Commissioned by: Matt Albert

Duration: ca. 7’

Program Note: Every year, hundreds of extremely talented, high-level musicians will compete for one of very few job openings in symphony orchestras around the world. Auditions for these highly-coveted jobs consist of performing snippets of famous (or notoriously difficult) orchestral works, which are called excerpts. Using material from orchestral excerpts, Excerptional Circumstances explores what might happen if two violinists were mistakenly assigned the same practice space right before going onstage for a very high-stakes audition...

The Premise : Excerptional Circumstances is a highly theatrical work, a cross between a piece of music and a comedic sketch. It begins in a very high-pressure, high-stakes environment where something is immediately wrong: two violinists have been assigned the same time slot in the same warm-up room before an audition. While neither character is inherently rude or mean-spirited, both are trying to complete their usual pre-audition warm-up rituals and find it increasingly difficult to mentally prepare due to the other person’s presence. Growing increasingly desperate, they try out different techniques to try to gain the quiet room they both desire: interrupting, ignoring, intimidating, and imitating, all while using the musical material of existing orchestral excerpts. Eventually the tension bursts into a joyful, fiddling jam session where the players riff on their audition material.

Video recording coming soon!