Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Not quite engineering, but related:

Professional orchestras have auditions, where you will perform a piece from the solo repertoire in front of the head of the section you are auditioning for, and a few other key staff (e.g. [1]). Some auditions will include orchestral parts, and you can buy books of famous solos for most instruments.

This repertoire has little in common with the kind of playing you will be paid for, other than as a pure display of technical ability (just like whiteboarding). For example, it is relatively poor as a gauge of the ability to play with others (accompanists follow you, not the other way around), or of your fitting in with the rest of your section.

Even on a technical level, performing a showy piece well in the few minutes of the audition does not mean you have the stamina to sustain this playing through four hours of Wagner.

[1] "The jury consists of 25 members of the orchestra: two of four concertmasters, the principals, the VPO chairman and managing director, five musicians of the relevant orchestra section, two staff council members from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, and a representative of the Vienna State Opera’s management." - http://web.archive.org/web/20141203022823/http://slippedisc....

When auditioning, would the applicant know which pieces of music they will be required to perform beforehand? I am assuming that they do, which would make it very different from 'whiteboarding' from a software engineering interview.

In software engineering interviews, most of the time the interviewer will try to have prepared questions that the interviewee has NOT seen before. To make it more like an audition, the questions would need to be provided beforehand so that the interviewee could practice them.

It's not unusual for auditions to music schools to include either 'prima vista' - where you play from the sheet - or 'secunda vista' - where you get a few minutes of prep time.

I auditioned at a number of schools and prima vista was the only thing.

At a few of the auditions they would interrupt you if it appeared that you knew the piece and give you something else.

Honestly rather annoying. Even though I entered teaching, I did a lot of time in the pit and sight reading was never a skill that was needed. I can understand the need to weed out people with no/basic reading skills, but the idea that you need to be high-level fluency (particularly with oddly notated pieces!) is nonsense.

The worst part was that most students just gamed it. They would purposely ritard some part just to make it look like they weren't familiar with a piece they could play blindfolded. The net result is that the school I ended up selecting had a number of non-fluent readers that wasted everyone's time at some point because they were so slow!

/rant

Yes and no. Usually you can play what you like and project a certain impression (e.g. last movement of Sea Eagle [1] if wanting to show brilliance, a Mozart concerto [2] if wanting to play it safe). This is similar to showing your open source work or the solution of a take home assignment.

They will then ask you to sight read or play through famous repertoire (e.g. Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony 2nd movement horn solo [3]).

This is true whiteboarding in the sense that in theory, you might not have seen it before, but a professional (or a well prepared student) will know most of the things that can be asked, just as inverting a binary tree is one of many probable whiteboard problems an engineer who knows the game will pick up in Gayle McDowell's book or whatever.

And that's part of the game, one that older engineers don't need to play anymore, which is why they have problems at the US border, whereas older musicians must continue proving themselves as their work has a physical component that unfortunately must be demonstrated throughout their professional life.

Edit: this captures the spirit of the thing quite well, spot the parallels with an engineering interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdAnogOKR0I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2kIVSP5yw&t=8m

