Audition and Subtraction

School is out, and music students, like many recent college graduates, are looking for jobs. The opportunities are few.

Fortunately, not all of the 82,795 music majors currently enrolled in U.S. colleges and conservatories want to play in orchestras. Only about 1,500 openings occur each year in the 6,500 full-time American orchestras (with budgets of $800,000 or more), according to the American Symphony Orchestra League in Washington.

“I have a friend in the Houston Symphony who had about 50 auditions before he got a job,” said one of the Pacific Symphony’s chosen few, violinist David Brubaker. “That’s a lot of plane ticket fares.”

Violinist Anait Seiranian, another Pacific hire who got the job after her “first big audition,” heard a similar story from a new colleague. “One person told me that was his 17th audition,” she said.

Brubaker, 26, and Seiranian, 23, are two of the six musicians who beat out more than 100 candidates in May to join the Pacific roster. (See related story, F29). They will perform with Orange County’s major resident orchestra for the first time on Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

Both violinists grew up in musical families. Brubaker’s parents and three older siblings are all professional musicians. Seiranian’s father, a violinist, and her mother, a pianist, teach at the conservatory in her native Armenia. An older sister is a chorale director.

Brubaker has been playing professionally since high school. “Basically, I played everywhere I went,” he said. “That’s how I made my living.” He studied violin at Washington University in Seattle, joined the Grand Rapids Symphony in Michigan for a year, moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of Music, and now is completing a master’s degree at Rice University in Houston.

“There are a couple of things I need to finish up--a recital and a class,” he said, speaking by phone from Houston. “I won’t really graduate until next June. I probably won’t move [to Orange County] until October.”

Seiranian came to the United States four years ago to study violin at Duquense University in Pittsburgh. Two years later she transferred to USC, where she hopes to finish a master’s next year. But until recently she had not been grooming herself for the special demands of orchestra work.

“My experience was different,” she said, speaking from her Glendale home. “In Russian schools, you learn to be a soloist or a chamber music player, not so much an orchestra player.

“My first years here were very difficult, catching up. I went to a couple of summer music festivals, Tanglewood and the Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. That helped a lot.”

Brubaker won the fifth chair; Seiranian, the ninth. Such good positions guarantee they will play all the classical, family and pops concerts as well as the ballet events. Their annual pay, according to Louis G. Spisto, executive director of the orchestra, will be in the $20,000-to-$25,000 range. The flexible schedule allows them to moonlight.

“It will be just be enough to pay the rent,” Brubaker said. “And pay my violin expenses. I’m buying a violin and have to make payments on that. But I’m excited about going to this orchestra. It’s not totally full time, and I’ll have time to explore other things. I’ve always been interested in doing jazz. I dabble in it. I’ll experiment with that. Also, I hope to get work in L.A.”

Brubaker and Seiranian agreed that the auditions, given from behind a wooden screen to judges who know candidates only by a number, were tough but fair. The finals alone lasted eight hours.

“It can be really scary because you’re playing not to people but to this wooden panel,” Brubaker said. “There are people on the other side. I kept my wits. Sometimes you just break down.”

Said Seiranian: “You’re totally nervous.”

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The audition committee often calls back candidates to play again. “I had to play three separate times, four excerpts each time,” Brubaker said. Seiranian played once in the prelims and twice in the finals.

Then they had to wait until everyone finished for the results. “That part got people really edgy,” Brubaker said. “We had to sit around just waiting for them to give us some information, either to get rid of us or to play again. Every time the guy walked in the door, everybody just jumped.”

Seiranian also felt the tension. “People would just leave without knowing the results. They didn’t want to wait around. I geared myself up psychologically. That’s the most difficult part. You just concentrate really hard a half hour before the audition. Then you do the best you can.”

Coping mechanisms vary among the musicians.

“Some people take the attitude that they don’t care,” Brubaker said. “That can help them. The best attitude, I think, is to go there and just play well so that whatever [the judges] say doesn’t matter so much, even though it does.

“It’s hard. When you play a lot of auditions and you don’t get anywhere, that can be really hard. People don’t know how close they are to actually getting the job. They don’t get feedback. I didn’t ask for any [here] because I got the job. My last audition, I asked, but they said, ‘We don’t do that here.’ ” Brubaker has auditioned “maybe six times since 1991” while working toward his degree.

The whole process, he said, confirmed what a teacher once told him: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” with a new emphasis on competition.

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Music schools have been trying to adapt to that reality, taking a more vocational tack.

“In the past five years, schools have been changing fast,” Brubaker said. “They’re opening up orchestral programs all over the place now. That’s what you concentrate on now, studying for auditions, which is not the best thing for people. They end up narrowing themselves down instead of broadening their horizons. It’s important to know how to play an audition well, but to just concentrate on just that is detrimental.”

USC has such a program, Seiranian said. “You learn the orchestra excerpts [required for auditions],” she said. “You play them, you play them through every week. You get the feeling of an audition. You play in master class. I was really prepared for that. My teachers at school always talked about it. So people are optimistic about getting jobs.”