The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 017 Nick Platoff: Winning the Audition - Before, During, & After

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

In this episode, I speak to Nick Plattoff, Associate Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony since 2016.  He and I talk about the audition process and how he went about to prepare for his SFS audition, how audition day was like, and how he prepared to step in to his new life as a professional musician in one of America's top orchestras.  We cover: His path, growing up with parents that fostered a culturally rich environment for their children Why he says music is a form of love How he came to choose the trombone and what was his motivation to keep playing The influence on summer camp in his decision to become a musician How he decided to put his multiple musical interests on hold while working on his trombone skills, and how that paid off What New World Symphony brought him, outside of the practice room and stage How deciding to focus solely on the audition process was crucial His audition plan and how he prepared for the audition     ALL ABOUT NICK PLATOFF:   Nick's website: https://www.platoffmusic.com/ San Francisco Symphony – about Nick: https://www.sfsymphony.org/About-Us/Musicians-Conductors/Members-Of-Orchestra/Trombones#artist-30720 San Francisco Symphony – Profile of Nick Platoff: www.sfsymphony.org/nickplatoff   YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT5z0tsqrLxgMFfyVuwaz8w Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sfsymphony/videos/308411646590076/ Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/nickplatoff/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickplatoff   Biography In April 2016, Nicholas Platoff was appointed the Associate Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony by Michael Tilson Thomas. He has been recognized in both national and international competitions, as winner of the Aspen Music Festival and School Brass and Percussion Concerto Competition, National Brass Symposium Trombone Excerpt Competition and United States Coast Guard Band Young Artist Competition. In September 2015, he was the only American to advance to the second round of the ARD competition in Munich. Prior to joining the SFS, Platoff spent two years as a fellow with the New World Symphony in Miami. He earned his Bachelors of Music degree with Brass Department Honors, majoring in Trombone Performance and Music Theory from Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music. He is also a proud alumnus of New Haven's Neighborhood Music School. His teachers include Michael Mulcahy, Per Brevig, Christopher Davis, Peter Ellefson, Terrence Fay, Randall Hawes, Timothy Higgins, and Douglas Wright. Platoff's experience in artistic planning dates back to high school, when he co-produced a day-long music festival in his backyard to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In college, he founded the Players' Operation Chamber Orchestra and served as its conductor and artistic director, presenting concerts that featured student soloists and premiered student compositions. During his time with the New World Symphony, he produced and curated "MIXTAPE," the first-ever concert of the New Audience Fellow Initiative, which offered a multi-genre program to a standing room audience. He is also a committed educator and works weekly as the low brass section coach for the award-winning SFS Youth Orchestra. He was a co-founder of the Miami Brass Festival, a day-long clinic for young brass players. His trombone students have been accepted to many of the top music programs in the country, including the Manhattan School of Music and San Francisco Conservatory, as well as the Interlochen Arts Academy and Boston University Tanglewood Institute. During the summers, Platoff has performed at the Verbier Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, Britten-Pears Programme, the National Orchestral Institute, and the Aspen Music Festival and School, where he was the Per Brevig Trombone Fellow. In the summer of 2017, he performed at Festival Mozaic, the Lakes Area Music Festival, and Burning Man.   If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on iTunes!  I truly appreciate your support! Visit www.mindoverfinger.com for information about past and future podcasts, and for more resources on mindful practice. Join the Mind Over Finger Tribe here!  https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfingertribe/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme!  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson. Also a HUGE thank you to my fantastic producer, Bella Kelly!   MIND OVER FINGER: www.mindoverfinger.com https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/

You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 17. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. In this episode, I speak to Nick Platoff, Associate Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony, and if you're a musician preparing for an important audition or performance, this is the episode for you. Nick joined the San Francisco Symphony as Associate Principal Trombone in April 2016. After graduating from the BNN School of Music of Northwestern University, he joined the New World Symphony and became very involved with the orchestra's activities.

Among other projects, he produced and curated Mixtape, the first-ever concert of the New Audience Fellow Initiative. Nick is a committed educator, and he serves as coach for the San Francisco Youth Orchestra, and he also pursues several artistic ventures arranging and composing music. Nick and I talk about the audition process and how he prepared for his San Francisco audition and he really tells it all. He gives us all the details on the process of preparing for the audition, how he organized audition day to make sure he really was at his best

and what he did to get ready to step into his new life as a professional musician and one of America's top orchestras. orchestras. So grab a pen and pencil and give this episode a couple listenings because there's a lot of great information coming your way. Let's go to the show. Nick Platoff, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Nick, you're the Associate Principal Trombone with the San Francisco Symphony, And I wanted to have you on the show because I think that you can really offer a great perspective on the whole process of preparing for an audition, winning a position, and what it's like to begin a career with one of the world's major orchestra.

So you've been with the San Francisco Symphony since 2016, and you're well established now, but it's still recent enough that the trajectory leading to this is still fresh. And I'm really curious to hear about your viewpoint on it now, two years later. But before we jump into all of that good stuff, I'd love to hear about your musical journey before San Francisco. So can you please tell us about you and your background and how you got started in music and how your artistic path has unfolded before you became a professional? Absolutely. So my journey began really from before I was born. My dad is a musicologist and he is the kind of person who cries for music very easily. He feels music very intensely.

