Written by: Matt Lammers of Fein Violins
Having spent a summer and nine orchestral performances with the Brevard Music Center Orchestra this year, I was dropped headfirst into a culture of high standards and professional level playing. Eager to study orchestral playing technique and musicianship, I was not expecting to make any modifications to how I went about acting during and around rehearsals on a non-musical level. This, however, can come between a job and unemployment for even the most competent orchestral players. Getting on the wrong person's nerves--or your entire section for that matter--may have devastating consequences when tenure, or being hired in the first place, is on the line, and in a festival situation it can be what separates you from being an asset to the ensemble and the object of collective hatred. It seems to me that this is something worth paying attention to.
While a great deal of the do's and don't's are either intuitive or were told to us as we sat down in elementary school string orchestra, many of them require experience and the inside line to recognize, and are generally unnoticeable to the outsider. It would be an oversight to not mention these that are seemingly obvious, so here we go: don't eat during rehearsal, don't talk back to your conductor or principal, don't smell bad, know your part, don't talk during rehearsal, be on time (EARLY) to rehearsal, and turn the pages on time. With that out of the way it's time to dive into the finer points of playing in an orchestra that I noticed during my time with the faculty of the BMCO.
Having spent a summer and nine orchestral performances with the Brevard Music Center Orchestra this year, I was dropped headfirst into a culture of high standards and professional level playing. Eager to study orchestral playing technique and musicianship, I was not expecting to make any modifications to how I went about acting during and around rehearsals on a non-musical level. This, however, can come between a job and unemployment for even the most competent orchestral players. Getting on the wrong person's nerves--or your entire section for that matter--may have devastating consequences when tenure, or being hired in the first place, is on the line, and in a festival situation it can be what separates you from being an asset to the ensemble and the object of collective hatred. It seems to me that this is something worth paying attention to.
While a great deal of the do's and don't's are either intuitive or were told to us as we sat down in elementary school string orchestra, many of them require experience and the inside line to recognize, and are generally unnoticeable to the outsider. It would be an oversight to not mention these that are seemingly obvious, so here we go: don't eat during rehearsal, don't talk back to your conductor or principal, don't smell bad, know your part, don't talk during rehearsal, be on time (EARLY) to rehearsal, and turn the pages on time. With that out of the way it's time to dive into the finer points of playing in an orchestra that I noticed during my time with the faculty of the BMCO.
