I normally like to start my day with some ppp cymbal crash practice to avoid waking up the neighbor's baby. Then after the crying starts (that's how I know I'm really in the swing of things) I move to the bass drum. That insures I'm actually hearing crying and not just the sweet sweet overtones of my cymbals (please see: Facebook.com timpani percussion swap shop, and buy some of my cymbals)
RIGHT.
So this morning I decided to start off with writing. I doubt any of my blog posts will make it into my dissertation, but they will probably be better off for my widespread fame, which is after all, how you get the gig. What gig? THE gig. You know what I'm talking about.
I thought about singling out particular characters here -- like get on soapy sudsy box and try to give a kitten a bath while speaking out about XYZ percussionist --- but that's really mean, not a great professional move, and most of all, I was thinking how it would feel if someone else did that to me. I would not like it very much, I don't think.
My main hangup is with the shameless self-promotion and tons of drivel that people build their careers on. For this, I would like to just target one person in particular: Kalithump Vortren. I think Vortren will support this move because it brings attention to his cause - so in a true Trumpian manner, this is good press. You could have even joined him for an audition hackathon. If you can hack you probably don't need to audition though, now do you!?
I'm not really qualified to comment on this thing, but let's just have a look.
- Vortren you sweet beautiful beautiful man, who took your head shots? I probably can't afford them, but wow you look good.
- Someone pointed out to me yesterday Vortren took auditions: the New York City Philharmonia and the old Florida Philharmonic (palm trees, anyone?) -- Wouldn't it be better to talk to people who've taken 400 auditions and not "won" any of them?
.........
I will now tell you how I STOOD OUT in the auditions I took.
I must have STOOD OUT at the Juilliard placement audition I took in 2000. The great late Roland Kohloff wrote in my comments: "Is this a joke? Is this the proctor or one of our percussion students?" --- That's a great audition, no? I stood out so much with my playing (behind a screen) they weren't sure if it was a percussion student or a bassoonist. Is this not what all great artists strive for? Most of the time I spend lots of money to hear a concert I have no idea if the musicians are trained or just passing the time before drinks at the bar - but I DO know they're great artists, right?! So when I read Mr. Kohloff's comments I knew I was in the wrong place. I thought I was a percussion major, but obviously I didn't sound like it. This will be addressed in a future blog entry titled: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE, especially to young extremely impressionable people, PLEASE. And to think they say it's better not to title the thing until you're near completion.
I also somehow ended up with all "0" ratings at Berklee (out of 8). That's great!! If I had a mediocre score I might have felt like someone with no talent or personality - but ALL ZEROS! How was that even possible?! I think it was a technicality, like whatever I auditioned with didn't register in their system as "music," but I maintained the 0's throughout my years there and even graduated as a big 0. YES! Looking back, I think it may have taken some skill to avoid re-auditioning and just sucking at playing a blues or something. This experience of getting 0's was directly related to my decision to play the xylophone on the subway where the trains were so loud nobody would actually have to hear my unintelligible "ideas" or nonsensical "lines" or whatever the heck Berklee evaluates people on in their playing. It must not be speed as I could always play really fast (almost never serving "the music").
Other ways to STAND OUT: WEAR SOMETHING CRAZY. I loved hearing from Nathan Siegel who previously thought I just sold cymbals on Facebook that he'd seen this photo in the 8th grade, and just now put it together who I was. I of course took the opportunity to promote the xylophone workshop at University of Delaware this summer on August 1-5, to which you should all consider attending. We don't talk about auditions really, except I will probably tell a story about Harry Breuer and Porgy and Bess and it will have absolutely nothing to do with auditions but people will immediately get nervous about the thought of missing a note and what it would be like to ......IS THIS A BASSOONIST?!
Right -- so wear something crazy. I've taken a lot of auditions dressed as a skunk (fewer as a blue monster) and they all tend to be pretty fun. WHY? Because I'm DRESSED AS A SKUNK. I imagine if I had a skunk suit during my freshman placement audition at Juilliard then I would have played better or at least had more fun. I did not. I think I probably wore khakis and a worn polo or button down or some blue shirt I got from my brother. I certainly didn't look anywhere near as handsome as K.Vortren('s headshot), that's for sure. It was behind a screen but all I remember is what the faculty wrote about my playing - and I knew I never wanted to experience that again (I may suggest that being a masochistic asshole is a good character trait to have if you plan on doing a lot of that sort of thing).