And I was attending performances even before I was born. And, you know, I can't remember what my first concert experience was because music was always a part of my life. And music was not just something happening in the background, but in my family, I think that music was a form of love the same way that food can be a form of love or time can be, you know, sort of a love language or gifts or whatever. Music was an important love language from, you know, before I was aware of anything. um so my my dad was always playing uh the music that he knew and loved really well um he's a Beatles scholar and a Mozart scholar so there's lots of um those kinds of music um happening in my house in addition to just you know really anything else and I really owe a lot to my dad and my family life um overall for getting me started in a mindset for music that is

all about embracing music's most positive things. And I didn't enter music feeling any sort of guilt or judgment about it. They never pressured me to practice. It was just always a positive, you know, infinite source for me from the first day. So there was always music happening in my house and it was clear that I wanted to get more involved. You know, we would always sing together in the car on road trips. Um, when I was growing up, that was around the time that minivans started to sometimes have, um, TV screens in them. So a lot of my friends were watching SpongeBob in the car, um, during road trips with their family. And I, with my two sisters, of course, begged my parents for one of those minivans, but they very smartly refused.

And instead we sang rounds in the car. We would sing row, row, row your boat or, um, things like that. And I remember my older sister, you know, being the crazy overachiever that she is, and she still is, she's now a surgical resident in Philadelphia. She would harmonize the melodies sometimes, just on the spot with no preparation. And I remember thinking, oh, well, you know, if Becca can do that, I can do that too. And so there was a sort of a healthy competition there. And from even before I started taking lessons on trombone, I was already just obsessed with music. So I started playing trombone in fourth grade after I heard a performance of the local high

school jazz band playing some music from the James Bond movies, which I thought was really the coolest thing ever. And I was a pretty tall kid and I thought I would be able to reach all the way to seventh position on the trombone, which ended up being true. And trombone was sort of love at first sight. I just connected with the trombone really well. And I always really liked it. And, you know, to be completely honest with your with your listeners here, I think that my motivation at the beginning to continue playing had just as much to do with feeding my ego as it did with, you know, loving music. I wasn't the most athletic kid in my in my school. And I wasn't the most

comfortable, you know, talking to girls or just really talking to anybody. I wasn't the most comfortable in my own skin at that time. And trombone was something I was good at. Trombone was something I was better at than my peers. And it was really comforting to like have a skill like to be useful, to be sort of recognized like, oh, you know, even though, you know, band wasn't the cool thing to do at my school, there was an area where I was special. And I think that was one of the main things that made me want to continue playing. And so I led a pretty normal life at that time and continued playing trombone in school. And I was taking lessons on the side and I was playing in some extra youth orchestra and youth band and playing jazz and lots of

stuff, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to do it professionally. I was on the swim team. I was doing lots of school stuff. And then when I was 16, I went to Brevard Music Center in North Carolina for six weeks. And that was the first time that I was around other kids my age who were equally obsessed with music. And I had my first experience playing Mahler there. We played Mahler First Symphony, which for an angsty 16-year-old is really a life-changing experience. I'd never heard music before that made me feel things like that. And I loved being exclusively in an environment where people also cared about music and we could geek out together about recordings we loved and, you know, just the, the excitement of discovering lots of pieces of music for the

first time. Like I remember going to a violin recital when I was 16 that summer and hearing somebody perform the Kreutzer Sonata by Beethoven for the first time and just my mind being completely blown and to be in a community where everybody was celebrating that kind of thing. And as opposed to my high school where most of my peers wouldn't really understand like why hearing the Kreutzer Sonata would be so significant to me. That was kind of when I decided that I wanted to do music professionally. And so that was the summer before my junior year of high school. And after that, I started practicing way more. I started taking CDs out of the library where I would ask my dad to bring CDs home from the college library where he teaches. My dad, by the way, is named John Pladoff, and he's a professor of music at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. So I would have him, you know, bring me home some CDs. And I discovered Ein Heldenleben and more Mahler pieces and, you know, just lots of brass-tacular things. And I started to go out and take lessons with some of the more prominent trombone teachers and eventually settled on Northwestern, which I think was absolutely the right school for me.

So I went to Northwestern and was studying with Michael Mulcahy, an amazing teacher, in addition to four other faculty members, including Tim Higgins, who's principal trombone here in San Francisco and now my colleague. I had such a fantastic experience at Northwestern. And one of the things that I loved about it was I got to do a lot of different things. I had this amazing world-class trombone faculty teaching me about that side of music making. But they also really didn't stand in my way when I expressed interest in wanting to explore other realms within music. Like, I really seriously considered a second major in voice performance while I was there. I really fell in love with singing in choirs. And I learned that if you can sing low notes in tune and you can sight read, then you're employable as a choral musician.

So my sophomore year, I started singing with one of the choirs at school. And then after that, started singing professionally in Chicago at St. James Cathedral. It's the Episcopal Cathedral and they have a fabulous choir there. I learned so much from singing there. Such amazing memories there. I also got really serious about conducting while I was there. I was pretty sure that I wanted to be a conductor for a few years, and I really explored that. And not every trombone teacher, I think, would be so open to let their students explore these other things, which I think ultimately really fed my trombone playing. What happened was around the end of my degree there, I'd been enjoying all of these other things. I was doing a lot of, you know, improvising and some composing and some arranging and just enjoying lots of different, just every part of music making that I could get my hands on. But I kind of did eventually realize that what I wanted to focus on at that time was just simple trombone playing and to really step up my game in that area, which would eventually open up doors for exploring the other areas later, which ended up really paying off. So after Northwestern, I auditioned for the New World Symphony in Miami and thankfully was accepted and had just another really, really special, wonderful experience there. For those of you who don't know too much about New World Symphony, it's a three-year program in Miami Beach where you play every week with a fabulous orchestra, like probably one of the best orchestras in the world of musicians under 30. Just incredible opportunity. And you live for free in South Beach. You get a free apartment. You play in this wonderful Frank Gehry building, great facilities, tons of practice rooms. And the staff there is there to support your journey. And so they bring in the best educators. I was taking lessons while I was there from top principal players from every major orchestra and also had opportunities to learn about leadership and communication styles and entrepreneurship and grant writing.

