I interviewed Mark on July 23, 2022 with questions submitted by participants in this year’s mock audition.

1. What is your approach with orchestral auditions? Do you recommend taking auditions for the sake of practice, or only if you are really serious about the job?

Well, everyone needs to get their feet wet, and that’s important. I think it’s a good idea to get the audition list, and spend some time studying and preparing it. I know these days, there are some screening processes.

You can look at it realistically, and think, “Maybe this would be kind of a long shot to get the gig, but I’m going to do this anyway and see what it’s all about, see how much I like it.”

If you have a few experiences like that, and hopefully they’re not too traumatic, you can start to build from there. After that period of time, when you start to really understand what you need to do to get ready, and what to expect, it’s a good idea to really start focusing on what you have to do to win. Don’t go just for the heck of it, or just to practice.

2. Can you audition without having a music degree? 

As far as I know, you can. I don’t think there is a degree requirement to audition, but that’s not to say that the committee might look at your resume and have some questions about it.

There are certainly cases in which very successful orchestral players never actually finished a degree. So, it does happen. I don’t think they were kept from getting the job because they didn’t finish their degree.

3. What is your preferred way to decrease anxiety about an audition?

[Mark] If I’m not mistaken, the root of a lot of performance anxiety is a suspicion that you are not ready to perform, are not up to it, or a lack of confidence.

I know when I’ve felt uneasy about performing, it’s usually been because I don’t feel quite ready, and I suspect that I might screw it up. I don’t think that’s the only reason for anxiety, but if you look at a lot of situations, you might come to that conclusion eventually. Although, it is complicated- there are psychological reasons as well. Different kinds of fears feed into this.

I am not speaking for others- a lot of this is your own approach, and your own psychology towards playing and performing. But for me, it would be to have a higher degree of certainty that things will sound the way that I want them to.

I have found that to be a good antidote, always, in my career. If you unpack that answer, then you can easily  trace it back to preparation: What have I done to prepare for the audition? How good and thorough has my preparation been? Have I really tried everything in different ways?

You can never guarantee that things are going to go the way that you plan, but I think you can find practice techniques that allow you to have a higher degree of certainty that things will turn out the way that you want to.

I guess that’s not a really fancy answer. Practice better, get ready, and then get out there and show your stuff. Don’t be afraid- you did the preparation, so it should work out, right?

But, that’s the kind of performer I am. I take risks, I throw caution to the wind, but I do so with the knowledge of what I’m doing, and with a certainty that things are going to be okay. That’s the way I’ve been able to protect myself from getting too nervous in my career.

I think it’s very complicated, and everybody has questions about how to deal with this- specifically with the whole [orchestral] audition thing. There’s a perfection dynamic, which is not necessarily natural, and I think that is difficult to deal with psychologically. But it carries through in orchestral performance- you can’t screw it up. When the time comes, you gotta do it right. You gotta find a way.

[Alyse] So, you talked about practice techniques- what about the psychological side?

[Mark] I think the way you practice can be positive and productive, and give you confidence, which is going to help you fight the battle against fear. The psychological aspect is fear.

That is a very basic emotion. It’s an unavoidable one- fear of failing, fear of humiliation, fear of the unknown. You’re dealing with really fundamental stuff. I’m not a psychologist, but I do believe that there is a lot to be said for facing the fear- defining what it is you’re afraid of. This is incredibly important, because fear has an irrational component.

Try to bring it to light, bring rationality into it. What are you doing, and what are you afraid of? I also think that acceptance is important. You have to surrender to fear. Fear is stronger than you, and it will be present. It’s a very basic component of being alive. I think that you have to try to make friends with it. It’s going to be with you, it’s part of the career. You will fear making mistakes.

Bring your fear close to you, don’t try to push it away. Try to be friends with it- it is you, it’s not somebody else who’s your enemy. This is your mind, which you need to respect, telling you things. And you need to listen, but also to have a discussion with it.

