Filling the Empty Chair : The nation’s top musicians participate in a ritual to win a job : Auditions

The first time cellist Gloria Lum tried out for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, her audition tape was “summarily rejected” and she never even made it to the live auditions.

That was October, 1984, and nobody else got the job either. A second round of auditions was held the following February and a new audition tape she’d recorded made the cut this time. But at the live audition, she had another problem.

“I had the flu and could barely stand,” recalls Lum, then a cellist with the Denver Symphony. “But in an audition, you can’t talk. You can’t plead your case. You can’t say, ‘I’m sick, I have a stomachache, can we do this another day?’ You have 10 or 15 minutes in which to show your stuff, and you have no room for mistakes. If you blow it, they have nothing else to go on.”

But Lum did not blow it--she got the job. It was her 19th professional audition in only six years.

Now, Lum is on the other side of the audition ordeal. On April 21, as a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s auditions committee, the 31-year-old musician will help judge the 23 violinists competing for a violin chair in the orchestra. It’s the Philharmonic’s first audition on any instrument since last April.

Lining up for jobs many people keep for life, the nation’s top professional musicians participate in a ritual not unlike other initiations into very exclusive clubs. Musicians speak of “taking” auditions, not applying for jobs, and of “winning” auditions, not getting jobs.

The ritual is a grueling one. Paying their own way, musicians crisscross the country, their instruments in hand--or, for cellists like Lum, on the next airplane seat--seeking better jobs with more pay, more prestige or both. When they arrive, they often rehearse with the sounds of their competitors in their ears, then face an audition committee that may already have heard 55 other people play exactly the same two-minute musical excerpt.

“It’s the most difficult thing they do in their lives,” says James Decker, a former member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who teaches at USC. “It’s a lot harder than doing the job. Everything’s at stake.”

The stakes are particularly high for a post at a top orchestra like the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Given its reputation, location and the potential studio work nearby, the Philharmonic is attractive on many fronts. Edging continuously closer to the traditional Big Five orchestras--Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia--it pays about the same ($1,020 a week minimum), and music director Andre Previn says many contenders in recent years have been people “who are playing in very great orchestras already.”

This is a look at the pressure cooker called the audition process as the Los Angeles Philharmonic searches for a new violinist.

Making the Cut

There are 34 violin chairs in the Philharmonic, representing nearly one-third of the orchestra’s musicians, and it is the area of greatest turnover. In November, 1986, the last time the Philharmonic added violinists, 19 violinists auditioned and four were hired. But last April, when auditions for this violin chair were first held, not one of the 13 auditioners was chosen. The orchestra has since been relying on substitute musicians, depending on repertory needs.

The selection process, with its application forms, audiotapes and other requirements, is much more complicated than it used to be. Thirty years ago, conductors generally hired students of prominent orchestra members and other known commodities. Musicians played in hotel rooms of visiting conductors or were sent by their teachers to non-competitive auditions. When music directors began to move every few years rather than every few decades, orchestra members wanted greater say in selecting the people who might sit on stage with them for life.

Enter the audition committee. At the Philharmonic, seven musicians are elected by their current colleagues to help choose their future ones. The music director still has the strongest vote, but no longer the only vote. “Our own individual prejudices tend to neutralize each other,” says principal oboist David Weiss, formerly vice-chair of the committee, “and we in that regard, may be more objective than the single opinion of a music director.”

Philharmonic musicians last year passed a contract change--one of few in the nation--saying if there’s a difference of opinion between the audition committee and the music director, nobody is hired. “It isn’t like the committee gets to choose its person,” says Weiss, “but the music director doesn’t get to choose his person either.” Each time out, orchestra management places an ad in the union monthly and waits for responses. Potential applicants are mailed repertory lists of required orchestral excerpts they’ll need to prepare for both audiotapes and--if they make the cut--for the live audition that follows. The tapes are used to weed out unqualified people and save them the emotional and financial expense of flying in from Kansas City, Denver or even Hong Kong.

Many people get cold feet or change their minds early on, says Philharmonic auditions coordinator Ellie Nishi, and fewer than half the people who receive applications actually send tapes. For the April 21 audition, the Philharmonic’s 120 inquiries--about 30 from Los Angeles--resulted in 36 tapes. Nearly all arrived on the March 24 deadline.

Audition tapes are numbered to preserve anonymity, then handed over to the committee. Listenings are usually limited to two hours each, to keep judges fresh.

“We’re pretty careful to give everyone a fair hearing,” says chairman Barry Socher. “It can take a while, even on a tape, to warm up.”

The Agony

On April 21, the audition committee will be listening to 23 violinists. Thirteen of those musicians sent tapes this year which qualified them for the live audition. The other 10 include finalists from last year, people whose tapes were accepted last year and couldn’t audition, and violinists who have been frequent substitute players with the orchestra. Philharmonic personnel director Irving Bush says as many as 12 violinists might sit in for absent or ill players during the course of a year, and prior “subs” hired as full-time players include audition committee chair Socher.

