 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: cjshaitan
Date: 2009-01-06 12:14
Hello everyone,
It has been a long time since i have been on this bboard.
I have a question i pose to professional clarinettist out there. I am interested in when u think it is to late to try and become a professional player - orchestral musician.
I completed my university music degree 6 years ago and have been private teaching and conducting since then but havenot maintained any regular practice routine. I was a very dedicated student and finished with first class honours and performance experience both in professional recital and orchestral situatiations. I became disillusioned with clarinet performance shortly after i finished and went into the financially secure world of teaching which i very much enjoyed.
A few things have changed in my life this year which will free up my time and for the first time in 6 years im thinking about getting back into practice and auditions. I realise it will be a long road back and i guess im just interested in any opinions about how best to get back into it and whether it is even a realistic goal to compete with the young clarinetist that are emerging from undergraduate and graduate studies these days,
many thanks for your time
colin
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-01-06 16:27
I don't play professionally (although I do play in a "semi-pro" orchestra alongside paid professionals), but I do have some experience in coming back to "serious playing" and "serious practice" after some time. I found that technique comes back more quickly than you might think--you just have to have some discipline (like everything else in music performance). I hadn't played regularly in about 8 years when I auditioned for the orchestra I play in now--and I hadn't played anything technically challenging in longer than that. But even music I hadn't played in about 15 or 16 years (Poulenc sonata, for example) didn't take very long to relearn--if you played long enough to start with, what you retain is far more than what you lose, I've found.
And--more importantly--I don't feel that with age I have lost the ability to learn and improve. The more I practice, the better I get--that hasn't changed. I think that if I really wanted to, I could pick up where I left off, work with a good teacher for a while and become competitive with the younger guys (or at least as competitive as I would have been at their age). Consider this: in the U.S., to land the top jobs, the younger guys still have to compete with players like Ricardo Morales and Greg Raden, both of whom are older than I am (by a few years, anyway--but if you're only 6 years out of school, they're probably older than you, too). If they can stay at the top of their game after age 35, surely you can get back to where you were and then some--I think age is much less important than determination, discipline, and talent. Thankfully, we're not like gymnasts. (And, besides, if you so chose, you could go back to school and be one of those folks emerging from graduate school, too.)
In fact, in some ways I think I actually play better now than I did 15 years ago when I gave up the idea of being a full-time orchestra musician and went into engineering (and eventually law). The reason I say that is that in that time, I've gained more intellectual and emotional maturity, and I've also become a much better listener. I feel I'm a lot better at the *mental* side of music-making than I was in my late teens/early twenties. As a teacher and conductor, surely you can make that claim more strongly than I can, because you've been actively involved in the mental side of music-making on a daily basis. And in the end, it's the mental side of music that separates the great artists from the technicians--that's why the greatest musicians are called "musical geniuses" as opposed to "musical champions."
So I think what you're thinking about doing is entirely realistic. The main thing--as with everything audition-related (and everything else in life, for that matter)--is to work hard, but also keep a positive attitude.
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