This past weekend, I presented at the South Texas Brass Symposium. Part of the event was a clinic for high school students preparing etudes for their All-State auditions. During this masterclass, I started thinking back to my high school experience, and what I was thinking about preparing for these kinds of auditions. The etudes were […]

The motto for most scouting organizations worldwide is some variant of “Be Prepared.” Boy scouts were never my thing, but that’s not a bad lesson to keep in mind. I was offered my current position at South Texas College less than a month before I needed to be on campus for my first day. In […]

A lot of times, we advertise our successes, but try to hide our failures. This is natural, of course, since we want to present the best version of ourselves possible. Because of this, a typical Facebook feed full of friends’ successes is not representative of the statistical reality. In any audition, one person wins, and […]

It’s been said over and over: you can only control your own performance, not how the other applicants at an audition play. This barely scratches the surface — the list of elements you can’t control is extensive: You can’t control what you play. The audition requires that you play the excerpts the panel wants in the […]