Klarinet Archive - Posting 000899.txt from 1998/04

From: Jonathan Cohler <cohler@-----.net>
Subj: Re: National Symphony 2nd Clarinet Job
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1998 06:05:20 -0400

The arguments I have seen so far don't wash.

The fact that businesses don't interview every resume sender is irrelevant
and not even vaguely comparable to the situation of the National Symphony.
When one applies for a job in a "normal" business, there are hundreds if
not thousands of jobs available from hundreds of companies in that business
that open up on a regular basis.

Symphony orchestra jobs for clarinetists in the U.S. are quite rare indeed.
In fact, I recall a posting that said there are only 18 (or so) full time
orchestras in the U.S. Each of these has only three or four clarinet jobs,
so we are talking about a total field of 50 to 70 jobs.

I also believe that the average tenure in these jobs exceeds the average
tenure of, for example, a software engineer by a factor of five or more. A
few examples are Pasquale Cardillo (2nd clar BSO ~48 years), Stanley
Drucker (1st clar NY Phil 50 years), John Bruce Yeh (Asst. Princ. Chicago
~19 years), Loren Kitt (1st clar National Symphony ~28 years), Harold
Wright (1st Boston Symphony, ~24 years). Someone from the ASOL or the AFM
could probably tell us the average tenure of a clarinet player in a
full-time orchestra.

While the argument that principal clarinet positions should be more
exclusionary might seem more reasonable on the surface, but that would
exclude people like Ricardo Morales, for example, who won the Met position
at age 21. That said, I understand perfectly well the practice of inviting
certain highly experienced, well-known players (presumably principal in
some other orchestra) directly to the second round of a set of auditions.
But this does not preclude letting anyone who gets on the airplane to
audition at the first round.

When I was a kid, which was the same time when John Yeh was a kid, no
orchestras (major or minor) excluded people from auditions based on
resumes. And yes, they got the same 200 applicants for every job back then
too. (In fact, I believe they used to get more applicants, on average,
twenty years ago than they do now, as music school enrollments have
declined for wind/brass/perc players).

The argument made by Roger Garrett that some get into the audition over
others because some teachers pushed more or more successfully, or were
somehow better connected to the audition committee, is precisely the kind
of biased "old boys club" hiring practice which gives our music business a
bad name.

Of course, if this exclusionary practice is common among full-time
symphonies now (which I refuse to believe until shown the contrary), and I
would love to know which other orchestras do this, then as teachers we
should advise our students to make "creative" resumes, and pull as many
back-door, "old-boys-club" strings as we know of every time we send a
student out for a first-round audition into these old-boy-clubs.

-------------------------
Jonathan Cohler
cohler@-----.net