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Re: Clarinet Audition Info

Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2022-01-10 03:32

The best advice I got regarding preparing for symphonic clarinet auditions came from Bill Wrzesien of the New England Conservatory in Boston. He put practicing symphonic excerpts along with scales and technical exercises into the daily practice routine. His spin on it was to take the panoply of typical excerpts that come up on most auditions and divide them into four different manilla envelopes. You'd categorize them in following way: One envelope would be all fast examples, the next would be all lyrical, then all tongued (in some manner), finally fast and slurred. There is a lot of cross over but part of the exercise of dividing them up was to get you to personalize your groupings.

Then, you take one packet a day going through all four groupings within a week (this leaves room to have three days a week where you are NOT doing excerpts). This way you keep them under your fingers at all times and may only need to polish up one or two for the big auditions coming down the pike (or leave you time to practice the one or two odd ones called for in a specific audition that are not typically asked for all the time).

Really the point is to just get into the excerpts and keep them under your fingers. Even if you think you need more "whatever" before you are ready for such and such excerpt, just play it. Just having the sonic idea in your ears or slight imperfections in your fingerings is so much better than......."I'll get to that some day."

...................Paul Aviles

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