And, um, I had the opportunity to produce my own orchestra concert there. Like I, they, uh, wanted proposals from all the musicians in the orchestra. Um, that's like what your dream concert would be if you had all the resources you wanted. And so I wrote a proposal for sort of a multi-genre concert that it was sort of a concert version of the listening parties that I used to have in my apartment during college where we would be probably drinking PBR and eating hummus and passing the headphone cable around and everybody was showing off the cool stuff that they'd been listening to. So by the end of the night, you end up listening to some amazing performance of a Mozart symphony on period instruments, but then you hear some crazy John Coltrane recording, or then you go to some pop thing or some avant-garde new music, or maybe we were geeking out to some amazing brass playing of Mahler or Strauss, but I really enjoyed those eclectic evenings. So New World Symphony gave me the opportunity to have like artistic control over the orchestra for one week and a $25,000 budget to put on that concert. And it was really successful. And I learned so much about that, about that side of the game. and then you know a month after that was the first half of the san francisco symphony audition so i was grateful that i had also been focusing a lot during other times on just my trombone playing and i made it my life's work to win that audition and i'm happy to go into more detail about what that process was like because i think that will probably relate more specifically to the the

content that you want to talk about just about practicing and mindfully practicing but pretty much uh i yeah just focused completely intensely on the singular goal of winning the audition and in the process you know i remember like my car got towed during that time um because i was too busy practicing and to to realize that i was getting parking ticket after parking ticket and eventually my car got towed and I was sort of aware that it got towed but I didn't have the bandwidth to go deal with that because I was like I have one job right now which is to practice and then eventually like a week later I went to go deal with the car and of course at that point I'd been sitting in the tow truck lot for a week and I owed them like a thousand dollars and it was

a total nightmare but I think that kind of I it's sort of a funny story in retrospect it was not funny at the time. But in retrospect, I think that and similarly, you know, like I'm working on a project really intensely right now on like a big recording project for an arrangement I made of Silent Night, which will be out in within this week. And I've been so bad about answering emails and, you know, cleaning my apartment in the last month, because I've just been completely focused on this one thing so i think that that is definitely one part of the the story of san francisco so i took the audition and thankfully it worked out and then i moved to san francisco in sept in august of 2016 i've been here for almost two and a half years now and just absolutely

loving the city and loving the orchestra and um since starting with the orchestra now that i'm not really practicing excerpts in the same way that I was, because I'm really happy with this job. I've gotten back into sort of being a more eclectic musician, and I'm doing a lot of composing and recording these days. I'm doing a lot of teaching. We're doing a lot of outreach concerts in San Francisco with the homelessness community. And yeah, just all sorts of great stuff. It's been a great journey, and I look forward to continuing it. And maybe I should stop talking now no this is great you know i was seeing some really really cool youtube videos on these creative projects that you just mentioned where you do some loop recording and if that's

okay with you i'll include some of them in the show notes of this episode that would be great thank you there are so many things in what you just said that i think is wonderful first of all you know music is a form of love i love that and i love hearing about how for you music was put in such a positive frame as you were growing up and you know you called it an infinite source and I think that also you mentioned that the way it made you feel in high school or middle school it's such a great reminder that in addition to all these benefits we hear about from studies on how music can improve your math grades and all of these things I kind of went through the same experience as you where I feel like music can really give confidence to kids and offer them

a welcoming and stimulating environment to evolve in and I don't know I think I it can really make the difference in the child or a teenager's life when you have this one amazing thing to turn to which is music and the other thing I really love too that you said was how all of these diverse fields were you know feeding the musician you are today and it's improvising and the singing and the conducting this is a really great inspiration i think for maybe people who are in college now to remember to branch out a little bit and not be afraid to explore other genres of music or ways of exploring themselves musically outside of the instrument that they've chosen but um again my turn to stop talking um it's a wonderful journey and i would love to explore

that process right now of getting into and evolving with the san francisco symphony starting with the audition process um as you mentioned you were at new world symphony and you saw the audition call for san francisco so what next can you please unpack what preparing for this audition involved and the process and the steps that you went through sure so um a couple of things so San Francisco Symphony was not the first audition I took. I'd taken a few before that, none of which had panned out. But, you know, steady improvement. So the first one I took, I didn't advance. The second one, I did advance to semis. And then the one after that, I advanced to semis again. And when San Francisco came up, that was, of the auditions I'd taken,

the one that I wanted to win the most desperately. I had heard San Francisco Symphony do a concert in Miami the year before and was just completely blown away. I loved the way that they played. I hadn't spent a lot of time in San Francisco, but I had a feeling that it would be a city that I would love. And so I made a plan for how I was going to practice, which really, really helped me. This was like a total paradigm shift in my practice. And I'm happy to send you a photo of this document because this really was such a game changer for my practice. One of the things that was great about New World Symphony was we were constantly getting access to some of the most successful orchestral musicians in the business. And so they would constantly be coming in and

people would ask them about like, what was the difference between how you prepared for the audition that you won and the ones that you didn't win? And just world-class people talking about their journeys. So I got an idea of what it took to win this without like needing to figure it out myself first. Like I saw tons of great role models. And one thing that I did notice for sure was one way to not win an audition is to walk in there with excerpts on the list that you aren't really ready with. The kinds of things where you might say, I hope they don't ask for this. If you walk into an audition, hoping that they're not going to ask for your week excerpt, then you're not really the most prepared that you could be. So I wrote up this document, which is kind of called the San Francisco Symphony Audition Preparation Plan. And then under that, I say, I hope they don't ask for this, which is just to remind myself that I don't want to be the person who's saying, I hope they don't ask for blah, blah, blah excerpt. And so it outlines a process that I followed pretty strictly when I practiced. So the first thing before you start practicing is to listen to the excerpt with a score. And so my mom had given me a Bluetooth speaker, like just a small JBL flip for Christmas that year. And that totally changed the way that I practiced.