Both preliminary and final auditions will be compressed into one very long day. Invited musicians are each given an appointment, then shown to a private warm-up room before performing. The actual auditions are done on the Pavilion stage, with the audition committee in the audience. Applicants usually know within an hour or two of their performances whether they will compete later that day as finalists. Previn joins the committee for the final rounds.

That’s a pretty civilized way to do things, say people currently making the audition circuit. Auditions can take place in small rehearsal rooms with lousy acoustics, and it isn’t unusual to wait your turn in a crowded locker room listening to your competitors. John DiLutis, a 22-year-old trombone student at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music who was a runner-up for a chair at the Chicago Symphony, speaks of a “real zoo in terms of people warming up. It’s interesting to see how people deal with it. Some are very social, even before they play. Other people are very isolated, sit in a corner and read, listen to tapes and don’t interact.”

Most orchestras use screens between the auditioners and the judges, a device that became popular in the mid-’70s as a counter to potential charges of sexism, racism or other unfair practices. The screens (sometimes not high enough to hide the head of a very tall musician) may be used all the way through the finals. Female musicians may be advised not to wear high heel shoes, and some orchestras even ask all contenders to remove their shoes so as not to risk shoe sounds indicating sex.

Los Angeles, in fact, is one of the few orchestras that uses no screens.

“We debated this back and forth for many years,” says Weiss. “We feel we are able to maintain objectivity. We also feel that many of the applicants--not all, but many--prefer to play for people out there rather than stuck behind a screen. The immediacy is lost when you’re playing for a wall. And like it or not, performing for the public is a visual experience as well as an auditory experience.”

What the auditioners are required to play varies not just from instrument to instrument, but from orchestra to orchestra, meaning they frequently go back to square one after each audition. Required repertory for the L.A. Philharmonic violin audition includes movements from Brahms, Schumann and Strauss--Strauss’ “Don Juan” is practically an audition standard--but they also have some choice among several concerti options. And near the bottom of the audition application form, auditioners are warned that they might also be asked to do some sight reading.

Finals also differ. When Curtis student DiLutis was selected as one of two finalists for the Chicago Symphony a few weeks ago, both finalists were asked to play with the trombone section of the orchestra. Three chairs were set up on the stage of Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. The orchestra’s bass trombonist and principal trombonist sat in the outer chairs, and the two finalists alternated in the center spot. Each played for maybe 30 or 40 seconds, then leaped up, a process that continued through four or five orchestral excerpts. Each finalist also played an excerpt alone.

Occasionally, orchestras ask even more of their auditioners, such as having string players play in quartets or perform with the full orchestra. Former L.A. Philharmonic music directors Zubin Mehta and Carlo Maria Giulini (and Previn, too) have all asked people to perform with the orchestra but only rarely. “It’s a little unwieldy to do,” says Previn, “but in a perfect world it would be the way to do it. If you have someone about to audition for a principal chair (the first chair in a section), it doesn’t prove that much out on stage alone. It has to do with how he or she would sound within the orchestra.”

Philharmonic principal trombonist Ralph Sauer, another audition committee member, couldn’t agree more. When Sauer was named a finalist for his job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic 15 years ago, he played that evening with the orchestra at a public performance. The orchestra brought him back two months later to play a solo audition plus a week of concerts. After that, they finally offered him the job.

“That was an extremely thorough audition compared to what we do now, where we listen to someone play for 10 or 15 minutes and then offer him a job,” says Sauer. “There may be a happy balance between the two.”

Whittling the Odds

Is the process fair? “Yes and no,” responds chairman Socher. “I don’t think any audition necessarily picks the best person for a position. They will pick the best person able to win an audition. Most of the time, those overlap. But sometimes it doesn’t happen that way.”

To whittle the odds, musicians prepare quite strenuously. Orchestra members and other teachers coach their private students as well as their university classes, and USC adjunct professor Decker has prepared interactive videotapes to teach audition skills. Erica Sharp, formerly a violinist with the San Francisco Symphony, has sold about 1,500 copies of her 1985 book, “How to Get an Orchestra Job . . . and Keep It.”

Nerves are also a factor. It is not unusual to see hands shake as musicians pack and unpack their instruments and line up their music on music stands. Some people clearly perform poorly under pressure, and articles in music journals suggest relaxation tapes along with intense rehearsals.

All those hours, all that emotion can affect a decision some judges say they make almost instantaneously. “Friends used to tell me they could tell in the first few measures of listening to a candidate whether they were interested or not,” says Marshall Hutchison, a string bass player with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. “I thought that was being awfully critical, but after sitting on a committee, I discovered that’s true.”

The news isn’t always pleasant. “You get really surprised at some of the things that come out of the auditionees--wrong styles, wrong rhythm, wrong keys, even sometimes, wrong transpositions,” says Philharmonic principal horn player Jerry Folsom, who frequently sat on the San Diego Symphony’s audition committee before coming here. “I think I learned more from sitting on an audition committee than I’d learned in school or from any teacher that I had about how to play auditions.”