Lastly -- about teaching and auditions and "winning." Something to consider:
Your professor "won" an audition. Hopefully they "lost" SOME auditions, too! A lot of fancy-pants winners win everything. I don't actually know much about Kalithump Vortren but I'm assuming he lost some auditions which would help him be an expert on the subject, but he won the Philharmonia audition pretty early on in his hopefully very-long career. That gives him a credential to most likely TEACH and PREACH (or you can just get on blogger and say whatever the $*#! you want like this and hope nobody screenshots it so when you want to delete it...well..maybe I should just snapchat blog, can one do that?) --- check it out - there's no way all Vortren's students are going to have the success rate he has had. Wait, this is getting too personal. Let's make it more general: There's no way a large group of people (students) will have the same exact type of success that their guru/teacher/knowitallmentor will have.
The guru/teacher could stand to have enough experience though to know there's more than "getting the job." Very seldom do people talk about "the job" itself. Or if they do it's a sort of tangential thing....why? NOBODY REALLY CARES ABOUT YOUR JOB!!!!! Seriously. Maybe you should care about your family and friends' jobs (I find myself asking friends who have jobs: "how is work?") - but seriously -- can you imagine listening to ANYONE else RAMBLE on and on about their JOB?!? No. it's absurd, and hopefully they're too busy DOING their job to talk about it. It's more common to talk about "getting the gig" because when you're unemployed you're a nuisance to society, right? Your parents are worried they spent all this money on you for nothing, you have a ton of time on your hands because you don't have a job or place to be, you have no money, you start having to imagine what it must be like to have a house in New Jersey and gigantic triangle collection.....oh wait, maybe you already have a gigantic triangle collection because you needed these things to "get the gig." (Two Sabian B8 4" triangle still available!)
Sometimes high school students ask me for recommendations of where to go to school. Can someone tell me where the most losing faculty is still somehow employed? That'd be the place.
Is anyone other than Brian going to buy these cymbals? I'll give you a good deal.
www.jonathan-singer.com
RIGHT.
So this morning I decided to start off with writing. I doubt any of my blog posts will make it into my dissertation, but they will probably be better off for my widespread fame, which is after all, how you get the gig. What gig? THE gig. You know what I'm talking about.
I thought about singling out particular characters here -- like get on soapy sudsy box and try to give a kitten a bath while speaking out about XYZ percussionist --- but that's really mean, not a great professional move, and most of all, I was thinking how it would feel if someone else did that to me. I would not like it very much, I don't think.
My main hangup is with the shameless self-promotion and tons of drivel that people build their careers on. For this, I would like to just target one person in particular: Kalithump Vortren. I think Vortren will support this move because it brings attention to his cause - so in a true Trumpian manner, this is good press. You could have even joined him for an audition hackathon. If you can hack you probably don't need to audition though, now do you!?
I'm not really qualified to comment on this thing, but let's just have a look.
- Vortren you sweet beautiful beautiful man, who took your head shots? I probably can't afford them, but wow you look good.
- Someone pointed out to me yesterday Vortren took auditions: the New York City Philharmonia and the old Florida Philharmonic (palm trees, anyone?) -- Wouldn't it be better to talk to people who've taken 400 auditions and not "won" any of them?
.........I will now tell you how I STOOD OUT in the auditions I took.
I must have STOOD OUT at the Juilliard placement audition I took in 2000. The great late Roland Kohloff wrote in my comments: "Is this a joke? Is this the proctor or one of our percussion students?" --- That's a great audition, no? I stood out so much with my playing (behind a screen) they weren't sure if it was a percussion student or a bassoonist. Is this not what all great artists strive for? Most of the time I spend lots of money to hear a concert I have no idea if the musicians are trained or just passing the time before drinks at the bar - but I DO know they're great artists, right?! So when I read Mr. Kohloff's comments I knew I was in the wrong place. I thought I was a percussion major, but obviously I didn't sound like it. This will be addressed in a future blog entry titled: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE, especially to young extremely impressionable people, PLEASE. And to think they say it's better not to title the thing until you're near completion.
