Kansas City and the ghosts of auditions past
Let’s get to it in a second. I’m in the middle of the fall concert season, right before the holidays. I’m playing a ton and i’m loving it. I managed to squeeze in a tournament on my off-weekend coming up in December that i’m excited to go to. Currently sitting at 11-15 for the year. Not too shabby and making some real progress mentally and physically. But, as the headline suggests, it’s story time.
During the mid-2010’s, the Kansas City Symphony held no less than a half dozen auditions for various clarinet section positions. Having completed grad school by this point and hitting the audition circuit, I was well aware that this orchestra was in a city with, in no particular order,
A decent salary
Great players
A new, very shiny, very wavy hall. Think Frank Gehry visits the heartland to paint a mental picture.
At the time I was frequently taking auditions. I think I was averaging 5-6 per calendar year for ones where I had to travel more than 200 miles-so packing my bags and flying to MCI when a spot opened was a no-brainer. I also was in a pretty common mindset for recent grads, one in which winning a job was THE goal. Not something that would be nice if it happened, it was me in a mad scramble for a coveted full-time seat in an orchestra and very little else on my mind for my professional goals.
I took this audition 3 different times across the next several years, pretty much any time the 3rd/Bass clarinet chair opened. Three times I got cut after the first round, which sucks. Boo. Chalked it up to experience and moved on.
The next time I was in Kansas City, in August of this year, I didn’t bring my clarinets, or my reeds. I brought my swords.
Donnybrook is an annual HEMA tournament held in the summer by Heartland Hema, a club in the KC metro area. At the encouragement of my good friend Dan, I signed up. And I mean signed up for everything possible-Mixed weapons, Singlestick, Rapier, Smallsword and Longsword. I also did a lot of line judging over the next 3 days and smashed my step count record, at least for being indoors.
I can honestly say I ran the gamut of mindsets during the weekend. Day 1, I didn’t care how I did. I just wanted to have fun and not get injured. Mission accomplished.
Day 2 I was feeling it a bit and Singlestick was first up. For those of you who don’t know, a Singlestick is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a stick with a hardened handle to protect your fist. The midwest has an unusually high concentration of elite stick practitioners, and I had never held one before that day. I got creamed. Holy father of the bride, I got my ass handed to me, by some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.
The rest of the day I loosened up and managed to do pretty well. I found that I love fighting with a smallsword, which is the closest thing to an Olympic fencing foil we have in HEMA. It’s the Eb clarinet of my sword bag.
Day 3 was Longsword and I was putting pressure on myself to win. I was having such a great time that against odds and and open field (not tiered by skill level) of competition, I was determined to leave there with something. It was at this point that I felt the most like I did nerves-wise before an audition early in my career, the first Kansas City audition I took in 2011. For that audition, I looked up before playing Mendelssohn scherzo and I remember seeing spots. My whole body tingled with nerves and for about 10 seconds I had no idea where I was. That’s a product of the kind of mental pressure state I had put myself in.
Now, as I faced my first opponent of the day,I walked forward and felt jelly in my legs, and it showed. I was in my own head. I felt like I was watching myself from the sidelines. I was pressing.
A friend of mine took me aside after pools and he could tell I was frustrated with myself. I’m still not very experienced on the competition circuit, but I have been getting better. And he got me to refocus and take things one exchange at a time. Just go deal with what’s in front of you, stop thinking 3 steps ahead, be present, be in the moment. Interact with your environment.
Now it gets to the first round of Elims. Mentally, I’m back in the dressing room of the Kauffman center in the mid 2010’s picking my reeds and ready to go onstage to play the list. Physically however, i’m about 15 miles away from the Kauffman facing my opponent with a Longsword. It may sound like two very different states of mind but it felt all the same to me.
This time, however, I cleared my mind of anything except my immediate task. I performed the way I knew I was capable of performing, and I won the match 10-0. I eventually got knocked out by a very skilled and experienced fencer, but I held my own. It was a good loss, and I had nothing to be ashamed of.
All of this is to say, whether you’re sitting down in front of a music stand in the orchestra, band, etc or staring across the ring from someone who’s trying to plant a metal bar somewhere on your body, you just gotta deal with it one step at a time.
And that, my friends, is how I finally made it past the prelims in Kansas City. Till next time :)
