Born to do what?
Jennie Dorris
Last summer a wonderful viola player named Melinda totally screwed me over.
I was in the middle of performing a piece, and as I played she told a friend of mine, "She's doing what she was born to do."
First of all, I wasn't supposed to know she said it, second of all I tend not to resonate with weird little poignant sayings like this, and third of all, I'm not supposed to need the reaffirmation of my career choice.
But the timing of her statement over me wailing away on my roto-toms hit squarely in my brain and attached itself. Last month I lost another orchestra audition. Just last week I lost another one. Some people use God to get through these things; some people have a supportive spouse. I have Melinda.
My teacher used to play a game with me where he'd start a sentence and then stop it abruptly, his mouth hanging open, waiting for me to finish the sentence. One of his favorite lines was:
"A life in music is a life of…." Then he would stop, his fluffy white beard split wide open.
A life in music, I would tell him now, is a life of losing.
I've lost all kinds of auditions. Some of my music friends have numbers that will make them quit taking auditions. Like, when they lose that 81st audition, the cello's going in the campfire. Or the piano's getting lobbed onto the Free listing on Craig's List. Some of my friends have a different number – if they don't have a full-time music job by a certain age, they're out.
I don't have a number yet, because every time I slink away from a lost audition, my drum cases banging against the outsides of my legs, I just smile and remember what Melinda said.
But before we get too feel-goody, I'd like to tell you exactly how I lose.
The boring way we musician-types find jobs is by refreshing a few web sites that list the job openings. But most of the times it happens like this – a Denver friend of mine flew to Philadelphia to take a lesson with the nation's best player. As he got off the plane, the freelance players in Philadelphia all started buzzing that he was in town to take a lesson – it must have meant an orchestra job had opened up in Denver.
We, by the way, have no problem taking several trips across the country to prepare for the audition. One guy even traveled to Turkey to learn native tambourine techniques. When we lose, we lose big.
Now, some folks find it adorable when they sit next to a buckled-in cello on an airplane. But the next time, look around the bloated plastic case and you'll see a young musician sweating it. His head is all numbers – how much the plane tickets cost, how many people he's competing against, what the number is that he will draw.
Because when you arrive at an audition, you go to a table in front of various rooms. You sign in, and receive a number, which is the order in which you audition. You will crumple this number casually between your fingers like you've done this all before, but the sweat from your hands will cause it to become paper mache.
There will be practice rooms, and here are all your competitors. They will be doing lots of weird shit. They will jump and windmill their arms, smacking their fingers against the fluorescent lighting. They will be eating lots of bananas, and the floor will look like a slip-and-fall scene from a cartoon. Bananas supposedly have beta blockers to calm down your shaking hands.
You care about these people but you pretend not to. You worry instead about the moderator, who is the only official person who can talk to you. She calls your number and leads you into the audition room. When you have a question, you can't do anything except go over to whisper to the moderator and she will relay your question to the judges.
She has to do this because your judges – usually members of the orchestra that highly resent being there – are behind what we call a "screen," but what is actually the exact materials of a cubicle wall. This is ironic in a way you don't have time to think about.
The judges will yell, muffled through the cube wall, the audition excerpts they want you to play. They will make noises after you play that are not clapping, usually they are snorts or you can openly hear a beer can being cracked. Sometimes, to keep it easy, when they hear one wrong note they will ding a small bell that you would use to get someone's attention at a service counter. When they ding the bell, you pack up your stuff and go home.
If you make it through the audition ding-less, you sit in a room and wait for the other auditionees to go in. They will have gotten very absurd, a room full of babies makes each other cry but a room full of nervous musicians makes each other a jabbering, twitching, noisy mess, and you will return to this cacophony to think over your mistakes and wait for the moderator, who is still the only person to whom you want to talk.
When she comes in, she will be the one doing the talking. You will all hold your numbers and she will shyly say a few numbers – not names -- that have passed to the next round of auditioning, and then she will look around. When you look at your number – though you have it memorized, you have become number eight – you will see that she has not called your number. There is no way to pack loud instruments quietly, and you smile at the numbers that go on, and you leave.
To make matters worse, because you are a musical masochist, you are allowed to ask the judges for their notes on your playing so you can get better for your next audition. You will submit your query, and they will ignore you, every single time.
Being rejected to your face is actually the best-case scenario. Sometimes you wait longer to lose – sometimes you just have to update a website until it is a full orchestra roster without your name on it. Sometimes you get an e-mail that is regretful, it is usually coupled with the offer for a job working with the orchestra doing something really shitty, like setting up chairs. You will take this job, and you'll wait, because Melinda said it was something you were born to do.
You will start to wonder what the hell she meant by this, and you will hate her for saying this at the perfect moment that it gave you years of hope. She has turned you into some kind of audition cockroach, all the confusion without any Kafka-esque realizations.
A life in music is a life of losing the thing you most obviously want, having people tell you they don't want you more often than not. It's actually a business of needs, and there are very few needs, and there are so many of us that want them.
It would have been such a sad thing to tell my teacher, when he paused there with his mouth open, that he trains people that are ready and waiting to lose.
But I think at the same time I told him that, he would be bored with my response. It's not shocking, he would say, I've said it a thousand times myself. It's not the defining moment that you're a loser, he would say. We're all losers.
It's a careful thing, to believe in people completely, to say with such confidence, like Melinda did, that you are, yes you are doing the right thing. It's sometimes worse to be realistic, like my teacher lead me to be, any logical person would never pursue a career in something with such few and dwindling jobs.
I was lucky to be balanced in between the two perspectives, which is the only safe place you can feel to do creative work, in between reality and blind faith. And maybe the moment that came to define me is that I'm prouder to lose at the life I was born to do, than to win anywhere else.