January Audition Ads

I read the audition ads in the back of the International Musician’s January edition a little more carefully than usual. The IM is the official journal of the American Federation of Musicians, which is a labor union most people have to belong to in order to work in the U.S. and Canada. There are a lot of auditions advertised this month!

I notice nearly every orchestra lists itself as an “equal employment opportunity employer” and several orchestras call themselves “proud partners” of the National Alliance for Audition Support (NAAS) as well. In the current IM, those “proud partner orchestras” are Buffalo Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic, Oregon Symphony, and Utah Symphony. It costs money to have bigger ads, so this is a commitment to something, I’m just not sure to what.

According to Merriam-Webster, an equal opportunity employer is "an employer who agrees not to discriminate against any employee or job applicant because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, physical or mental disability, or age.” According to its website, NAAS " is an unprecedented national initiative to increase diversity in American orchestras. It does so by offering Black and Latinx musicians a customized combination of mentoring, audition preparation, financial support, and audition previews.”

Usually, repertoire lists for these auditions are compiled by an audition committee comprised of other players in the orchestra who will be judging the audition. The repertoire lists feature the composers musicians in the orchestra think are most important. They feature composers who in theory will be played in concert by winning candidates. Most musicians will tell you that their ultimate obligation when presenting music onstage is to the composer, and to represent that person’s ideas to the best of their abilities. Audition repertoire is selected to display the candidates playing the biggest, most important, and most difficult parts in order to form a judgment about how they would function in the orchestra. If candidates can play this repertoire well, the hope is that this translates into their other work, and they will be able to play anything well. These lists are the standards by which everything else is judged.

So, I looked at the repertoire lists for the current publicized auditions of these orchestras paying to represent themselves as both equal opportunity employing and NAAS "proud partnering" orchestras. Of the lists that are published (I’ve attached all that were available online today), there were no living composers, no women composers, and no Black or Latinx composers deemed important enough to make it onto the repertoire lists in Buffalo, Dallas, Wisconsin, Oregon, or Utah. (Illinois Philharmonic has not posted any of their lists.)

There were many big, fancy orchestras who did not call themselves “proud partners,” but “equal opportunity employers,” such as Cincinnati Symphony (which according to its audition page is also an NAAS partner and a 2020 leader in gender equity), Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony. Similar to the “proud partners,” their published repertoire lists included zero women composers, almost zero living composers (with the exception of a John Adams bass trombone excerpt in San Francisco), and zero BIPOC composers beyond Alberto Ginastera (dead Argentinian composer of European descent who is required in Cincinnati, LA, and Chicago).

The Philadelphia Orchestra, advertising a horn audition this month but not sharing its repertoire list yet, has a published repertoire list for Associate Concertmaster which includes one work by Gabriela Lena Frank, who is simultaneously living, female, and BIPOC. I suspect their horn list will also include one or more excerpts by a composer who is not dead, white, or male.

What does it say when there is so much talk about equity and equal opportunity when the standards by which we judge a player are almost entirely tested on repertoire composed by dead, white men? It says that either an orchestra is not playing music by people who are not dead, white men or that it does, but doesn’t take it seriously enough to judge new players based upon it. Perhaps the people making these repertoire lists do not know the repertoire outside of dead, white men; or they don’t like it; or they don’t find it suitable for testing a new colleague.

Audition repertoire lists do not need to feature exclusively orchestral literature. They often feature solo and chamber music works. This is a great opportunity to include works by “other” composers if suitable orchestral literature is unknown. But a little bit of work with the Google/Youtube machine can reveal all kinds of orchestral literature worth programming on these lists.