I kept it in my case, and I had my Spotify playlist of all of the music that I needed to, all of the excerpts. And so before, and then the other thing that I had was on my iPad, I had downloaded all of the scores for all of the excerpts. And they were in a neat list in alphabetical order. Everything was very organized, which was a first for me. Before that, I was not nearly that organized. And so let's say I was going to practice the excerpt from Mozart Requiem, the Kyrie movement. There's a big alto trombone excerpt in that. so I you know get into my practice room and I you know take out my trombone and set myself up and I've got my water and I've got my speaker and my iPad and my pencil and my music all set up

the first thing that I would do rather than just immediately jumping into playing the excerpt would be to listen to the movement with the score all the way through and just notice things happening in the score like oh you know the last time i listened to this i didn't realize that i'm you know with the violas here where there's this bassoon line that um you know supports my thing or like oh i need to make sure that i'm not covering up this voice um just little things like we all know that score study is important um for preparing excerpts really for preparing any music but especially for excerpts because what you want to demonstrate to the committee is that you understand how the music works and what your part is like that you'll be a good

orchestral colleague so um but I never did score study as much as I thought I needed to so what worked for me was working it into my practice sessions one quick side note is that I think that many of us feel that like we're not really working unless we're playing something through a million times like that feels like hard work but really like the best practicing like it's not about working really hard it's about like doing the smart things that will make you better quickly yeah 100 yeah so score study is really like practicing on steroids it's like one of the fastest ways to increase your musical understanding and it's way way way way better to do some score study than it is to just, you know, smash your face against the wall a million times. And what

I found was, I would listen to the score, listen to the music with the score, notice a lot of things. And then when I would go to play through the excerpt the first time, it was like I had just been performing it with the orchestra that week, like the music was so fresh in my head. And I found that it's really, really hard to play an excerpt badly, if you have literally just listened to a recording while watching the score. Because the music is like, you're not going to play a wrong rhythm. You're not going to play the style wrong. It's so fresh in your head. It's like you're playing it with the orchestra. So that really helped. And then the next part of this document is a series of questions that I found really good teachers ask me in lessons, but I

didn't always ask myself these questions. And so the questions are, what is this excerpt all about? what is the mood what is the style what is the tempo what is the sound and color where does each phrase go what is my articulation have i accounted for all of the markings like all of the italian or german words or french words all of the you know tenuto markings or accents retardandos stuff like that and then is this really really in tune and when i kind of held myself accountable to following this process, my practice was insanely productive. I was not just, especially for brass players, we have a really limited amount of, you know, time that we can practice before we start to experience muscular fatigue, where your brain can actually last quite a bit

longer. So this was a practice method that really used my brain a lot more and used my face a lot less. So as a result, my face, I mean, yeah, just talk to brass players about this. When your lips are tired, it's just really, really hard to play your best. So I play better overall when I'm actually playing less. Even if I'm practicing a lot with my brain and I'll do a lot of singing or a lot of imagination kind of visualizing practice, that is better for my overall playing level than, you know, just playing physically through things lots of times. So this process like really, really got me to a new level. And there are two other things that I want to mention about how I prepared for the audition. The other is recording. And I'm sure

that you talk on your podcast all the time about the importance of recording, but, um, I did a ton of, uh, mock auditions for my recorder. And, uh, so what I would do is I would out of the list of excerpts, I would, uh, make up a round of, you know, maybe I would play my concerto and five excerpts and i would without stopping just play the round um for my for my iphone and record it using an app that i really like called road rec r-o-d-e like oh with the slash through it like the microphone company rec r-a-c and what i like about this app is um it's a lot like cleaner and easier to use than the the apple voice memos app although i do use that one a lot too and you can listen back at half speed so this is something that a lot of people told me including um when

i had a lesson with mark in a way while i was at new world mark in a way is our principal trumpet player in san francisco symphony um and he's like an audition champion the guy has won so many auditions like you should think about having him on the show if you want to learn about audition process and so i would play the round and then go back and listen to my round at half speed and oh my god if you want to um if you want to expose your weaknesses on your instrument one of the fastest ways to do it is to listen to yourself playing at half speed because if you're playing something out of tune it's going to last twice as long and if you are playing something with um an articulation style that is different from it's just so it's like

looking at you're playing under a microscope it's so easy to see all of the all of the flaws and i mean it can definitely be a little debilitating to hear yourself like that but it's also one of the fastest roads to improvement so you go in and you listen and you're like oh wow like every time i play an f it's sharp and it's just clear as day so the process of adding recording and especially half speed recording to uh my sort of framework of like this is how my practice, it like supercharged my practice. Other important parts of this process. So the prelims and semis were in February of 2016. When I so I went and after the semifinal, I found out that I had made the finals, which were six weeks later. So I in between those two rounds in San

Francisco, of course, I, you know, freaked out and celebrated and thought about like, wow, this this dream might actually come true. I went back to Miami and took a week or two off of practicing those excerpts because I really wanted to avoid being burnt out on them. And then my plan going forward after that was to kind of focus in two areas of how I thought I could demonstrate that I was the right person for the job in the finals. And so the two areas were first, I knew there was going to be a section round. And I had sort of heard through the grapevine, like who the other finalists in the audition were likely to be. And these people were older and way more experienced than I was. You know, people who had been playing professionally for many years. And at the time,

