Let There Be Drums!
I’m a music geek, so this post from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s blog was pretty much guaranteed to catch my attention. I guarantee you won’t read something like it on just any blog:
Monday, March 16 we held twelve hours of Timpani / Percussion auditions and I am happy to say that I survived. Maya and I started the day at 7:30 to set up and we actually had the first candidate arrive at 8:00am, an hour and a half before their audition time. This was fine because I had thought this would set us up for a very smooth day. What I did not factor in however was how long it took to move each set (4) of timpani in and out of the audition room.
Can you imagine sitting through twelve hours of tympani? I love classical music, especially big percussion pieces, and I can’t imagine the size of the headache I’d have after half that. The kicker of the piece, though, wasn’t the length of the auditions but the surprise manual labor involved. As you’ll find as you read on, many of the tympani players also brought their own drums, so there was a lot of moving of large drums in and out of the audition room. So, this poor lady not only had to sit through booming drums all day, but only found respite when it came time to haul the big drums in and out of the audition room.
That leads me to ask a few questions:
1) What on the world did she do to get put on tympani audition detail?
2) What pieces would they use for the audition?
3) Do they give extra points if the percussionist spins his sticks like Tommy Lee in the middle of “Rite of Spring”?
If the answer to the third question is “yes” then the LACO is easily the coolest orchestra on the planet.
(Via @LaceyH, devoted LACO fan and, I believe, publicist)
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