Sam Bergman is a violist in the Minnesota Orchestra, an editor for an award-winning arts news website, and the author of a popular blog detailing the touring life of orchestral musicians.

MyAuditions January 2005 Artist of the Month.

Hello Sam,

What is the blog mentioned that you write and what is the web address?

Hi Sam, fascinating blog and great that you're on the forum!

A couple of quickies if you can spare a minute, if I may:

(1) What's the tuba story at your orchestra?

(2) Do you believe your orchestra sets up as tightly as possible?

In other words, ample space usually gets used naturally, but I've often found when musicians are forced to cramp up the results are always beneficial for mutual audibility and tightness of ensemble playing despite the physical discomfort.

So, if you are given a large space, does anyone ever suggest to voluntarily opt for the physical discomfort and squeeze in together with every millimeter absolutely possible without anyone being at risk with el/bows flying into nearby eyeballs etc.?

Any comments much appreciated, thanks!

mac, the url i believe is http://www.artsjournal.com/roadtrip/

Sam, great blog! why more professional orchestra members don't have blogs is baffiling but me thinks that us rookies greatly appreciate all the advice we can get.

Sam,

Saw the orchestra at Barbican back in Feb. Smashing performance!

Greetings, all! Sorry to be a couple of days late to the discussion, but I was out of e-touch while spending the New Year's holiday with friends in Massachusetts. I'll jump right in with answers to the questions and comments that have been posted so far.

To Mac:
The blog in question is in fact the one that Pete linked to. It was a temporary blog covering the Minnesota Orchestra's 2004 European tour. There was a good deal of interest in my continuing it after the tour ended, but I just couldn't imagine a way that I could do that without getting myself into trouble with either my colleagues or my bosses, particularly since I serve as the current chairman of our orchestra committee, which is in charge of dealing with all disputes, contract questions, etc.

To arrBoy:
The tuba story is this: last summer, our longtime tubist (and star softball slugger) Ross Tolbert retired from the orchestra. We held an audition last fall, and when the dust cleared, we had offered the job to Steve Campbell, who has been most recently with the Milwaukee Symphony. Steve has accepted the job, and I believe he'll be starting in fall 2005. He is an outstanding player who stepped in to play our last European tour while Ross was out of commission, and we're all looking forward to his arrival.

Regarding your question about how tightly we set up, it's interesting that you would ask. We have a fairly large stage, with some fairly (ahem) unique onstage acoustical oddities, and we have kicked around about a million different ways that we might become better able to hear each other. The idea of setting up in a tighter space has come up several times during my time in Minneapolis, and we do set up in fairly close quarters. Could they be closer? Yeah. Am I, personally, looking forward to the day when they are? Not really. I'd rather deal with having to stay a bit more alert for visual cues if it means that I can pull a full bow without worrying about breaking my tip on the stand behind me.

To Pete527:
The reason you don't see more orchestra musicians writing blogs is probably that, like any workplace, we spend an awful lot of time in close quarters with the same 98 people, and the risk that an unofficial biographer could cause severe hurt feelings and even jeopardize the orchestra's reputation (unintentionally, of course) would be quite high. Even in the limited time that I was writing Road Trip, and making a supreme effort to keep myself out of such trouble, I managed to tick off a fairly powerful individual, and had to move pretty quickly to avoid allowing the fallout from my work to hurt the organization as a whole. (And, no, I won't be sharing any of the details of that little episode. You all understand, I'm sure.)

To violagirl:
Thanks for the kind words. I always love being in London, and the chance to do an underperformed gem like "Bluebeard's Castle" at the Barbican was a thrill...

Sam,

Wonderful that you had the time to respond. I have took some time to read through your blog and I find it quite enjoyable. I will continue to enjoy reading through more of it in the coming days.

Regarding your response to Pete, I think that we can all agree that when a professional such as yourself with a high profile orchestra like Minnesota blogs, there is indeed a fine line we walk between objectivity and the appearance of impartiality without facing the ire of the employer.

There has been a very lengthy discussion on these forums - which I have found to be the only one on the net in which professional orchestral musicians participate - regarding one's decision to post with one's true identity or anonymously.

Some from Detroit, Colorado, Buffalo, Charlotte post with their real names and always are very careful how they phrase their posts while others post anonymously and are a bit more cavalier (no doubt some will flame me for this comment).

For all of us amateurs, wannabee orchestra musicians and fans, it is always nice to be able to connect directly with professionals like yourself. I just wish there were many more of your fellow colleagues who could participate in these discussions. I think many of us would all agree that we could use all the advice we could and every little bit helps.