I was 23. And I had, you know, great experiences of playing tons at Northwestern and playing at New World Symphony. But I didn't have like, I was by no means a seasoned professional. So I spent a lot of time practicing for the section round, which is for those of your listeners who are not as familiar with that, in a lot of brass and wind auditions for orchestras, especially if it's like, you know, a principal trumpet or principal trombone role, they want to see what your ability is for going into a new section and just blending with those people. Like, how do you blend with the people who are already in the orchestra? Do you give clear cues? Are you listening to them really well? That's a really important part of most final rounds. So I practiced a lot with my low brass section at New World Symphony. And I also took a trip to Chicago. It was probably in March of 2016, where I played for my old teacher, Michael Mulcahy, and also got to do a practice section round with like really one of the best low brass sections you could ever assemble, which was Michael Mulcahy and Randy Hawes, who is also on faculty there and plays bass trombone in Detroit Symphony and Gene Picorni who's the tuba player in Chicago Symphony and like the stars aligned and they were all available at the same time and willing to come help me just play through a bunch of rep and listen with like

the best some of the best musicians in the world like how to lead effectively as a principal and like really how to listen down to the tuba and all that stuff it was a completely invaluable experience and then the other thing that I focused on was taking like the big excerpts like something that Jay Friedman who's the principal trombone of Chicago Symphony talks about with auditions is like there are certain excerpts that will win you the audition and there are certain excerpts where you can lose the audition like there are some excerpts that are really big expressive solos and there are opportunities to um to show off your own style and like how expressively you can play And especially for a principal role, orchestras want to hire somebody who plays with a lot of emotional expression and a lot of panache and style for more stylized things.

And then there are also excerpts where it's just a difficult technical hurdle that you need to demonstrate that you have mastery over. So for trombone players, that's something like William Tell Overture. There's during the storm scene of the overture, there's like a really fast technical thing. And I feel like no one would ever hire a trombone player based on like, wow, like his technical ability on this, like, you know, musically, not it's not like the most soloistic or expressive thing. It's just sort of like, can you play this hard lick? So that's an excerpt that you can lose on. And so as opposed to like for trombone players, Bolero is a big expressive solo where you really need to show off how stylishly you can play. Or the big solo from Mahler's Third Symphony, that's like a really big opportunity to see how expressive you can be.

Or the Tuba Miriam solo from Mozart Requiem, things like that. Or there was like a big, there's a big trombone solo in a piece by John Adams called City Noir. That was on the list too. So I focused my attention on the section playing, as I just mentioned, excuse me. And the other big area was on turning all of those big, what I would think of as sort of job winning excerpts, turning them all into like total home runs. meaning I wanted to be the musician who showed up and could not only you know play like a professional in the section round like I wanted to not sound like a 23 year old but sound like somebody who's 40 and had been doing it for a long time but with the sort of the big solo excerpts I wanted all of those to be total home runs and really special and my goal with all of those was

It's like, I want them to listen to my Mahler three and think, oh my God, that is just the most powerful, heartbreaking, expressive Mahler three I've ever heard in my life. And just have it be such a level of polish and refinement that there would be no choice between me and some other candidate. And consciously focusing on those kinds of excerpts and just making sure that my William tell or hungarian march were were good enough um that i that they wouldn't slip low enough that they would cost me the audition but i knew that in the final round of the audition where they're looking more they've sort of established by that point it's like well we've heard you play

in a couple rounds already and you've demonstrated a certain level of uh technical ability and uh you know you're playing in tune you have good rhythm you can play the instrument well now let's see really who you are as an artist. So I was focusing on those things in sort of the six-week period between the two rounds of the audition. And then the other thing that maybe Don Green has talked about is, and I read, I think I read his book Audition Success back actually when I was at Northwestern when I was preparing for the New World audition. And so he advocates for all sorts of smart things you can do to get ready for an audition, including certain kinds of practicing and practice auditions, like mock auditions,

but also just taking care of your body is so important for playing your best. So something that I experimented with and really it paid off for the San Francisco audition was instead of flying to the city where you're auditioning the day before or even the day of, I flew two days before. Because for me, as a brass player,

my ability to control air is critical to how I play and when I fly it kind of messes with my breathing and I've you know since gotten better at dealing with playing right after um stepping off of a long flight because eventually you know you you don't have always have the luxury of flying out early and allowing your your body to kind of recover from that difficult environment but for this audition I flew two days ahead and had two good nights of sleep in a hotel and really treated myself to like luxurious days of practicing the kinds of days that I was uh taking like the day before my audition was the kind of practice session where you're in the room for three hours but you maybe play for 25

minutes you do a lot of singing and a lot of imagining and a lot of listening and just like you know, fine tuning, tiny little details, making sure that my, my a natural octaves in Mahler three were like really precisely in tune, making sure that I knew exactly what my phrase plans were. And then, you know, after my sort of lazy, super productive practice session, go have like a delicious lunch with a friend and then go and have another similar session in the afternoon and then have a really delicious dinner and catch up with a good friend and go to bed early and get enough sleep. Something that I definitely tell my students to do when they're getting ready for an audition is to binge sleep if possible. That's something that has

worked really well for me. If I have something really important coming up, I'll try and get 10 or 11 hours of sleep a night if I can. Sometimes your schedule doesn't allow for it, but when it does, it really, really helps you to feel your best and play your best. Are you drinking tons of water? Are you eating the food that makes you feel healthy and nourished and really encourages your best playing. So I just tried to take control of every single possible variable for the audition and thankfully it worked out. So yeah, that's sort of my San Francisco Symphony audition journey right there. Nick, that's so much amazing, amazing information. I think that the listeners are going to get so much value out of it. The one thing that strikes me is really your emphasis on