Most auditions end with the players never knowing why they weren’t chosen. Houston Symphony cellist Jeffrey Butler, a finalist for positions not just here but in Chicago and Philadelphia as well, recalls that he approached one conductor after a final round “and asked if he had any constructive criticism for me. He just said: ‘No, the other guy was better than you.’ ”

The Many for the Few

Once musicians get jobs at major orchestras like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, few move on. Turnover at major orchestras “is relatively low,” says Lew Waldeck, symphony representative at the American Federation of Musicians in New York.

“That’s one reason that orchestras are of the quality they are. There’s not much place to go, and if you are making a reasonable living, there are the considerations of selling a house, moving your family, and sending your kids to another school. Unless there’s a particular prestige or financial motive, people don’t do it.”

A survey last year by the American Symphony Orchestra League found the average length of tenure for major orchestras ranged from 12 years on keyboard to 19 on percussion. Philharmonic personnel director Bush has no statistics on length of stay here but says if musicians stay five years, they generally stay 25 or 30 years, or until retirement.

The number of vacancies--and, hence, auditions--at major U.S. orchestras varies little from year to year, say experts. Los Angeles usually has one or two openings a year, but may have as many as four or none at all. The prognosis isn’t good for future vacancies either: Nearly half the musicians in major orchestras are between 26 and 40. Just 9% are over 60.

Musicians do leave, of course, not only to retire but to teach, concentrate on careers as soloists or simply have more freedom; a Philadelphia Orchestra cellist came back from sabbatical and decided he prefered free-lancing to the regimented life of the orchestra. Less common is a lateral move like that of 34-year-old Philharmonic violinist Elizabeth Baker, previously with the San Francisco Symphony. “After 10 years in San Francisco, my first job, it was time for a change,” says Baker. “I needed to find new avenues from within and without the orchestra for expressing myself.”

Less fortunate musicians travel the circuit, hoping their money doesn’t run out or their instrument isn’t damaged before they land a job. Often they go back to the same orchestras; Bush estimates a good 25% try again here. It may cost hundreds of dollars a shot, say musicians, but the potential payoff is worth it. (Lum’s salary jumped from $26,000 in Denver to $47,000 here four seasons ago).

Others simply scale back their aspirations. At the next rung, regional orchestras in cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Miami have increased both their proficiency and pay, making them more enticing to people who wouldn’t have given them a second glance just five years ago. The Philharmonic Orchestra of Florida, for instance, now has a base pay of $19,500. About 100 people applied for two horn positions last year, reports horn player Rosemary Estes, adding that both the caliber and quantity of people auditioning have gone up every time they boosted salaries.

Schools keep pouring more and more fish into an already crowded sea. This year, for example, USC alone will graduate 10 violin students with orchestra aspirations. “Many of them will play in metropolitan orchestras that pay a third of their income, teach privately or with a university,” says Paul Ellison, chair of the music school’s string department. “Others will play in middle-ranked orchestras that pay a living wage and receive upwards of half (their income) from that orchestra. Then there will be the lucky ones that land a good orchestra job that pays their living.”

The situation is even worse for wind and brass players. About the same number of wind, brass and string students graduate from conservatories each year, but anybody who’s ever been to a symphony concert knows how few flute, trombone and horn players players there are on stage compared with violinists and cellists.

The result is swarms of applicants for every opening. At the Chicago Symphony, for instance, audition committee chairman David Sanders, a cellist, says 50 to 70 cellists might audition for an opening compared with 130 trombonists. The orchestra received 277 responses to its ad for a second trombone player and 180 when its long time tuba player retired after more than 40 years.

It isn’t a perfect system.

“I’ve been to auditions that were fixed, and I was furious,” says Carolyn Hove, Philharmonic oboist/English horn player. “I spent hundreds of dollars--I think it was $600 just on plane fare--to go to this orchestra, (was there) all day, and this committee didn’t even have the correct excerpts on the stand. The piece of music not only had mistakes in it, but instead of using the part we play in the orchestra, the committee used an edited combination of the flute and oboe parts.”

The Musician’s Union gets individual complaints, says Waldeck, but “the bottom line is how else would you do it?” Answers Previn: “Overall, there is no way to come to a fair decision as to replacements in an orchestra without the audition system.”

Musicians would like standardized repertoire so they wouldn’t have to learn whole new passages for each audition, and there have indeed been attempts to streamline the procedure. Back in 1981, horn player Decker and others at USC set up International Video Audition Service to store musicians’ videotapes at assorted regional centers for orchestras to come and review. The service was demonstrated to various professional groups, says Decker, but orchestras didn’t pick up on it.

They also rejected a second USC idea for a national bank of audio auditions in Washington. “It became too massive for them to even contemplate,” says Decker. “I think I was a little too far ahead of time on that. I’ve put it on the back burner until I get more interest in it.”

Meanwhile, it’s survival of the fittest in the orchestra world. “We aren’t wolves waiting for a sheep,” argues Lum. “It’s always tough to get over nerves, and there are 10 million things that can go wrong. We don’t know on the committee if somebody is sick or just replaced a broken string. We go on what we hear. Some people can put everything aside and just knock you out. And that’s what we’re all waiting for.”

Editorial librarian Tom Lutgen assisted with the research in this article.