' hotel rooms (though many of our American brass-playing heroes were hired that way). But I would suggest that a serious re-thinking of orchestral auditions is needed.

[GabrielRice]

To the larger point, I've never been particularly motivated by competition, but many people are. If wanting to win a competition drives them to practice a lot and hone their skills, what's the harm?

When I was in college I played in a trombone quartet that went to a couple of competitions. We won one of them by working really hard, pushing each other to improve, and putting the music first. We all became better players individually for it, and we sounded better than any group of college sophomores had any right to expect.

[harrisonreed]

The point of a competition is not only to have a winner but to also showcase the talents of the "losers". In many cases, everyone wins who has a good showing.

There's a great show on Netflix from Korea called "Culinary Class Wars", which is obviously a cooking show, but I think it illustrates what is good about a competition. Food is kind of like music -- very subjective. And you have to think you've got something worth selling if you run a restaurant, so there is vanity involved.

The contestants get to go against Michelin star chefs and are judged by very high level experts. With the exception of two contestants, who genuinely produced bad food, everyone got great exposure and feedback. They were all winners.

[fsgazda]

There's a great show on Netflix from Korea called "Culinary Class Wars", which is obviously a cooking show, but I think it illustrates what is good about a competition. Food is kind of like music -- very subjective. And you have to think you've got something worth selling if you run a restaurant, so there is vanity involved.

I watch a fair number of the American cooking competition shows, and while too many of them emphasize the "drama" rather than the skills, one show ("Tournament of Champions" on Food Network) does what I think they all should, the testing and judging is blind, so the judges have no idea if they are eating food from the famous chef, or the young unknown that is up against them. It frequently ends up with big "upsets".

[CalgaryTbone]

I will speak up for the orchestral audition process. It's not perfect, but neither is any other way of hiring. The use of orchestral excerpts (mostly) makes sense because that is exactly what the job entails, and anyone who says excerpts aren't musical is basically ignoring their value - every one of them that is required needs to be played with style, phrasing and solid fundamentals. They are small snapshots from larger works by master composers that feature the trombone in some way. Also there are ways to show individual musicianship with melodic shape and adjusting dynamics to show a knowledge of where the part being played is more melodic or accompaniment in nature.

Also, most orchestral auditions include section playing and perhaps a trial week (or more). That is a great opportunity to really judge balance, blend, rhythm and tuning. Along with that is the chance to play "chamber music " - adjusting to colleagues while playing accelerandos and ritards, as well as shaping crescendos and diminuendos (without a conductor).

The premise of this thread seems to promote individuality in music making, but while performing in any larger group, especially an orchestra, the vast part of the performance is really being part of a team and knowing your role at each point. We played a couple of nice performances of Scheherazade the past 2 nights. 90 percent of the performance is an orchestra playing together and about 10 percent is solos from across the orchestra. Obviously, there is more freedom for those soloists than for the whole group, but even then, a good soloist will play in such a way as to set up the next tempo and help make the entrance after their solo be together. All of us that are accompanying at that point are both listening and watching to make sure the next passage is immediately together. To my thinking, this is being musical and is just as important as that great solo just played by an individual musician. By the way, I was very proud of the playing by the brass section on these shows. We come from many different places, and different musical backgrounds and are all hired through the audition process. The goal is always to bring a unified product to the stage.

As far as any non-musical issues and the possibility of hiring someone who lacks personal integrity, even in the extreme, I seriously doubt that any method of hiring will ever completely eliminate that. People who fall into that category often are very good at hiding that side of their personality, and any workplace can have a creep working there.

Jim Scott

[mgladdish]

To continue the tangent, Katherine Needleman has very strong opinions about blind auditions, with good reason.

https://katherineneedlemanoboist.substa ... -auditions
https://katherineneedlemanoboist.substa ... t-actually

[GabrielRice]

I will speak up for the orchestral audition process. It's not perfect, but neither is any other way of hiring. The use of orchestral excerpts (mostly) makes sense because that is exactly what the job entails, and anyone who says excerpts aren't musical is basically ignoring their value - every one of them that is required needs to be played with style, phrasing and solid fundamentals. They are small snapshots from larger works by master composers that feature the trombone in some way. Also there are ways to show individual musicianship with melodic shape and adjusting dynamics to show a knowledge of where the part being played is more melodic or accompaniment in nature.

I don't disagree with any of that, Jim, and that's the way I teach and always try to play the excerpts. And in most cases - especially at the top of our profession - the winners of auditions display musical thinking in the process. But the musical values of excerpts are subjective. Missed notes, breaths where somebody on the committee thinks they "shouldn't be," "gotchas" of compressing or stretching a rest a little bit, etc., are much more objective and much easier to judge.

