Today I was a member of a voting panel to elect the new 3rd horn in the auckland phil. It was my first time to listen and vote to choose who will play next to me every week. I hard and exciting decision which I've been looking forward to! We started with twelve candidates and arrived at two who were awarded trials. However this meant eliminating ten others. Which is just the way it goes, except that six of them happened to be friends of mine at some point in my life. It's just hard to watch your friends go down. Although I can't change the way someone sounded, in the end I had to make some tough calls and eliminate my friends. A sad feeling.

During the audition I wondered at how on earth I had made it through such an unforgiving screening process! I don't know how I did it except through working hard and luck when it counted most.


-Carl