Honoré Daumier, “Concours du Conservatoire”, lithograph, 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (public domain).
To get into an orchestra you play behind a screen. The candidate enters the hall, walks on a carpet so that the sound of shoes will not reveal whether he or she is a man or a woman, does not speak, does not greet, and plays for a committee that hears but does not see. In many procedures the candidate is assigned a number and no one may name them. It is the most brutal and the most honest system the music world has invented.
It was not always like this. Until the 1960s and 1970s, in most orchestras, positions were assigned by invitation: the music director or the principal flagged someone, usually one of their own students, and that person came in. The result is documented by photographs of orchestras from those days, which are rows of men trained by the same three or four teachers.
The screen arrives in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1970s, pushed by lawsuits and union pressure. A 2000 study by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, which analysed the audition records of major American orchestras, estimated that the introduction of the screen significantly increased the probability of a woman advancing past the early rounds. That work has been much cited and in recent years also debated on statistical grounds, and it is best reported for what it is, an estimate and not a certainty. The fact no one disputes is the other one: the composition of orchestras has changed radically since the criterion became what you hear.
How it really works. The first round is almost always a set piece for the instrument, that is, a solo piece, plus a series of orchestral excerpts, which are the most exposed points of the repertoire: those where the instrument is left alone and there is nothing to hide behind. Every instrument has its list, the same for decades, and whoever prepares spends months on a handful of minutes of music. The second round raises the stakes. In the final round, generally, the screen comes down, because at that point they also assess how a person sits in a section, and that you have to see.
The paradox of the system is here, and it is the point that concerns Italy more than any other. The screen selects superbly for who plays well for three minutes alone under pressure. It says almost nothing about what one then does for thirty years: sitting inside a collective sound, following a baton, changing colour in three seconds because someone asked, counting a hundred and twenty bars of rest without losing the count. Those things are seen in rehearsal, not in audition, and that is why after the competition there is the trial period.
The system’s virtue, though, remains enormous and should be defended precisely by those who care about merit. Behind a screen it does not matter which conservatory you come from, it does not matter who your teacher was, it does not matter whom you have worked with, it does not matter what is on your CV. A sound counts. In a country where almost every other professional selection passes through titles, scores and connections, this is one of the few entrance tests in which the paperwork is of no use.
The things to look at, to judge whether a competition is serious, are three and they are public. If the call states which excerpts are required, with the edition and the exact bars, the competition is made to be prepared for. If the committee includes outsiders, the competition is made to be won by someone who is not from the house. And if between the date of the call and the signing of the contract there are months and not years, the position really existed.
The rest is accounting, and Melos will return to that with the numbers: how many calls the foundations publish each year, how many reach the announcement of a winner, and how many end with a signature.