mindfulness. And I feel like your approach was very introspective, you know, this, what you mentioned about listening with the score, to really spend more time understanding what is happening as opposed to that. It's so true what you said, we feel that we're working only when we're playing, but so much of the work needs to happen beforehand in the head and that we understand what's happening before we pick up the instrument. And I absolutely love that list of questions. I would absolutely love this document. If that's okay with you, I could maybe put a link in the show note on how to access it. That would be great. Because I feel like, you know, I don't know if you know, Tony Robbins says, but he says, you know,

questions are the answer. And when we really take the time to ask these very important questions, It helps us zone on mindfulness and it really helps us reach a greater level of depth, you know, beyond the notes, beyond the intonation and really reach what I think you use the word polish and refinement. And I had never really heard anyone talk about questions that went such into, you know, to use this word again, depth. I love this mindful approach. and as you said with Don Green I do the same thing before audition to really take care of your body and you mentioned delicious food and sleeping a lot it's so so important I completely agree with that I'd like to touch a little bit more on this audition day thing so when you were there you know you show up for the audition and you said that you were flying in early to be very

rested and adapted to the weather. And, um, but I wanted to know also, the other thing I was curious about is your takeaways. What do you think helped you do well that day that you would recommend people do or avoid on audition day? Sure. So, um, as, as I've discussed a little bit already, um, one thing that I'm not sure everybody is, is learning in music school. And this is something that I learned from my high school teacher, Terrence Fay, who plays in the New Haven Symphony and a lot of other orchestras in the Connecticut area. And I definitely learned this from the Don Green book as well. It's like it's not only your life as a musician is much more than just how well you play the clarinet or the viola. There are a lot of other variables that you can control that will make you better off when you're in a scary, high-stress situation like an audition.

If you have the time and the financial resources, which thankfully at the time I did, to fly out early and get an extra night in the hotel, that really gave me an advantage. It just made me feel so much more comfortable. Other things like that were I picked a hotel that was walking distance to the concert hall. So I wasn't adding the extra layer of, you know, getting an Uber that morning and worrying about traffic. It's like I knew that it was going to take me seven or eight minutes to walk to Davies Symphony Hall from the Hotel Whitcomb where I was staying for both rounds of the audition. So when I went back for the finals, I knew it's like I'm going to stay in the same hotel. I know how to walk to the concert hall from there there's a place on the way that I can stop for breakfast that I know like has exactly the food that I want for breakfast

and like the funny thing was um the day before the audition so I flew out two days before the morning of the day before the audition I kind of practiced my routine like I went to the place where I knew I was going to order my breakfast and I ordered like the you know at that time like the perfect breakfast for me was like a, like an egg and cheese sandwich on like a toasted bagel with some avocado and a banana. And that just like, you know, I think that's a great breakfast that makes me feel really good. And I like to play when there's a significant amount of food in my stomach. And so I practiced, you know, my breakfast routine the day before so that the morning of the audition, when like hilariously enough, I overslept, I slept through my alarm

and got up like 45 minutes later than I wanted to, I still wasn't panicking because I knew it's like, oh, like I'm going to this place for breakfast and I wasn't worrying about other stress factors, other things that I did. And this is just stuff that you learn about yourself as you do this more and more.

I wanted to make sure that I had like stuff to do between rounds because sometimes for auditions, you can be waiting a long time. So I made sure I had snacks. I made sure that I had plenty of water to drink. I always would travel with my headphones to listen. So it's like one other thing you can do before when you're usually when you take an orchestra audition about 15 minutes or sometimes it's longer before your time to go on stage.

They'll give you the list of the excerpts that you're going to play. And you can really, really do a lot to sound your best on stage if you have a good method for prepping in those 15 minutes. So for me, that would be accessing my playlist, which was like organized on my phone and plugging in my headphones and listening to all those excerpts, preferably with the score. And I knew like, OK, for this excerpt, like this is like the 90 second thing that I need to practice. And other than that, I don't need to play it. you know practicing like the starts of excerpts or practicing like that one lick that you know is going to be troublesome without you know wasting all of your mental and physical energy like just like playing through like smacking your your face against the wall as we've talked about

so you know in between rounds especially on the day of the finals I played two rounds one was like the first final round and then in San Francisco and a lot of other orchestras uh the tendency is now to have a super final round also so i played the final round which was behind a screen and then i had like you know maybe an hour or two to wait before the second final round which was unscreened and at that point i was the only candidate left so it was unscreened and i played i was on stage for the second final round for probably an hour um and i played maybe 40 minutes with the section and I played a bunch of solo stuff by myself um and in that like two hour wait I remember uh I had I was like watching Netflix on my iPad I think I was watching Frasier which

