Julia Pyke (Principal of Spokane Symphony)

Two candidates have been offered trials without another public audition.

Congrats to Gracie and shoutout to Connor - he's making finals everywhere!

In addition to distributing opportunities across a lot of different subs, I'll say they primarily seem interested in hiring subs who will likely still apply for a fellowship in future years - it's a recruitment tool for them. If you've stopped applying or have become established in your career already, they're not gonna have you out just so you can have a fun week in Miami, they're gonna call someone who's still a student.

I presume it would be higher for other instruments, but Calgary is very isolated and traveling to auditions is just a lot harder and more expensive for bassists.

“They only gave a trial to one of the best principal horns in the country, who also happens to have years of experience subbing in their section and fitting into their sound concept - rigged!!!”

Age-related decline of playing ability varies from instrument to instrument, and from person to person. The answer isn't age, it's just how well you play. I'd say a lot of people are playing phenomenally well in their 40s, but that age bracket might just not be dominating the audition circuit because lots of people in their 40s are settled down and don't want to move, especially if they have kids or a spouse's career to accommodate. If you're advancing at auditions and making it to finals often, you're good enough. But "good enough" can still take 10+ auditions to have that lucky day. If you have family to work around, being on the audition grindset for a year or two is just gonna be a much tougher ask than it is for a 20-something with no partner, no kids, no commitments.

They're so low paid because a lot of orchestras simply don't have the donor base (either because of the population of the city in question, or because of an incompetent development team). Whether or not the wage is "livable," if enough musicians continue auditioning for and accepting the positions, the orchestra will continue to be able to operate, and somehow those musicians go on living, whether it's from inheritance, spousal income, other gigs on the side, or simple frugal living. I'm not making any moral judgment here, it just is what it is. Instead of complaining that certain jobs are underpaid just... don't apply for those jobs? If others decide that the Victoria Symphony pays enough, good for them. If you prefer to make more money, you can feel free to go do so, either as a musician or by going into another field. The people who choose to audition for and accept positions with Victoria Symphony are adults who can be trusted to be responsible for their own life choices.

There literally are tons of rich musicians. It seems kind of delusional to imagine otherwise if you've been to any prestigious festival or conservatory. It's a very appealing career path for someone coming from wealth, since their parents can afford them the best training and equipment from a young age, severely reducing the risk of failure, and it offers respectable social status and an abundance of free time relative to a typical 40-hour-a-week desk job. Sure, it's arbitrary and unfair, but it's not helpful to anyone to pretend that our field isn't full of rich kids. Certainly if I were rich and had kids, I'd encourage them to go into something like classical music instead of something lucrative but time-intensive like law or finance or consulting. Why should they toil for 80 hours a week if they don't need the money? Classical music gives the the respectability of having a job, but without eating up half their waking hours. And personally, if I had a big inheritance coming, I'd be much more inclined to audition for relaxed but under-paid jobs in great cities like Victoria, Vancouver, Portland, etc., or settle for freelancing or playing non-lucrative chamber music instead of chasing after auditions. If the money problem were already taken care of by mom and dad, then having a lower status job where the demands of the orchestra are a little less intense seems like a pretty attractive tradeoff. Not to mention with how many Americans threaten to move to Canada around every election season... Seems like pretty fortuitous timing for Canadian orchestras to expect some strong international applicants in the near future.

If you're not coming from wealth: Apply for free/cheap festivals. The more accessible ones include Texas Music Festival, Round Top, NOI, Colorado College Music Festival, Sarasota Music Festival, Festival Napa Valley, NSO SMI (if you're young enough). You can always apply for Aspen and just not go if they don't offer you enough money. You can even tell them outright that you're not willing to pay that much and try to negotiate a better offer—especially if you're also accepted to one of those other festivals. If you don't get into any of those, spend your summer getting lessons with an excellent teacher who you have not regularly studied with before. Ideally a principal player, just because principals hire subs, so this is a good way to start cultivating the roots of a relationship that could get you gigs later. If you're back in your hometown staying with your parents, playing for the local principal player is a great idea because you can (hopefully) stay with your parents for free whenever your hometown orchestra calls. As a freelancer, it's sometimes hard to give up work to take a trip to visit family, so getting paid to visit family is a great arrangement to cultivate. (Maybe also get a part time summer job, but it's hard to have the energy to practice if you're working too much. Something like 30+ hrs/week is probably too much.) Once you've gotten into one of the festivals above, start also applying to a couple of "reach" festivals each year: Music Academy, Tanglewood, Verbier, PMF, NRO... Getting accepted to any of these before you finish school is a major sign that you're on the right track. As you transition from student into professional life, keep in mind that sticking around town during the summer is a great way to start getting your name out there in a freelance scene. Lots of highly-compensated orchestras have summer seasons where many of the regular players take time off, and even many of the other local freelancers also go off to festivals or on vacation, so the summer season is a great time to get your foot in the door (LA, Cleveland, etc.). Even if you're not getting called by the big orchestra in town, random gigs will still come your way where you'll meet other people who can get you more gigs later.