I also somehow ended up with all "0" ratings at Berklee (out of 8). That's great!! If I had a mediocre score I might have felt like someone with no talent or personality - but ALL ZEROS! How was that even possible?! I think it was a technicality, like whatever I auditioned with didn't register in their system as "music," but I maintained the 0's throughout my years there and even graduated as a big 0. YES! Looking back, I think it may have taken some skill to avoid re-auditioning and just sucking at playing a blues or something. This experience of getting 0's was directly related to my decision to play the xylophone on the subway where the trains were so loud nobody would actually have to hear my unintelligible "ideas" or nonsensical "lines" or whatever the heck Berklee evaluates people on in their playing. It must not be speed as I could always play really fast (almost never serving "the music").
Other ways to STAND OUT: WEAR SOMETHING CRAZY. I loved hearing from Nathan Siegel who previously thought I just sold cymbals on Facebook that he'd seen this photo in the 8th grade, and just now put it together who I was. I of course took the opportunity to promote the xylophone workshop at University of Delaware this summer on August 1-5, to which you should all consider attending. We don't talk about auditions really, except I will probably tell a story about Harry Breuer and Porgy and Bess and it will have absolutely nothing to do with auditions but people will immediately get nervous about the thought of missing a note and what it would be like to ......IS THIS A BASSOONIST?!
Right -- so wear something crazy. I've taken a lot of auditions dressed as a skunk (fewer as a blue monster) and they all tend to be pretty fun. WHY? Because I'm DRESSED AS A SKUNK. I imagine if I had a skunk suit during my freshman placement audition at Juilliard then I would have played better or at least had more fun. I did not. I think I probably wore khakis and a worn polo or button down or some blue shirt I got from my brother. I certainly didn't look anywhere near as handsome as K.Vortren('s headshot), that's for sure. It was behind a screen but all I remember is what the faculty wrote about my playing - and I knew I never wanted to experience that again (I may suggest that being a masochistic asshole is a good character trait to have if you plan on doing a lot of that sort of thing).
Lastly -- about teaching and auditions and "winning." Something to consider:
Your professor "won" an audition. Hopefully they "lost" SOME auditions, too! A lot of fancy-pants winners win everything. I don't actually know much about Kalithump Vortren but I'm assuming he lost some auditions which would help him be an expert on the subject, but he won the Philharmonia audition pretty early on in his hopefully very-long career. That gives him a credential to most likely TEACH and PREACH (or you can just get on blogger and say whatever the $*#! you want like this and hope nobody screenshots it so when you want to delete it...well..maybe I should just snapchat blog, can one do that?) --- check it out - there's no way all Vortren's students are going to have the success rate he has had. Wait, this is getting too personal. Let's make it more general: There's no way a large group of people (students) will have the same exact type of success that their guru/teacher/knowitallmentor will have.
The guru/teacher could stand to have enough experience though to know there's more than "getting the job." Very seldom do people talk about "the job" itself. Or if they do it's a sort of tangential thing....why? NOBODY REALLY CARES ABOUT YOUR JOB!!!!! Seriously. Maybe you should care about your family and friends' jobs (I find myself asking friends who have jobs: "how is work?") - but seriously -- can you imagine listening to ANYONE else RAMBLE on and on about their JOB?!? No. it's absurd, and hopefully they're too busy DOING their job to talk about it. It's more common to talk about "getting the gig" because when you're unemployed you're a nuisance to society, right? Your parents are worried they spent all this money on you for nothing, you have a ton of time on your hands because you don't have a job or place to be, you have no money, you start having to imagine what it must be like to have a house in New Jersey and gigantic triangle collection.....oh wait, maybe you already have a gigantic triangle collection because you needed these things to "get the gig." (Two Sabian B8 4" triangle still available!)
Sometimes high school students ask me for recommendations of where to go to school. Can someone tell me where the most losing faculty is still somehow employed? That'd be the place.
Is anyone other than Brian going to buy these cymbals? I'll give you a good deal.
www.jonathan-singer.com
