Review

Various
Protocol: A Guide to the Collegiate Audition Process For Trombone: (Tenor Trombone, Euphonium and Bass Trombone)

Arranged by Larry Clark and Daniel Schmidt


New York, NY, United States
Publisher: Carl Fischer
Date of Publication: 2009
URL: http://www.carlfischer.com
Language: English

Primary Genre: Study Material - book

Students who are preparing for college auditions are wise to look for sound advice on how to prepare and what to expect. Protocol is a helpful new resource that, in spite of some sloppy editing, will prove useful to those navigating the audition process.

Larry Clark, former chair of the wind and percussion department at Syracuse University, and Daniel Schmidt, director of bands at Northern Arizona University, offer up several pages of excellent, reliable advice about the college audition process. Their focus is on preparation and the kinds of things that one can expect when arriving at an audition site. They provide checklists of questions to ask, information about theory and music history placement exams and considerations for choosing an institution; all of this information is well written and will be welcome reading by any young player heading to a college music audition. Scales and arpeggios – a staple of undergraduate auditions – are included as well.

The heart of the book contains several orchestral excerpts for tenor and bass trombone and euphonium as well as some studies and solos that the authors believe would be good audition material; piano accompaniment is provided for the solos. But it is here that things get problematic. The list of “most requested pieces on collegiate music auditions” suffers from several typos – such as C. Kopprasch rather than Georg Kopprasch, and Patrick McArty instead of McCarty – and in the bass trombone list, none of the listed solos or etudes are included in the book. The commentary by David Vining, professor of trombone at Northern Arizona University, about how to approach the included excerpts is useful and on mark, but the excerpts themselves suffer from confusing misprints. For instance, diminuendi in bars seven  and eight of the Schumann Rhenish Symphony bass trombone excerpt are instead written as accents; slurs in the tenor tuba solo in Mars from Holst’s The Planets, which are specifically highlighted in Vining’s notes on the excerpt, are missing. Also missing are tempo indications for six excerpts. The layout in this section is also careless, with mis-numbering of measure numbers – both the tenor and bass trombone Hungarian March excerpts contain the same material but are numbered differently – and many excerpts whose first line is not indented. One should expect better adherence to house engraving rules from a major publisher like Carl Fischer. The first of the first trombone solos from Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 is included but without commentary; translation of the many German instructions in the part would have been a welcome addition. Curious, new accents are added to Oscar Blume’s Etude No. 8 that do not appear in Carl Fischer’s own edition of the studies and David Vining’s editing for bass trombone of the Galliard Sonata No. 1 is a bit curious, with many octave displacements that seem awkward and change the contour of the piece (and the title of the fourth movement should be Hornpipe a l’Inglese, not Hornpipe a lÕInglese). This is not just picking nits – these are simply examples of a sloppy approach that permeates the book and mars its integrity and reliability. One major mistake must be noted: in the piano part to Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique, the resolution of the chord in bar 38 is missing – change the top note in the right hand from the printed c-natural to a b-flat on beat three. 

Protocol – also available in editions for many other instruments including trumpet, flute, clarinet, saxophone and all strings – is a good idea that is made less useful by careless proofreading and a rather messy editorial approach. Future printings should clear up the many nagging problems that take away from the books’ clarity of purpose and great potential for usefulness. Until then, students can glean good insight from much of the text while developing their own research skills to correct mistakes and rectify omissions in the excerpts, studies and solos. 

-Douglas Yeo
Arizona State University