The Audience Wants You to Do Well: A Tale From a Non-Blind Audition

With Solo and Ensemble performances coming up at the beginning of May for Texas middle and high school students, not to mention juries and finals for college students, I would like to dedicate the end of April to discussing the popular statement used to counter performance anxiety, “The audience wants you to do well.” This is a statement made in books, by teachers, and motivational speakers. It makes sense once you think about it – if someone is going to dedicate their time to listening to you perform or audition, they want their time to be spent hearing a good performance. It’s easy to imagine the audience being scary or antagonizing, but ultimately, people would much rather hear music played well – in fact, that’s the whole reason why they’re at the performance. This statement may be easier to say than to believe right away, but I was lucky enough to have this statement proven true for me fairly early in the “taking auditions” portion of my career. This story is from a time in my life when I was young enough to not have a lot of audition experience, but old enough to know that performance anxiety shouldn't have been as much as a problem as it was to me by that point. I became determined that to solve this, I would take as many auditions as possible – near and far, but mostly near because this was my early twenties and I was pretty broke at the time. My training leading up to the audition had made very clear that the majority of the time in professional auditions, the audition panel would be listening from behind a screen in at least the first two rounds so as not to have bias in choosing a winner. As I expected, my first three auditions had all been blind – one for a Navy band, and two for smaller regional orchestras. After arriving at my fourth professional audition, another regional orchestra, I was informed that the stage would not include a curtain. In the past, I had had enough non-blind (but also non-professional) auditions that although I was surprised, I was not thrown off my game. While preparing to go into the warm-up room, I had some friendly conversations with a few of the musicians who were already in the orchestra, including the personnel manager. It seemed like their philosophy behind the non-blind audition was to genuinely get to know the candidates as people aside from their playing. I may have been young, but I was smart enough to understand that these conversations were part of the audition as well. By the time I took the stage, I’d had a few more audition experiences behind me, and was feeling better about this audition than I had in the past. As I took my seat and looked beyond the music stand, where there would normally be a screen, there were three people sitting at a long table facing me – two musicians in the orchestra, and the music director. It was weird to look at at first, but I suppose that’s what it looks like with or without a curtain! Unlike most other auditions, instead of starting with playing my solo, this one began with small talk. Someone asked me where I was from. I told them I was from the Boston area, and someone noticed that I didn’t have an accent, mentioned the Red Sox, and some other non-music things. While the process was non-traditional, it was nice to remember before playing the audition that I would be playing music for real humans that I had things in common with, and not just a black screen. Chatter may cause extra anxiety for some, but fortunately, it made me feel more comfortable. I don’t remember all of the excerpts that I played, but it was something to the tune of my solo, three standard excerpts, and ending with the Short Call. Considering that the latter ends on a high C, and that playing in the high range wasn’t one of my biggest strengths at the time, it was also the excerpt I was the most nervous to play. At that point, I felt as though the solo and other excerpts had gone fairly well. I took some deep breaths to prepare for the Short Call and told myself that this was only one time that I would play that very famous excerpt, and if I messed it up, there would be plenty of other auditions where I would be able to play it again, but better. With all the bravura I could muster, I played the Short Call and really did hit the high C at the end! In an even bolder move, I peeked beyond my stand to look at the panel for initial reactions, and after I hit the high C, one of the panel members SMILED. The audience wants you to do well, and I saw it with my own two eyes. The panel knew the excerpt, how challenging it was, and that it ended on a precarious note, and were still rooting for me to succeed. Then, when I did, someone was visibly happy for me. Even though I didn’t walk away as the overall winner, I consider the audition an important growing experience. All the other parts of the audition represented everything else an audience would want to see in your performance – not only your playing, but your personality, ability to be a good colleague, and for you to feel comfortable in the performing environment. Even if your performance doesn’t allow for establishing those things through talking to the audience, you can still carry yourself with confidence, interpret the music in your own way, and have fun with what you’re doing. It’s what the audience wants, after all.