Also, most orchestral auditions include section playing and perhaps a trial week (or more). That is a great opportunity to really judge balance, blend, rhythm and tuning. Along with that is the chance to play "chamber music " - adjusting to colleagues while playing accelerandos and ritards, as well as shaping crescendos and diminuendos (without a conductor).

But Jim, even that part of the process is under fire right now. I have read articles from some of the people advocating for more diversity in orchestras arguing against having trial periods at all. And there have been high-profile tenure cases recently that have been harshly criticized, and for good reason as far as I can tell. In some situations I have been in - on both sides of the screen - the part of the audition committee that comes out to play in the section round lose their votes at that point (full disclosure: in one case I probably would have won an audition if they hadn't). I understand it is to preserve anonymity and promote fairness, but clearly there is an aspect of that that doesn't make sense.

As far as any non-musical issues and the possibility of hiring someone who lacks personal integrity, even in the extreme, I seriously doubt that any method of hiring will ever completely eliminate that. People who fall into that category often are very good at hiding that side of their personality, and any workplace can have a creep working there.

Again, I don't disagree, but in the attempt at "fairness" we have made the audition process into a sporting competition much more than a job interview, and because it is now that much more competitive, the hero worship and problems that come with it have gotten worse. Or maybe it's not actually worse and we just talk about it more now, but its certainly not better.

------------------------

As to the all-blind auditions and prelims for everybody Katherine Needleman calls for...its hard to disagree with any of that in principle. However, it further dehumanizes the process in ways that I think bring another set of problems, as I'm suggesting above.

Furthermore, the reality is that time is money, and in smaller orchestras there is never enough time to fairly hear everybody who wants to apply. There was a second trombone audition for a New England per-service orchestra recently in which most of the applicants were only able to play 2 excerpts in the prelim. They walked away feeling like they had not been heard fairly. I know the people on that committee and I know they want to hear people play their best, but I also know they had limited time and too many applicants to hear. I would actually propose that the bar for auto-advancing to a (blind) second round be a lot lower rather than higher, in order to give everybody who auditions a more complete, more fair listen.

Other than that, I don't really know how to reconcile all the issues. I'm just suggesting that we need to think about it a lot more and be creative with the solutions.

[Wilktone]

Tell me how wrong I am.

You're not wrong.

There are, though, two different things that I think are being discussed. The audition process, while not perfect, is essentially a "job interview" for a musical position. That's kind of a different animal than a musical competition. Auditions are necessary and aren't going away any time soon, but most of the professional work I do doesn't require them. I did stop subbing for one of the local orchestras a while back when a new personnel manager came in and required all subs to go through an audition, even if we had already been performing with the group. I figured my audition was all the successful performances I had already played and haven't been called since. It hasn't been too bothersome for me, since I'm too busy with other regular rehearsals and performances that are hard for me to sub out in order to play with that orchestra anyway.

I've never been a fan of the contests. When I was running jazz festivals I always set them up to be non-competitive and even avoided giving any of the bands rankings. But music competitions, particularly marching band ones, are big in my area. Even bigger in others. The motivation it can provide students (and some teachers) is undeniable. I always felt the competitions mostly served for a way for music teachers to quantifiably justify their programs to administrators who are more data driven and think that our field as a whole could do a better job selling what we're teaching.

Dave

[VJOFan]

On the other hand competing is fun to do and interesting to observe.

Trying to be the best, when done with proper work, leads to being one’s best. Good teachers, coaches and parents can contextualize competition so its meaning is clear- a result is what happens on a particular day at a particular time in particular circumstances. Who someone is and their most consistent qualities, may affect the result, but are separate from it.

Adults should get this and be able to feel the feels when a result goes against them, but then continue on with the work of becoming closer to what they want to be. They also should be able to evaluate the fairness of a situation and take available steps to remedy injustices.

[Bach5G]

The jazz guitarist/educator Mick Goodrick reportedly said it’s ok to be competitive, but keep it to yourself.

[CalgaryTbone]

I will speak up for the orchestral audition process. It's not perfect, but neither is any other way of hiring. The use of orchestral excerpts (mostly) makes sense because that is exactly what the job entails, and anyone who says excerpts aren't musical is basically ignoring their value - every one of them that is required needs to be played with style, phrasing and solid fundamentals. They are small snapshots from larger works by master composers that feature the trombone in some way. Also there are ways to show individual musicianship with melodic shape and adjusting dynamics to show a knowledge of where the part being played is more melodic or accompaniment in nature.

I don't disagree with any of that, Jim, and that's the way I teach and always try to play the excerpts. And in most cases - especially at the top of our profession - the winners of auditions display musical thinking in the process. But the musical values of excerpts are subjective. Missed notes, breaths where somebody on the committee thinks they "shouldn't be," "gotchas" of compressing or stretching a rest a little bit, etc., are much more objective and much easier to judge.

