So, yeah, it’s been over a year since I last posted here. That’s stupid, but I guess also that’s life.
This post announces another kind of stupidity that is life—the life of a musician, anyway.
I’m going to take another audition. This time it is for a section position in the Grant Park Symphony, Chicago’s summer orchestra and a plum gig for many musicians.
It’s probably not such a plum for someone who works a full-time job to support his family and such because what does it mean if I win the spot? I take all my Paid Time Off and then some in order to rehearse and perform every day for ten weeks? Crazy talk.
But here I am, going at it. All these excerpts . . . they feel so familiar. It’s a cliché to say “like old friends,” but they kind of are. In revisiting them I can sense how I have improved over the years. Fingerings that are familiar, and those that now seem old, replaced by new intuition. Bowings that had meaning and new ideas that have fresh feeling in them.
It’s kind of exciting, kind of fun.
Honestly, what I’m doing right now is warming up to decide if I am actually going to take the audition. The deadline for submitting an application is early March. So I have a few weeks to brush the dust off the Zimmerman books and see if I feel confident enough. If I do, I’ll submit my application and then the auditions are at the end of March.
And right now, this is feeling fun. Wish me luck.
Tags: audition