Over time, you do get used to situations, and your fear becomes appropriate to the threat. It does take a lot of experience, and it does take positive experiences in which you have proven to yourself that you can overcome your fear. I hope that all my students are able to have positive experiences with music and performance, and that those things will help them be more understanding about their fear, and therefore make it smaller.

It’s not just a performing career that has this, right? You can be afraid of a lot of things. There’s a lot of scary stuff in life.

[Alyse] I guess in a lot of ways, any sort of job is a performance, in its own way. Ours is just a little more public.

[Mark] Well, I think because of the nature of live performance, you do your homework, and then you turn it in and have it graded in real time.

[Alyse] Yeah, that’s true! You see how it goes.

[Mark] Right? So there’s not that delay where the teacher’s going to take it home and grade it, and get back to you about how you did. That is the burden you carry in live performance- it’s the fun and the thrill, but it’s also the risk. You know, where there is great risk, there is great reward, and vice versa.

4. What recommendations do you have on how to structure a practice plan when preparing an audition list? 

This has become a frequently discussed topic these days, and a lot of players are sharing their audition preparation stuff. I think it’s great- you can find a lot of information on that.

Like everything else, you have to find what works at first, feel your way through, and then you can start to really define what really works for you. I think the basic component is time.

In order to improve as a flutist, as an artist, you need one thing- you need time, and that can be a hard thing to come by. That’s one of the biggest challenges- getting time to do the work, and to do the work the right way, without feeling too frantic.

The idea is that you know you’re going to prepare a whole bunch of stuff that needs to all be played perfectly on the same day. So when you’re structuring how you spend your time, you need to realize that that is what has to happen. Give yourself plenty of time for preparation, like a month.

You know when you go to the doctor, they take what’s called a baseline reading of your health, right? You have a physical, and they want to see what’s wrong with you right now. Then a year from now, if something else is wrong with you, they can compare it to the first time. So you need to take a baseline reading of your playing, in some way, and that can be a little bit hard to do. 

If you know what you need to work on the most, I think it really helps. And  that’s where you must start when you’re preparing a performance, or an audition. You have to see- I still sound okay on that, I can pretty much play that one, and not too worried about this one. Then you have other ones that you really can’t play anymore, and need to go back to square one and work on it. 

Split your list into three categories: 1) stuff that’s in pretty good shape already, 2) stuff that’s just okay, but you definitely need to spend some time on it, and then 3) things that are kind of a disaster and you really need to spend some serious time on, or maybe some excerpts that are more difficult for you.

I think another essential part of preparing an audition is re-evaluation. The baseline is how you sound, right now. You should use your recorder, listen to each excerpt, and see how it is. 

But then, I think you have to also go back, record it, and ask the same questions- is it good? If it’s good, what’s good? If it’s not good, what’s wrong with it?

Get organized with each excerpt- do you need to question things that you thought were good before? Maybe some time has passed, and you realize maybe you made the wrong decision before.

That is a really time-consuming process- reevaluating each excerpt, and questioning whether you want to really change things. Maybe you’re just a better player now than you were at your last audition, and you’ve got a bunch of bad habits that you have to fix. That can happen.

There has to be some time for that stage, and all that has to happen as quickly as possible when you’re getting ready. You shouldn’t drag or procrastinate in that phase, you have to attack all of that as quickly as possible.

There’s a lot of specifics that go into this. Some people have an extremely developed process that they go through- their own boot camp. They put themselves through whatever torture to make sure they are going to come out the other side and win. There is an element of that- you gotta toughen yourself up, you gotta be consistent, you gotta be able to play a lot, you’ve gotta survive it- don’t hurt yourself. You’ve gotta survive all the repetition, and still sound like you love the repertoire.

There’s a lot of challenges there, and that’s one reason I’m writing these orchestral excerpt practice books- [which include] different ways to practice excerpts. Repetition is a big problem that we have: practicing bad habits, the same thing practicing over and over. All of these issues are very real once you try to spend a whole bunch of time getting ready for an audition.You’ve gotta find a way to stay fresh.

