I will call this session, "Road to the Job."

These sessions, I'll talk about my progress towards winning a position in a professional symphony.  Hopefully, I won't have to continue this past April 21 because that's when I take my next attempt at winning a job.  I found a job opening for a permanent position in the Lexington Philharmonic in Lexington, KY.  It's only about an hour and a half from where I live.  And, as mentioned before, the audition is April 21.

Now I have to give credit to God on this one in a big way.  The day before I found out about this gig, I had an awful performance experience with excerpt class.  I think I mentioned it in my last post.  I decided that instead of letting my bitterness over the performance take control of me, I would take control of my bitterness.  None of that "tail wagging the dog," crap.  So, as always, I continue to pray to God for guidance, and the next day I found this job opening.  However, I decided I needed to make sure this was what God wanted of me, so that night at church, I asked the group to please pray for guidance.  The next day, Dr. Carroll gave me her blessing to go on and take the audition.

The rep for the audition are your basic excerpts.  Most I've played or am half-way familiar with.  Four of them I've never played before.  But luckily, there's nothing weird or out of the ordinary with these excerpts.  Another thing I need in addition to these 10 excerpts is a solo concerto.  If you've been following, you know I've been working on the Telemann.  However, this is not a concerto played in an audition for a professional setting.  So I've decided, again with Dr. C's blessing, to bring back Der Schwanendreher by Hindemith.  My favorite concerto for viola!

I reckon, to prepare for this audition, in addition to keeping up with my other viola studies, I'll need to practice 6-7 hours a day as opposed to 4-5 hours a day.  This means I'll have to sacrifice a few distractions.  Mainly netflix instant streaming.  I'm a sucker for marathoning my favorite shows.  Luckily, this is the time of Lent.  Now, I'm not Catholic, but I do think the idea of Lent is a great one.  Jesus sacrificed so much for all of us, the least we can do is sacrifice one thing for him.

I'm going to try to post weekly recordings of my progress.

Final Thought:
"You know what happens to a toad that gets struck by lightning?  Same thing that happens to everything else."  Halle Berry as Storm in the movie X-Men.  This is quite possibly the worst epic quote in history, and yet, I love it.