I think there's something to be said for local auditions. It is about keeping musicians within a community where they already have close ties. I think if the norm were for more orchestras to do this, it would be a lot more feasible for people to move to the city they want to live in, build the life they want as a freelancer, and then get "promoted" from substitute to full time when the opportunity arises, all the while getting to live in the place they actually want, where they have friends, family, etc.. It would be much better for musicians' quality of life than the current situation where young and talented people are forced to be itinerant and unmoored, ripping up their social lives and starting from scratch in a new city every couple of years to chase the next opportunity. At the end of the day, whether or not the next timpanist of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic is the most meritorious possible choice doesn't have any real impact on the world. But hyper-individualism, careerism, atomization, and the erosion of social capital is a very real problem in the world (and especially America) that is perpetuated by this hyper-fixation on the meritocracy. Besides, if Fort Wayne held open, national auditions, and hired the most meritorious player possible, they would have far more turnover as tons of those players would use Fort Wayne as a pit stop on the way to something ****** and better. Hiring locally is far more likely to get them someone who is embedded in the community, wants to stay, and saves them from spending way more time and money holding auditions. Hiring lots of temporary hotshot 20-somethings who think staying in Fort Wayne is beneath them would also probably also not be great for cohesion and morale within the orchestra.

1-year

Who even needs a principal horn these days, New York Phil has been blazing a trail for other brave orchestras to remove the position entirely!

This was asst/utility, not associate, correct?

"...the committee just felt that none of the semi-finalists merited consideration..." "...A person's playing is scrutinized every which way before being offered the position..." Obviously, the committee thought that a few of these semi-finalists merited further consideration after the first semi-final. They then continued to scrutinize their playing every which way in more and more "semi-final" rounds, without subjecting auto-advanced finalists to that same degree of scrutiny. /// "If you just think that all auto-advancing should be done away with, then prelims will go on all day, or for multiple days..." There are a lot of worthwhile arguments to be made in favor of auto-advancement, but this is the weakest BS I've ever heard. The highest numbers of auto-advanced candidates I've ever heard of at any audition is somewhere below 20. That's two or three more prelim groups, 2-3 hours, to hear all those candidates. I've attended plenty of auditions where prelims stretched across two days that seemed totally fair and unobjectionable to me. In this case of only having 1 or 2 candidates auto-advanced, hearing them in an earlier round obviously adds even less time to the schedule. /// The matter of the CBA is that it allows the committee to CHOOSE how to run their audition on a case by case basis, and this committee chose to run a horribly unfair audition. The issue in this particular case is not just that candidates were auto-advanced to an un-screened final, but that the committee then went out of their way to hold extra rounds to cut EVERY SINGLE other candidate. If they held a single semi-final and the committee agreed on one hearing that none of those candidates were up to *****, that would look a little sus, but it would at least be believable that if some of those candidates had played better, they could have been given a chance. The fact that some of these candidates evidently played well enough to merit further consideration not once, but TWICE, and then were cut anyway in a THIRD semi-final...? Ridiculous. Absolutely no one is happier with this nonsense than if the orchestra had just announced Jaclyn's appointment out of the blue without an audition. At least that way, candidates wouldn't have wasted their time, effort, and money coming out to an audition where the committee was not interested in giving them a fair hearing. There are tons of horn auditions happening right now. Any candidate who was good enough to advance through the prelim and two out of three(!!!) semi-finals with an orchestra as good as Minnesota is obviously going to be in serious contention for other jobs. One of those people could have instead prepared for (and won!) any number of other auditions this month (Sarasota, Oregon, Atlanta, Louisville, Rochester...) if they hadn't spent their limited resources on this sham.

Regardless of what's in the CBA or what's normal, choosing to continue holding "semi-finals" until everyone is cut is stinky. Especially for a horn audition, where fatigue is a significant limiting factor. Even playing two heavy rounds in a single day will push great horn players to the limit, let alone three. These candidates were invited to spend their money to come out for an audition where they were set up for failure. That is not cool, period. If the horn section wanted to hire Jaclyn, fine, good for them, she's a great player and as far as I'm concerned she deserves a job in a great orchestra. In this case, the CBA is a problem in one of two ways: either the orchestra should be contractually required to hold an audition where auto-advanced candidates compete in a blind round against outsiders, OR the orchestra should be allowed to hire who they want without wasting everyone else's time and money. I don't care which way, but "fairness theater" is not doing anyone any favors.

Yikes 😬

Yeah Vancouver is an amazing city, but the orchestra does not pay well enough for the cost of living.

They've had a large rotating cast of guest principals, I would not read anything more into any of those appearances. They will almost certainly hold another publicly listed audition. They went through a very similar process when trying to hire for principal flute over the last couple seasons.

I think the general rule is that travel is usually covered for separate finals, but not for separate semis. The latter often seems to me to be a way to dissuade applicants who are not auto-advanced.