I think is a great show and it's like very just you know like light comedy just like made me feel good I had food um I was drinking water um I love listening to Stevie Wonder Stevie Wonder just puts me in a great mood just I think like it's as much you know honestly something that I think people preparing for auditions might want to uh think about is the same thing that some like you know an Olympic athlete might think about you know like what are what is Michael Phelps doing in the locker room before he's getting ready to you know perform in the Olympics it's it's so much more than just being a good musician. Like you really have to be good at taking auditions. And that I think comes down from, comes down to knowing your body, knowing your mind well enough

to, to know what food you need to eat, what rest you need, how much water you need to drink, what psychological help you might need to put yourself in the position where you can perform at your highest level. Because it doesn't matter how well, you know, what the song is in your heart if you're so nervous that you're debilitated and you can't deliver it when you need to at the most important moment. One other thing that I haven't mentioned is beta blockers. I mostly don't really worry about stage fright. I've always really enjoyed being on stage. And I feel like that extra nervous energy usually contributes to me having like special performances. Something about like the nerves of being on stage drives me to do special things that I never thought of

in rehearsal. But with auditions where you really, it's kind of more of a test environment, more of an execution thing, my nerves would sometimes get in my way. And I found through, you know, experimenting carefully over a period of weeks, that like something that would pretty much what would happen to me is when I get nervous, I lose some control over my sort of my my abs. And I don't have like the most refined, perfect control over, I would sometimes get a little shaky in a soft note, where if I weren't nervous, I would normally be completely fine doing something like that. So I found that taking like a 10 milligram propranolol pill was too much for me and it made me feel like sleepy and I like didn't care enough. But if I chopped that pill

into four pieces and ate two and a half milligrams, that would help me relax enough to have control over my, over my airstream without really messing with my brain too much. And, you know, through practicing doing that trying a beta blocker during rehearsal or trying it for a mock audition where you're just playing for friends and it's a safe environment I figured out like okay this is like what I need to do is like an hour and a half before I play or whatever it was like I'm gonna eat my breakfast sandwich I'm gonna have my tune at my you know quarter of a beta blocker pill I'm gonna have a cup of coffee and I'm gonna listen to this blah blah music and like that is gonna put me in my best possible state to play my best. This is really great. You know, I feel that

these are two key components, this proper, methodical, mindful planning to control all those variables and really creating the proper mindset. And they are so important and so often neglected. People spend the time playing in the practice room and do not, I think, spend enough time planning on all those things. And I'm so happy you're bringing all these things up. And I feel the same way, especially performing more and more as a professional, that the more joy I can bring in the making of music, the better I play. So this aspect of really making sure that, as you mentioned earlier, getting a good meal, bringing a TV show that puts you in the right, you know, mindset that relaxes you makes you laugh. I feel all these things really

come together to make me play at my best. This is really, really great information you're giving us today. Thanks. So now you get the job. What what happens after that, you know, I'd love to hear about what happens once you win and you live the happily ever after you know how was it preparing for your first season with the san francisco symphony oof um it was great well one thing i should definitely add is after you have such a big life win like that like i don't really remember being upset or sad for like maybe like four months after winning the audition i was just so on top of the world nothing could get me down even you know like of course things come up and there's there's always going to be you know sources of drama in your life like big parking tickets yeah parking

tickets such a giant bummer but you know i went back to miami afterward and there's a lovely tradition uh at new world symphony which is unfortunately uh being neglected sometimes um so any new world symphony fellows listening to this please listen to this particular sentence I'm about to say, there's an important tradition at New World, which is that after you win an audition, you kind of owe the orchestra a party because all of your colleagues in the orchestra have been supporting you and just helping to create an environment where you can practice effectively and succeed. Like they've been there for you when you're talking about like, oh, like, I just can't figure out this excerpt or I, you know, can you listen to me play around or like,

what are your thoughts on Beethoven like your community has really supported you and after you go out and succeed in an audition it's important to honor the tradition of throwing a keg party for the orchestra and unfortunately um some people are not doing this anymore and this is not something that I approve of at all so I threw a giant keg party and it was really fun don't do that unless you're over 21, of course. Drink responsibly. But yeah, I guess like, so after that, I did two summer festivals. I played at Spoleto in Charleston, and I played at Verbier in Switzerland. And what I sort of focused on during those festivals was just playing wise, like trying to act like a more mature principal. I had at that point had the

luxury of, of spending time with some of the best trombone players in the world. Um, and I'm thinking of people like, you know, of course, Tim Higgins and Toby oft and Joe Alessi and Michael Mulcahy. And these, these guys are all totally seasoned pros. And I found that when I would play second when they would play principal it was so easy to follow them um because they just had so so much um conviction so much confidence in this is how the music goes and it was it's really easy to follow somebody who knows exactly where they're going and they don't need to tell you all right now we're turning left here or oh we're taking time here they just play it with so much gutsiness that it's like impossible to play it any other way than with them so during those

festivals when I would play principal I tried to play like that I tried to just like be like a really badass leader and then of course you know when I moved to San Francisco I remember the the night before my first rehearsal um it was a gala rehearsal I was really nervous and but as it turns out, the better the orchestra is, the more on the same page everybody is and the easier it is to fit your part into that orchestra. So I found that showing up to my first rehearsal, I was really nervous, but it was really easy to fit my part in with everybody else's because everybody just knows how to play. Everybody's playing in tune. Everybody's listening to each other really carefully. And the other thing that I'm really, really lucky with is my colleagues in the San

Francisco Symphony are just exceptionally wonderful, great people. You know, if you've listened to recordings or if you've heard the orchestra live, you know the level of musicianship of the people in the orchestra. But something you might not know unless you are hearing it from somebody who works there is it's a very warm family environment backstage. People joke around the lot. People are really supportive. People genuinely care. And it's a really positive place to work. And I'm so grateful for my colleagues and how much fun we have together. And I found it, of course, you know, you're going to be nervous during the tenure process. And there are things that I needed to change to be the best possible colleague for them. But overall, it's been like

a really easy and fun place to work. So yeah, I just tried to learn how to be, how to try to act like a principal player who was older than I actually was. And to listen a lot, listening is just so important, especially for brass players. We're at the back of the orchestra and when I'm playing above mezzo piano, you know, I have a loud instrument and I'm not going to be able to hear what's happening in front of me as clearly. So learning how to listen in an orchestra is a really complex skill. It's not as easy as anybody would want it to be. So those are sort of the things that I thought about after the audition. Did you have an approach to prepare the repertoire that was as methodical as for the audition? You know, it depends on the repertoire.