Also, most orchestral auditions include section playing and perhaps a trial week (or more). That is a great opportunity to really judge balance, blend, rhythm and tuning. Along with that is the chance to play "chamber music " - adjusting to colleagues while playing accelerandos and ritards, as well as shaping crescendos and diminuendos (without a conductor).

But Jim, even that part of the process is under fire right now. I have read articles from some of the people advocating for more diversity in orchestras arguing against having trial periods at all. And there have been high-profile tenure cases recently that have been harshly criticized, and for good reason as far as I can tell. In some situations I have been in - on both sides of the screen - the part of the audition committee that comes out to play in the section round lose their votes at that point (full disclosure: in one case I probably would have won an audition if they hadn't). I understand it is to preserve anonymity and promote fairness, but clearly there is an aspect of that that doesn't make sense.

As far as any non-musical issues and the possibility of hiring someone who lacks personal integrity, even in the extreme, I seriously doubt that any method of hiring will ever completely eliminate that. People who fall into that category often are very good at hiding that side of their personality, and any workplace can have a creep working there.

Again, I don't disagree, but in the attempt at "fairness" we have made the audition process into a sporting competition much more than a job interview, and because it is now that much more competitive, the hero worship and problems that come with it have gotten worse. Or maybe it's not actually worse and we just talk about it more now, but its certainly not better.

------------------------

As to the all-blind auditions and prelims for everybody Katherine Needleman calls for...its hard to disagree with any of that in principle. However, it further dehumanizes the process in ways that I think bring another set of problems, as I'm suggesting above.

Furthermore, the reality is that time is money, and in smaller orchestras there is never enough time to fairly hear everybody who wants to apply. There was a second trombone audition for a New England per-service orchestra recently in which most of the applicants were only able to play 2 excerpts in the prelim. They walked away feeling like they had not been heard fairly. I know the people on that committee and I know they want to hear people play their best, but I also know they had limited time and too many applicants to hear. I would actually propose that the bar for auto-advancing to a (blind) second round be a lot lower rather than higher, in order to give everybody who auditions a more complete, more fair listen.

Other than that, I don't really know how to reconcile all the issues. I'm just suggesting that we need to think about it a lot more and be creative with the solutions.

Gabe, I think we're mostly in agreement. I was going to say some more about trials and tenure, but it was already a long post.

I'm in favor of trial periods because I believe that is the ultimate chance to see how the finalist(s) actually play the job. Your athletic event analogy is one I have also seen in some instances - actually playing rehearsals/concerts with people is a way to really find out if they bring chamber music skills to the job and don't just play in their own world without listening to others.

The Tenure process has taken a serious hit in recent times, but I still think it can be saved with a few tweaks. We have added requirements for more formal feedback to new players who are on tenure track. Making sure that any issues (big or small) are brought to their attention means that adjustments can be made, and also makes it less of a shock if the tenure were to be denied. The tenure process, even without reform is certainly preferable to the old way where conductors fired people at will. I think it's also important to say to folks who aren't from the orchestral world that someone not getting tenure doesn't necessarily mean that the musician is a bad player in some large way, but might perhaps be stylistically off the mark for that job. Denial of tenure is relatively rare, and many of those players do get another job elsewhere. Also, tenure in orchestras is very different from the academic version - people do still occasionally get fired for letting their playing go, but there is a process including feedback to give them a chance to get things together. Ultimately, I am a fan of section playing and trial weeks because they make it far less likely that some problem will be discovered after the player is in the job, and tenure is just a formality at that point.

As far as diversity issues, I also want to see more diverse rosters, and I welcome new initiatives to help that. I have noticed though that student bodies at major (and smaller) conservatories and universities are only now slowly moving towards enrolment that mirrors the diversity of the population. Screened auditions have made huge changes to the rosters of orchestras, but some groups are still under-represented - they are also the groups that are under-represented in the schools. Here in Canada, for instance, we have had a history of female trombone and tuba players in several of the professional orchestras including in some of the most prestigious ones, but the numbers are not anywhere near 50%, like the population would reflect. It is moving in the right direction, but there still needs to be a more balanced mix at the student level, and of course, the jobs have to be open for audition.

Jim Scott

[Geordie]

To the larger point, SNIP …

When I was in college I played in a trombone quartet that went to a couple of competitions. We won one of them by working really hard, pushing each other to improve, and putting the music first. We all became better players individually for it, and we sounded better than any group of college sophomores had any right to expect.

That’s the philosophy that has driven a lot of collective and individual improvement in many British (and elsewhere) brass bands. As a ‘team’ effort it sometimes results in lively spectator reactions when results are announced.