As a musician just starting to take auditions or as someone who hasn’t landed a job yet, I feel that it could be helpful information to an audition candidate if they knew how many people were auto-advanced to a semi or final round. Orchestras have good reasons to advance highly qualified musicians to semi or final rounds but this information isn’t often available in audition postings.
If you are making a decision to take an audition that could cost you $500-1000+ in travel expenses it would be valuable information to have when making the decision. It feels as if when there are many candidates who are auto advanced it makes your chances of advancing that much lower. You may decide to pass on an audition with 10 people auto advanced and dedicate your preparation to an audition where there are less or no auto advances.
I notice that there is a general feeling of discontent when someone who is auto advanced to a semi or final round wins the audition-especially if there is no screen up. I think this could be amended by announcing to audition candidates from the start that there are x number of auto advanced candidates.
Thoughts?
it is a fact that committee members (or whole committees) will sometimes have preferred candidates going in. It's also a fact that it's not uncommon for an audition to advance zero (0) people out of prelims/semis with dozens if not hundreds of applicants and then have a few people auto advance to finals. sometimes there are people auditioning who have played for the orchestra for many years and have the support of the section going into the audition. It's just human nature.
it blows that other people auditioning don't know this going in. you don't know if a principal player's daughter is auditioning. you don't know if, even though there are five openings, the CEO/Music Director/whatever has said to only fill one position for financial reasons.
I don't think an orchestra would ever disclose this information, but they can and should mandate screens through finals, require that positions get filled within a certain time-frame, and have explicit policies that are consistently applied about who gets auto-advanced (and not delegate the rules to the whims of section leaders or music directors).
there are many ways the process is unfair. those of us who are tenured in orchestras have a responsibility to look out for auditioning musicians and not pretend like the system is fair when it immiserates and impoverishes those who seek to succeed in it.
It is not useful information to disclose. As redacted has said, all auditions are run with the best of intentions, according to the rules laid out in the collective agreement. Candidates are advanced because their playing is already known, not because they are preferred. This is a time saver. If you are just starting, your playing will not be known, so you will not be advanced. In the end, having to play a prelim or not will not affect the outcome. It is your preparation that will have the biggest effect on the outcome. If an additional 3-5 excerpts will cause you to lose, you were not going to win anyway. If you are looking for information to help you decide if you should attend or not, check out the bargaining agreement to see if the rules seem fair to you. Not auditioning is the best way to guarantee you won’t get the gig.
While I totally understand your point, and have felt the struggle of applying to auditions where others are pre-advanced, I don’t think anyone should get their hopes up that we’ll see professional orchestras ever adopt this policy. Despite how it may seem from the outside at times, I feel like the vast majority of auditions are run with the best of intentions, even when there are candidates pre-advanced. The orchestra ultimately wants to have the highest possible number of extremely qualified candidates apply and attend their auditions. This gives them the best chance at hiring an excellent artist for their ensemble. By advertising any information that would dissuade people from applying, they would be diminishing their own chances of a successful process - which they certainly will not want to do. This is true in virtually ANY industry’s hiring systems, not just orchestral performance.
My recommendation is to not think much at all about how many pre-advanced candidates there might be at an audition you want to take. It doesn’t impact your preparation in the slightest. There is a lot about the audition process you can’t control, so just worry about the part you can control - your own playing.