I applaud your participation in this discussion and hope that you continue to be as frank as possible without "crossing the line."

Sam, perhaps you could elaborate on the setup. Does that mean you folks are sitting closer together which would result in a more concentrated acoustical result, lack of stage space or are you and your colleagues "just good friends?"

Okay, Alexander, you asked for it... Our standard stage set has actually changed a great deal in the last 18 months, with the arrival of our new music director, Osmo Vänskä. The problem of setup in our hall is twofold: first, our stage is quite large, leaving our options more open than many halls. Second, while Orchestra Hall is acoustically superior from most seats in the audience, it is a very difficult stage on which to play. It is nearly impossible for those on the right of the stage to hear those on the left, and vice versa, and there are serious back-to-front delays and dead spots as well.

Osmo's solution to these problems has been to bring in risers for the winds and brass. The front row of winds sit about 6 inches above the main stage, with each subsequent row going up another 6 inches or so. The trumpets, trombones, and tuba sit on a separate riser, higher than all the others, on the stage left side. The percussion are also on this riser, with the tympani positioned immediately behind the horn section at center stage and the rest of the section at stage right, behind the violins.

The risers have helped the overall acoustic immeasurably, from my point of view (they're also popular with the audience, which can now see the whole orchestra, rather than just the strings), and they have had the added benefit of causing much of the brass and percussion sound to be projected more directly into the hall, rather than into the back of the heads of whatever string players were unfortunate enough to be sitting in the previous line of fire. In addition, the risers take up a great deal of space on the stage, which doesn't allow the strings to spread out too much in front, which is all to the better for listening purposes.

It's also worth noting that, under the Osmo setup, we adopt the "classical" seating model for anything written in or before the mid-19th century. (Beethoven seems to be the cutoff - we play his symphonies in this seating, but Brahms, Dvorak etc. in the standard modern setup.) In this setup, the violins face each other, firsts on stage right, seconds on stage left, the violas stay inside on stage left, and the cellos take the traditional second violin position at stage right. The basses, who normally sit behind the violas and cellos at stage left, swing around to stage right for this seating. My impression is that the second violins, who can no longer hear the firsts terribly well, detest this seating, but it works out quite well for the rest of us, and distributes the sound of a Beethoven symphony beautifully.

Sam,

That's quite a bit of musical chairs and seems like a short term solution to me.

Even though the orchestra sets up differently between Beethoven and Brahms, wouldn't it best serve the long-term acoustical needs of the orchestra by doing a redesign of the "bandshell".

Has the orchestra considered a redesign like Carnegie Hall? I know it costs millions but it would permanently solve the problem.

Actually, Alex, as both a practical and acoustical matter, a full redesign of the hall doesn't make sense for us. As you say, it would cost millions of dollars, and believe me, we don't have a single dime to spare at this point. Furthermore, the adjustments Osmo has made really have made a big difference, and additionally, it's worth noting that the griping amongst the musicians about the onstage acoustics has softened noticably in the past 18 months, which is to say ever since a strong music director who understands the orchestra took the reins.

Furthermore, since our hall doesn't actually have an onstage shell - we play with the full stage open, the way the acoustician designed it in the early 1970s - any renovation would mean literally ripping the hall apart. It would take years, and any improvements in the onstage acoustics could potentially damage the sound in the hall itself, which is stunning as it is. Furthermore, raising money for such a renovation would be nearly impossible, since a) most patrons have no idea that there is any problem with the acoustics, since it sounds fine from where they sit, and b) everyone in town knows that we have far greater fiscal priorities at the moment.

We actually have an internal plan which calls for a partial revamp of Orchestra Hall as a component of our planned upcoming endowment drive. But the areas we would be revamping are the audience areas - the lobby is completely substandard for the needs of our concertgoers - and the offices. At the moment, our staff is split between three different buildings, we have not nearly enough rehearsal space and practice rooms, and we badly need a small chamber music hall. All of these things will continue to take priority over any onstage modifications, especially since the orchestra is widely considered to be playing at the absolute top of its game right now, and clearly, any onstage quirks aren't hurting our overall sound.

Hello Sam,

I see you are currently on the forums. I was wondering if you could outline the audition process with Minnesota. How are candidates selected, vetted, auditioned, etc. Do you sit on the players committee participating in the auditions? Do string players hear brass, wind and percussion and vice versa or just strings?

