The Audition.

1. Warm up in wonderfully cozy heated room. Choose reed that is both easy to blow against and articulate with while still sounding resonant and clear.

2. Walk into audition room that is inevitably 20 degrees colder than warm-up room. Blow a few notes into your horn to confirm that, yes, your reed has proceeded to freak out about the temperature change and no longer has any resonance.

3. Play the first audition piece, an etude in the key of Db, at least 10 clicks faster on the metronome than you had prepared. Proceed to curse your brains out (mentally) as both your pinkies refuse to allign themselves with the rest of your fingers, as well as your tongue, thereby causing every other note in this etude to be out of time.

4. Move on to the orchestral excerpt, Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony. Redeem yourself by playing the brisk solo with great gusto and playfulness. Finish the excerpt with an increased sense of confidence.

5. Proceed to take the allotted minute given to silently look over the ridiculously atonal and nonsensical sight-reading piece.

6. While looking over the sight-reading, have the silence broken by one of the judging members behind the screen saying, "Uh...can you finish the Mendelssohn?"

7. Proceed to pee in your pants slightly. Realize in a split-second that you, indeed, did not finish the excerpt and, instead, had the second most gigantic* performance-related brain fart in your entire life and left the last two lines out for no apparent reason.

8. Play the remaining two lines of the orchestral excerpt perfectly as your brain instinctively blacked out and could not think of any ways to sabotage your playing, as per the norm.

9. Play the sight-reading piece, complete with the final note replace by the most gloriously resonant squeak ever in the history of mankind.

10. 30 minutes later, learn that you have won the principal chair.

The End.


* The absolute most gigantic performance-related brain fart I ever made was realizing halfway through the first page of a twenty-minute long concerto during a solo recital in my first year of graduate school that I had walked out onstage without my neckstrap, thereby guaranteeing that my wrists would lock up within the next two minutes and I would have to suffer through the remaining 17 minutes of the concerto with about 50% functionality of my entire lower arm region. Whoops.