Waiting in the Vienna airport, it has occurred to me that I haven’t written a blog post in… quite some time. Sorry about that.
Since we last spoke, I won an audition. With the Rhode Island Philharmonic, as 2nd Trumpet. I have also been appointed to the University of Maine-Orono as Assistant Professor of Music. Just yesterday, I met Karl Schagerl in Mank, Lower Austria, and am now a proud brand artist. So, it’s been a big year.
I wanted to touch base about an important lesson I’ve learned today, based on a principle I believe in. That is, merit. In the world of music performance, that often takes the form of auditions. Specifically, blind auditions, against multiple applicants, carried out in as impartial a way as possible.
If you know me, you are currently rolling your eyes. This again. Yes, this again! But allow me to make my case.
Let’s spend a moment deciding what a fair shake looks like. An orchestra advertises an audition, implying that anybody who feels they can do the job can come and play for a reasonable shot to win. People who the orchestra knows personally on an institutional basis either via subbing or acting are often invited to an advanced round as a way to incentivize qualified candidates to audition and sometimes to save them from the intense culling of a first round. To me, that is all fine, as long as the rules are clearly defined and everybody is playing with the same set. As many rounds as possible go by with candidates being anonymous (preferably all of them). Winners are further vetted by trial weeks and/or a robust tenure process.
There are institutional reasons for running an audition this way. Many of the most successful organizations in the world understand the value of having a continuous flow of talent, of introducing new people with new perspectives, in a way that is grounded in merit. I believe that matters just as much in the arts as it does in business. Without contracts administered on the basis of merit, players are instead selected from within the ranks with no objective quality control, incentivized for any number of reasons that may have nothing to do with their playing or leadership abilities. Advancement within the organization becomes a popularity contest, or sometimes Survivor, where the most aggressive, loud-voiced members advance merely because they are the most noticeable. Leaders of successful businesses in competitive fields have written ad nauseam about how this course is usually unsustainable. It does not invite innovation, good ideas, information exchange, or a market for positive traits. In the arts, it engrains problems, making them hard or impossible to fix. People can amass a lot of voice and power on committees that they are not really qualified to wield, and the voices that are qualified or could potentially be qualified are drowned out. Big decisions become egalitarian, which is fine for a community orchestra where nothing is at stake, but very not good for an orchestra that wishes to be professional and to expand their orbit of influence.
I see this playing out in my life, with my orchestras. One of them is very much stuck, I believe because they are struggling to leverage the ability of an organization of diverse minds to make better decisions than an individual is capable of making. That is one of the superpowers of a true committee. On a true committee, there is a mechanism for defeating special interests. No committee member on their own is entirely impartial, but those biases are easier to wash out when candidates need a plurality of votes. Instead, the our committees are deferring to individuals, and any individual is prone to advancing their individual interests. Another orchestra I serve in is doing the opposite: empowering individuals to participate equally in committees, empowering fully blind audition processes, and taking wins seriously. The people who are awarded those contracts are productive and altruistic in committees, and decisions carry the gravity and error correction that many minds are capable of providing. There is collegial respect. That orchestra has been rewarded by these dynamics both on and off stage.
There is one more reason I believe fair auditions are probably the most direct way to solve for success in an orchestra. It is a vernacular that everybody who has participated understands. Winning a reasonably competitive audition requires facility, nuance, control, poise, focus, and dedication. Nobody should be arguing against the value of those things in a group. Is it the only way to get those things? Of course not. But it is a reliable way for an orchestra to get those things. And in fully auditioned ensembles, the contracts are a sacrament that everybody shares. It creates a common language of experience among everyone. At the end of the day, we trust our colleagues more, even when we disagree, because we all participated in the process of accepting them into the tribe.
Please know that I do not believe a fair audition is the ONLY viable way to build a good group, or that someone is not a good musician because they did not win an audition, or that they aren’t good at their job because they didn’t win it in a fair audition. But I see it in a statistical sense. A single non-rational decision does not spell doom, but many of them compound. I know people out there disagree, and that’s fine. I invite discussion in good faith.