 People talk about other aspects as well- your health, your diet, and it certainly all plays in. You’ve gotta find a way to get to the finish line still standing. 

Attitudes- not just about nerves, but about competition. You’ve gotta really figure out your approach about competition- how you feel about it, how it makes you feel. A lot of it has to be looked at. 

It all really comes back to time. You need to carve it out somehow. Your partner or spouse has to understand what you’re doing, and give you that time.

There’s a lot of personal issues to be worked out if you’re going to spend this kind of time investment. But if you can sit down with a piece of paper at the beginning, and really think about it, write out a schedule for yourself. How are you going to do this? When are you going to do it? Then you hopefully get yourself in tip top shape for that one day, when it’s your day.

5. What changes have you observed in orchestras and auditions throughout your career?

[Mark] Well, there have been some. I think that young players are much more savvy about the audition process than they used to be. The whole business has had to become more organized. Orchestras have had to do a better job at getting people through the audition process in ways that make sense.

Other things that have changed- certainly the whole idea of a screening process. That was just being started when I was coming up. Actually, that was one of the ways I learned to work with a recorder so I could hear myself. I had to make recordings for audition prescreenings.

It was kind of an epiphany to be able to do this, and then I realized- wow, I can really change how I play by analyzing this recording. That was the beginning of a huge self- teaching adventure. I’ve used techniques and information from that process my whole career. I think it allowed me to get out of the teacher dependence thing, where you are constantly going to the next guru to find “the secret.” 

Of course, all they’re going to offer you is how they did it, and that’s not you. You gotta find out how you personally are going to do this. The coaches and teachers- you’ve gotta remember everything they tell you and see whether it works for you. And therein lies the value of that education, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there. 

But ultimately, and as soon as possible in your career, you have to get independent, and you have to form your own effective opinions- not just negative opinions about how other people play- that’s easy. But the hard stuff, which is looking at your own playing, and being able to effectively decide and make changes that you really believe in. That’s the money in the bank, that’s what gives you a career.

Once you get used to it, using a recorder is very important. I think a lot of players are wise to it now, and use a recorder as a good tool.

Everything is more developed about the audition process by necessity, and the whole screening discussion is a little bit thorny. I know in St. Louis, we really did try to hear everybody, and give everybody a fair shot. I think if you’re going to make a mistake, you should make a mistake on that side, instead of excluding too many people from the audition based on their experience, or lack of.

One huge change has been in the tenure process. After you win the audition, when I was coming up, there was more of an assumption that if you could win the audition, then you could do the job. There was a fair amount of faith in the audition process working in that way. If you could prove it on that day, then the likelihood was that you’re going to be able to learn what you need to learn in order to keep the job.

I think that has sort of crumbled, and now the audition seems to be a first step approval in a much longer process. On the one hand, I think it’s good that the whole tenure thing has become more of a discussion, and that it may seem like it’s sort of more fair than it used to be. But on the other hand, I think there is a temptation for the tenure process to become a very exaggerated and very different kind of review after you’ve already proven yourself in the audition.

Dismissals after the tenure process have become much more common, from what I’ve observed, and with my students going into the orchestras. That poses all kinds of complicated questions. Back in the day, after you’ve been in the orchestra for a year or so, you get a call from the personnel manager and he’d say “yeah, you got tenure,” or “no, you didn’t get tenure, you’re gonna be gone at the end of the year,” and that was the end of it.

Prior to that phone call, it was very hard to find out how you were doing. Does the conductor like you? How are you doing with your playing? Do your colleagues like you and your playing? It was very hard to find these things out. During your tenure period, you’d just go to work, keep plugging away, and hope for the best. 

I found that to be psychologically very difficult. And a little bit terrifying- you know that there is a day coming when you’re going to get a phone call, and the personnel manager is going to say yes or no.

Now, there are extensive meetings between various people, all who are trying to tell you their own personal opinion about how you’re doing. In a way, it can drive a player just as crazy, or it’s worse.

[Alyse] Yeah, I don’t know if that’s an improvement or not.