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XELNRsN3Jx8

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEbO80q66ak&t=1m12s

I was just reading along here, and thinking that I’d much rather whiteboard for the rest of my life than ever take another orchestral audition, although each of these practices is only loosely related to what you will do on the job itself. I recently switched to software development from a professional career in classical and jazz music. Here’s the view from the performance hall: A top five orchestral audition (the ones that pay a sort of "living wage") comes around 2-4 times a year these days, if you’re very lucky. Typically, around 200 players of that instrument apply for this rare opportunity, and they come from all over the world- language is no barrier-we welcome international competition, and they will have no problem working here if not from the USA. Conversely, Americans can’t really audition in the EU, with rare exceptions for principals and special situations. There are no even slightly weak players anymore; everyone at the audition has a list of around 20- 30 complete symphonic pieces (we don’t get these from books- we buy the complete scores, and are prepared with pieces not on this list— we have to take the other 2 that year, remember.) rock solid memorized, along with at least two of the required/allowed concertos, a Bach Suite, and possibly some longer solos that come up in the orch. repertoire. Each piece is around 15-20 pages long, and represents tricky “algorithms" in performance technique. (think of it like this- one might be: “performing Dijkstra’s algorithm in the manner of a Shakespeare monologue, but in his accent, using his exact vocal inflections, breathing points, and slang ornaments to show you understand the linguistic trends of his time and heritage-but yelling it from a stage on demand through a fussy megaphone prone to glitch, while evoking the feeling of a whisper in an office”, and that would be one of 20) There is always sight reading at major orchestral auditions— I never took one that didn’t have it. Every single player at the audition is a graduate of Juilliard (or another one of the top 5 private conservatory programs in the US) and the age range is from about 20-50 because there are no jobs. (think the top 5 CS grads of Stanford, MIT, etc… dating back to the 90s) We have all known one another since childhood, because it takes that long to learn the required repertoire and technique. At the audition, zero-1 mistakes are allowed, because there is no other way to cut people from rounds- everyone is prepared to an Olympic level, and many are on beta-blockers or complex drug cocktails so they can handle the pressure of doing this several times a year. This has all been the case since the early 90s. Younger auditioners who don’t already play in major orchestras (yes, these players are competing too, so think- top professor in CS/AI at Stanford against you at the whiteboard) must put in 4-7 hours every day for 5-7 months before the audition (players know it will come up before it is announced and practice old lists- like for the MET Orchestra or others). In addition to this, a string player can not compete acoustically in a hall with colleagues who play Strads on an instrument that costs less than $30,000. (this has nothing to do with their technique) To think that someone could win one of these with just an undergrad degree is ludicrous. Orchestral rep is not really covered in this fashion in undergraduate work. In addition, the orchestra often selects no one at all from these highly qualified people, each of whom paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for three nights, not to mention a $100 set of strings a bow rehair, and perhaps a $200 instrument adjustment, and perhaps a “lesson” with a member of the section- also $120-200. Taking a single audition is very, very expensive. Auditions at lesser orchestras that do not pay a living wage often have much longer repertoire lists and demands (insecurity with their status/ignorance about what separates the wheat from the chaff), but one still has to fly/hotel there. All that said, orchestra auditions didn’t used to be like this. They started out in the 40s and 50s resembling more of a whiteboard kind of a thing. Just saying— we need to think about where this might be going one day...

Thanks for sharing your experience. As a bad amateur musician, I've wondered about what it's actually like to pursue a career in music. It's sad that the odds seem to be highly stacked against people who want play classical and/or jazz music professionally.

I live in Pittsburgh where we have a wonderful orchestra. The musicians went on strike this season because their compensation was going to be significantly reduced (after already having suffered cuts recently). I wish I knew what to do to convey a love of this music to others, such that there could be more financial support for orchestras. It seems like the supply of talented musicians far exceeds the demand.

Also, since you're a fan of jazz, I was blessed to hear what would become Phil Wood's last concert. He played here in Pittsburgh while on oxygen -- he called it his "amplifier". Members of the Pittsburgh Symphony joined him as he played selections from "Charlie Parker with Strings". Besides the fact that every solo he played was perfect, he ended the show by telling the story of his musical career (and also, to the surprise of all gathered, announced his retirement from music). He passed away only a few weeks later.

I hope that we can find a way to not only maintain but to expand the richness of these musical genres for future generations. But with the challenges that you've described, I fear that many musicians will not be able to take part of it.

I've heard about the similarity between orchestral auditions and whiteboard interviews before. As someone who has prepared for whiteboarding interviews at a Big Five firm, I'm fascinated by the comparison. For a while I couldn't figure out how the similarity arose. Today it occurred to me that while in classical music the crisis was caused by the maxing out of demand, in software engineering perhaps it's the rapid growth in supply. By either mechanism you have a slots-to-candidates ratio crisis.

There's a significant difference between musical performance and composition (improvisation combining the two). I would argue that composition is closer to programming than performance, but overall it's a bit apples to oranges. Music is a unique thing.

In front of that whiteboard you have to perform with all that that entails, but you also have to compose.

Yes, so do cooks at crappy dinners and bars. This audition is also often unpaid, sometimes called a "working interview". I've known people who have gone through this in the last few years for jobs making just above minimum wage.

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