1.2 The school band year: concerts, contests, and auditions  (Page 3/4)

Auditions

An audition is a competition for placement in a performance group or in a contest. Your band program may begin each year with auditions for places in the program. Beginners' bands, very small band programs, and bands which accept all comers may not have auditions. Most others have some kind of audition, and most students in a band program will be involved in some kind of audition at some point. While it may not seem fair to ask youngsters to compete in this way, placement by auditions is good for the group as a whole, and in the long run is pretty fair as well as being the most efficient way to make assignments.

Placement within a group

Each group of people who play the same instrument in a band is a section (for example, the flute section, or the trumpet section). The players in each section are ordered by chair , so that the best player in each section is the first chair , or principal player, the second-best is second chair, and so on. The music is composed and distributed so that the first chair player in each section will get the most difficult, highest (most easily heard) and the most exposed, soloistic parts. Players in lower chairs will get easier, lower (less audible) parts, and will play more often as a group (rather than solo). This ensures that the entire band together will play the music as well as it possibly can, given the players that it has. In small sections, each player may have a separate part, or all players may be playing from the same part. In larger sections, such as clarinets and trumpets, there may be several different parts, with more than one player on each part, so that one may have, for example, the "principal second clarinet" (the highest chair playing the second clarinet part, who would play any second-clarinet solos). If a part is particularly difficult or physically exhausting, the first chair may have an assistant principal , who plays the tiring parts but not the solos; or one "first" player may take the lead on all the high, tiring passages, while another player takes the solos. Some sections may also have players who specialize in a slightly different instrument or part, such as the bass trombone player, who plays the lowest parts regardless of relative ability.

The first chair in each section is the section leader . In some large ensembles, the section leader may be given extra responsibilities, such as running individual section rehearsals. In any musical ensemble, the players should, as much as possible, copy the section leader's tuning , articulation , dynamics , and timbre . This saves the director and the larger group a great deal of time and frustration. When a section is playing as a team under the section leader, the director can easily ask the entire section for a different articulation, for example, rather than trying to figure out who is playing too long or too short.

The first chair of one of the sections may also be named the concert master (or concert mistress ), and some extra duties may come with this leadership position. In a performance, the concert master may take charge of tuning the instruments before the performance, or may lead formal movements of the band, such as standing and bowing. In an orchestra, the concert master is always a violin player. In bands, any of the woodwinds that are seated in the front row (normally flutes, clarinets, and oboes) may be named concert master. In some bands, the position will go automatically to a particular instrument; in others, the director may appoint the most responsible and enthusiastic section leader. There is normally no separate audition for concert master, and some school bands do not have one.