[Mark] Yeah, too much of a good thing, you know. In St. Louis, they would try to streamline it so we would meet with the music director and tell them our opinions, and then the music director would meet with the musicians, but there were a bunch of these meetings. I think St. Louis had a two year tenure review process, which is an eternity for a player who won the audition. Ostensibly, that day, they were better than everybody else.

That’s a really tough one. There are people out there right now who are trying to address this. There’s a certain amount of psychological strain on a new employee who has to undergo this. I kind of feel like somewhere in there, there’s got to be a happy medium of some kind.

It’s difficult, you’re dealing with an art and a person. If you hired them in the audition, then what you should be saying is that you’re okay with us. There’s some stuff you might have to learn, or some changes you may have to make that the music director will be in touch with you about. But basically, you’re okay.

There seems to be a negative element that comes in. You were okay on the day of the audition, but now we want to see if you’re okay over this next year or two. And by the way, can you change all of this stuff that we come up with during the two years. 

It can easily be a mess.

I think that’s a really big difference- the problem that has emerged with that, maybe too much of a good thing. I don’t know. 

There have been changes- orchestras seem to be more egalitarian than they used to be. As a principal in an orchestra now, I could see that the way the orchestra wanted to be was everybody more on the same level of esteem in the orchestra. The principal players were no longer considered to be better, as they once were. There have been some changes there.

Managements change- in and out, different trends. It’s highly individual, depending on which board and which orchestra you’re talking about. It’s hard to say if there are any real trends you can put your finger on. 

Some orchestras have done well, and some haven’t. Some managements are helpful and good, and they grow the orchestra, and some are the opposite. When I started, I spent a number of years in my career, too many, dealing with the strikes, unions, work stoppages, and threats from management towards musicians.

All this strife that is part of orchestral life, and they don’t talk about that stuff in school. It can be a tough world out there in orchestra. I think that it’s still that way. 

Because of tenure and because we’re unionized these days, we’re seen as a little bit more job secure than private sector mid-management, and I think that’s great. But I think anti-union sentiment is as strong as I’ve ever seen it, and musicians have to stand up for themselves, as always, to try to keep the conditions, or improve their conditions. It’s the same battle that I was in my whole career, and I think anyone in the business now is in for the same. I’m not sure that has really changed.

6. How did you maintain your playing for the 20 years you spent playing Principal Flute in the St. Louis Symphony?

One could argue that I didn’t [laughs]. At a certain point, are you going to play better tomorrow than you play today? I don’t know. I don’t think it was hard. Once you get on the train as a principal flute in a major orchestra, the you deal with the demands of the job on a daily basis. I don’t think there’s any problem maintaining- you have to work so hard to keep up and to keep the conductors happy, your colleagues happy, and do the recordings and tours. You play so much, maintaining is not that huge of a problem.

People will ask, well what do you have to do to warm up? Well, do you ever really warm down? That whole Dale Clevenger sort of stuff. 

It’s true though, you always have to turn on the recorder and listen to yourself- have the courage to face it. Do you sound worse than you did yesterday- really? If you do, can you admit it, and what are you going to do about it? I really tried to do that. Being conscientious, making sure you really keep your fundamentals healthy. That’s an important part of it- you gotta keep track of that stuff. 

I did the best I could with it throughout my whole career, almost 40 years of it. It was fun, I had a great time. You’ll kind of live in the practice room, and that’s where the real work is done. Then the rest of it is kind of fun. You  kind of show your homework all the time. That idea was really helpful.

I think teaching is really important. Students are so inspiring, and that’s a very important way to maintain your playing and spirit, and to try to keep learning to learn new stuff. With students, you always encounter things that are new, and people who are new. It’s a joy as an artist to stay in touch with the young people who are doing it, and starting out. To care about them and take care of them, teach them the lessons that they need to learn. 

I’ve tried to do that my whole career as well, and I think that’s helped me a lot in terms of staying on top of it. I’m still at it- I’m not going down that easily. Certainly teaching a lot, that’s for sure.

Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.