The 48 hours before an orchestra audition

The biggest mistakes I see in the last two days before an audition are almost all mental. By the time you've traveled to the city, the practicing is mostly behind you. What's left is your own head, and in the final 48 hours your head is not always on your side.

You know the thoughts. I'm not prepared. Why am I even doing this? You start second-guessing choices you made months ago, the tempo you settled on, a fingering, the whole plan. You second-guess the practicing itself. And then, if you're not careful, you go looking for proof.

That last one is the dangerous part. You sit down in the hotel or the warmup room and you start testing the hardest spots, running them again and again, because some part of you needs to know they're still there. Here's what actually happens. You play the hard passage ten times, and on the eighth or ninth one you miss it, because anyone will eventually miss anything if they repeat it enough with that kind of pressure on it. Now you've done it. You've handed your subconscious the exact evidence it was hunting for: see, you're not ready. You went looking for reassurance and manufactured the opposite.

What you need to do in these last two days is the reverse of testing. You need to raise the trust you have in yourself, and the trust you have in the work you've already done, work you can't meaningfully add to now anyway. And, as strange as that sounds for something this stressful, you need to raise the level of love you have for being a musician and a creative artist. If you can walk onto that stage trusting yourself, grateful that you get to do this at all, and actually looking forward to performing, you'll play your best. I believe that completely. It's easy to say and harder to do.

Keep the days normal

Your mind takes comfort in the familiar, and the familiar is exactly what you want when you're trying to convince yourself there's nothing unusual about today. If you exercise, exercise. If you eat a certain way, eat that way. Don't suddenly start carb-loading or fasting or trying a workout you've never done because something you read promised it would help. New is the enemy this week.

This is part of why I travel the way I do. I get to the city the day before I play, or earlier if the climate or altitude is different enough to bother my reeds. I pick a hotel about a twenty-minute walk from the hall, close enough to skip the stress of transit and parking, far enough that I'm not marinating in a lobby full of clarinetists running Daphnis at full volume. The walk to the hall does its own quiet work. It gives the nerves somewhere to go.

Remind yourself that nothing genuinely new is going to happen out there. You've played these excerpts. You've played them under pressure. And in the rare case something unexpected does come up, a reed shifts, a string player two rooms over throws off your tuning, the committee asks for something in an odd order, you're fully equipped to handle it. Handling things is most of what years of playing has actually taught you. There's no situation you haven't quietly been preparing for the whole time.

Practice to build confidence, not to interrogate it

You'll practice some. Of course you will. Just make sure the practicing is built to increase your confidence and your relaxation, not to put your readiness on trial. Play slowly. Play the openings of excerpts in the right character so the first note feels like an old friend. Play the things you know you sound good on. You are not in the practice room to find weaknesses anymore. That window has closed. You're there to remember how it feels to play well.

So, no testing yourself in the practice room. I'll say it a second time because it's the single most common way I watch a prepared player walk in already half-defeated.

If you're a reed player, make your reed decision in the hotel, not in the warmup room, unless there's an objective reason to change, like the reed actually cracking or becoming extremely unresponsive. The warmup room is the worst possible place to make that call. You're surrounded by other people's sound and your own nerves, and you are nowhere near the clear-headed end of the scale. The test I use to choose: I imagine the audition is a chamber concert I'm genuinely excited to play, and I ask which reed I'd want to play for that concert. Then I commit to it before I leave the room.

Trust the plan

When it's finally time to walk out, there's really one job left. Trust the plan you put in place. Trust the abilities you've built over years of playing. Trust the preparation. You did the work, and the last 48 hours are not for adding to it. They're for getting yourself to the stage still believing in it.

This is the part of Behind the Screen that's hardest to put on a practice chart, because all of it happens on the inside. The book gets into the physical and mental routines I use to stay in that headspace, along with the survival kit and the full warmup-room countdown. If you want the whole thing, it's on Lulu. And if you want to talk through your own head game before a specific audition, reach out about coaching.