better late than never

(I wrote this a while ago, but with Timmy's ordeal it just never got posted. I felt it still deserved to be posted ... so here goes!)
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It is true, our summer activities have been done for about a month so why has it been so hard for me to blog????

I had an audition

It was actually a really big deal for me and occupied any extra brain space that I had left. I know that your next question is ... "how did it go?" I wish I had an easy answer, but here is what happened.

It was a blind audition. I was pretty proud of my playing in the first round, despite my nerves. I made it to the second round :-) and played better, I even got all of the hard spots in Tombeau!! (This is the excerpt that was my Nemesis. I couldn't even play it a month ago!)

Verdict comes back that they hired .......... no one. Yup, that's what I thought too! How could they hire no one? Well, they invited us to go and meet the panel and get feed back if we wanted to do that, which I definitely did! (I do VERY well with feed back).

I met the panel and all seven had raving reviews of my playing! The only thing that they had any issue with at all was my rhythm. This makes sense to me because I can have this tendency to play a little uneven when I am:
A) nervous
B) not playing with a metronome/conductor
C) all combined

They kept raving about my great pitch, my musicality, my hard work (after they realized that I prepared an audition with 2 small children at home), my dynamics, my ability to "nail the hard stuff" and finally ending with telling me how close I was and that it was just "not quite good enough to offer me a full time position" (dang rhythm). They did offer me a contract to play the Christmas concert with them, which of course I accepted. One of the women on the panel is involved in a smaller orchestra in a different small town and asked my permission to give them my name. Later I got an email from the oboe player asking if she can pass my name onto yet a different orchestra. So where I didn't get the job I went for I "kind of" got three jobs. I know they didn't offer anything to the other auditioners and so I was the best there, which is good news.

The panel kept saying over and over that they really want me to come and audition next year, which I will.

So the overall result was more positive than negative and I feel good about myself and my playing. Though I can't help but feel a little disheartened. Nobody likes to hear that they are really really good, and a very impressive player, just not quite good enough. Oh well!