9/13/15 Reflection About First Volunteer Day

For my first service learning opportunity I helped out with  the Philharmonic’s audition process.  I arrived at the church across from their “headquarters” where they were holding the oboe auditions. The big thing Amanda had to tell me first was all of the musicians identities needed to be kept confidential. Since I had interactions with the musicians as I was doing the job I will either have to generalize or change their names for disclosure.  It’s very important to make sure nobody’s name is thrown around after the audition because it could damage a reputation.  This is very important because say Thomas auditions for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and is a very good musician but has a bad audition. Somebody could tell others about Thomas and it  could make the rest of his career more of an uphill battle. This is also the reason that I felt like I  wasn’t allowed to take pictures of the location I worked at. Being a musician is competitive enough, but one bad audition made public to everybody could hurt their future prospects for jobs.

Amanda then explained to me how the audition process worked.  The auditions were for oboes and they were divided up into two separate groups of 10.  Each person in the group would draw a number and that was the order they would audition in.  When the auditions started there was somebody to take the musicians down to the audition room from their warm-up room, and there was somebody giving people a 5-minute warning for when this would happen.  From these two groups the judges will select the people they want to hear again and they will compete in a final round.  I helped with the set-up and then I was on 5-minute warning duty.    

I got to hear all the musicians going through their warm-up routines. As a musician it was interesting to see how they warmed up with their practicing for pieces, and with their fundamental warmup.  Each musician had their obvious strengths and I got to talk to a couple after their audition.  They told me they were nervous and that they thought they could have done better but just wanted another shot at the final round.  One in particular told me how they prepared in their practices for this audition by working on different fundamentals and then building the piece up slowly.  This is exactly my audition process so I thought it was nice to know I’m doing the same setup as some professionals do for their auditions.