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

Sam,

How are players committee members for auditions selected? How long do they participate and are they compensated for this extra responsibility or is it built into the collective bargaining agreement?

Well, unlike some major orchestras, we don't actually pre-select the candidates for our auditions. Pretty much anyone who submits a resume with any evidence of musical experience is invited to participate, and we've heard as many as 130 candidates at our auditions. This lack of pre-screening does mean that we occasionally find ourselves horrified at the hideous noises coming from some head case who played in a community orchestra for a couple of years back in college and thinks this qualifies them, but for the most part, I think it makes for a better process, and allows us to snag some top-notch musicians who can't get the time of day at an audition in, say, Cleveland. (That's not by any stretch a slam at Cleveland. They have their reasons for running things the way they do, and when you're the Cleveland Orchestra, you can pretty much run things any way you want. We don't have Cleveland's built-in prestige, so we choose to be a bit less exclusive.)

When there is a vacancy, our management formally requests that the Members' Committee (it's what we call our orchestra committee) form an audition committee. The Members' Committee, together with the principal of the section involved, picks the players to serve on the committee, within some specific rules laid our in our master agreement. (For instance, in the string section, an audition committee must always have four members of the section in which the vacancy occurs, plus one musician from each of the other three string sections.) Auditions committees are always made up of seven players from within the same family of instruments. Strings never hear wind auditions. Audition committees are paid a very small stipend, mainly to pay for the meals they must grab from nearby restaurants during breaks in the action.

The actual auditions are conducted much like every other audition, albeit with some variables determined by the individual audition committee. Whether or not to use a screen in the preliminary rounds is up to the committee, for instance. Most sections use them - our cello section, for one, does not. The music director does not attend the preliminary and semi-final rounds of the auditions, and decisions in these rounds are made solely by the audition committee. In the final round, the music director joins the committee, and from this point on, the audition committee's role is technically an advisory one. The final decision on whom to hire (if anyone) is entirely up to the music director, although I've never seen an MD in this orchestra hire someone whom the committee was dead set against. Nearly every major orchestra allows the MD the final say in this process, which is the #1 piece of evidence against all the conspiracy theories surrounding orchestra auditions. (You know the ones: "Oh, they just hired her because she once went to the summer camp where the assistant principal teaches, and you KNOW they weren't gonna give it to anyone else." Music directors honestly don't give a **** whose student has been preselected for the job. They really don't.)

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that our personnel managers are justly famous for running some of the friendliest, most painless auditions in the business. They go out of their way to make the process as painless as possible for the candidates, and even go so far as to break the news of who advanced and who didn't to each candidate individually, rather than announcing it to the room. It's a little thing, but as anyone who's ever gone through the indignity of a professional audition knows, those small favors can make all the difference in a very stressful process.

Sam, re: the "ancient" set-up 2nd vlns stage left: with less 2nds, what about the additional factor of the orientation of the instrument not facing the audience? Everything might sound great from the podium but what about audience?

Well, as a violist, I might ask the same question about the way we normally set up. After all, we always face the back of the stage, and nobody's complained that I know of.

Seriously, though, I actually think that the "ancient" setup, as you call it, makes a lot of sense in terms of balance. It features the first violins and cellos facing their sound directly out to the audience, with the inner strings (2nds and violas) facing in. After all, in an orchestral setting, the 2nd violins usually have a lot more in common with violas than they do with 1st violins. This can also have the side benefit of allowing the 2nds and violas to play difficult soft background material at an executable volume, without burying any light and airy melodies that may be going on in the 1sts. But that's just my opinion...

Well, it is only the viola section... ;-)
I'd give you a warm handshake of welcome, but I can't remember the secret viola handshake - please say hello to Tom Turner for me - we had great fun sitting together in Elija at the Oregon Bach Festival last summer!

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Originally posted by Pete527:
mac, the url i believe is http://www.artsjournal.com/roadtrip/

Sam, great blog! why more professional orchestra members don't have blogs is baffiling but me thinks that us rookies greatly appreciate all the advice we can get.

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I'll chime in here, too. I suspended my blog here before the end of 2004 because involved with several sensitive committees in my orchestra, and we're entering a negotiation for a new CBA. As always, the appearance of impropriety is just as important as the actual presence of impropriety or lack thereof. There is a LOT of stuff that I wish I could talk about, but I must respect the privacy of my colleagues.

Charles,

Was wondering were you have been hiding last few months.

Real shame about your blog. It was one of my favourites.

Harry - glad you liked it! I hope I can get back on it sometime next season. Stay tuned!

Charles