sometimes the trombone part is really critical and sometimes it's less critical sometimes things are you know way more demanding than others and every week is really different and then of course sometimes there are weeks where I've played that piece several times before and so like I don't need to do as much preparation for those weeks as for ones where the part is really hard or I'm playing like a really exposed role or, you know, just any other reason that you might need to prepare more. But the same, I definitely tend to use the same principles when I'm preparing, like listening to recording is really the most important thing you can do for orchestra playing, just to understand the context of where your part fits. So I definitely like to do score study. I

definitely like to practice with a recording, especially for something like, I remember my first season we played Rite of Spring and I had played Rite of Spring before years before but you know there are parts like in the sacrificial dance where it's just really rhythmically tricky and I wanted to show up rhythmically confident and ready to not muck up what my colleagues had already created like the first rehearsal for a San Francisco Symphony Rite of Spring is already pretty high level. The orchestra has played it a lot of times. People really know how it goes. And there are certain parts where I think your job is to not mess up what's already working. There are some times in orchestra where spotlight is on you. Bolero

is a time for me to show off. It's like, how sexy can I play the trombone? That's really what I'm thinking about for bolero for right of spring i think like it's more about like i need to make sure that i'm really grooving with the orchestra so the way that i practiced that was you know like the last page of right of spring you really don't want to step in a hole and i remember practicing in my apartment the same like maybe 30 or 45 second long passage just over and over and i would turn on the recording and then i would rewind it back like 45 seconds and go through it again. I probably played through that section 10 times in a row. And then I remember, you know, getting on stage the next day and feeling like comfortable rhythmically. Rhythmic comfort is

something I definitely talk about with my students all the time. It's really hard to make your best sound or play in tune or really speak your truth musically if you're not rhythmically comfortable in where it is. So if you're working on something that's in like an asymmetrical meter or has tons of rubato or something, or if you are only going to be confident in making your entrance, if the conductor gives you a cue for that moment, then you're really not as prepared as you need to be. Because anything can happen. People make mistakes. A conductor will forget to cue you. It's not, you know, as much as, you know, some, it's nice when conductors cue you. It's not, you can't, to be a true professional, you really can't be relying on them to give you every single entrance.

and you need to be able to come in and nail it without their help because something else might come up they might need to attend to the violas at that moment they might more than likely forget to cue you even though they promise to do it and you need to be ready to come in and nail it anyway so that's where your preparation comes in seeing the things that might be problems for you if there's a difficult entrance if there's like like something that comes in for trombones a lot for example is we sit a lot we are not playing for the majority of most orchestral music which you know in some ways is easier than the role of a string player because they're playing way way way way more notes than we are but something that can be challenging about that is entering at the right

time so sometimes it's very clear it's like okay like you know the violas have this accompanimental figure and they do it twice and then i enter but sometimes you know where the violas enter the first time is not totally obvious and it's like oh in the exposition of this symphony like the violas play it twice and then we come in but in the recap the violas only play it once before we come in and being confident in those entrances especially for music that you haven't performed a million times comes down to your preparation and like practicing entrances is something that I definitely do when I'm practicing. One thing I tell students is that what they see from the conductor should be a confirmation of what they already know. Absolutely. That's really good

advice. Is there anything else you would recommend to a young player who just wins a position in an orchestra and is about to start his or her first season? Totally, totally. That reminds me of something really, really useful. I had a great, I'm lucky, you know, especially through New World Symphony, I had access to just, you know, the most qualified people in my field. And now I, you know, get to really consider some of the best trombone players in the world as like important mentors and now colleagues and friends to me. And one of those people is Toby Oft, who is a principal trombone in the Boston Symphony. And I remember before, during that summer between the audition and when I started, I went up to Tanglewood, which is thankfully like,

you know, only an hour and a half drive from my parents' house in Connecticut. And I met Toby for a coffee and just like asked him for advice about the tenure process and, you know, what his experience was like and what things I should keep in mind. And he recommended that I read a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which is, you know, he's not the only person who's recommended that book before like you know it's super famous for a reason really fantastic book and I can summarize that that book in like you know maybe one sentence which is when you're talking to people you should genuinely care about what they have to say and you should allow the conversation to focus more on the other person and what they want to talk about

than you, especially than you talking about yourself. And after reading that book, I noticed that most people that you talk to are really interested in telling you about either themselves or about whatever thing they're really interested in. And you'll get along really well with people if you primarily listen and talk less. And I think that, you know, as, as of course, this is, you know, an interview and you wanted me to be on here and like talk about what's interesting to me and talk about myself. But I definitely have had the tendency of being more of a talker than a listener before. And reading this book really, I think, prepared me well for a professional environment where, especially when you're under tenure review and you're new in the orchestra,

it is not your job to speak your mind all the time. It is your job to listen to everybody else and learn as much as possible to like really be a sponge and absorb the culture of the musical and the social culture of the orchestra that you're joining so um reading that book was really really helpful how to win friends and influence people um in you know the summary of the book is close your mouth be a positive person and listen to what other people are saying and actually care and, you know, actually genuinely care about what they're saying and care about them. And then you'll, you know, get along well with most people if you genuinely care about them and don't just want to, you know, we all know what it's like to be in a conversation

with somebody who like while you're talking, you can tell that they're just, they're just waiting for their moment to step in and say that brilliant thing that they have to say. And it's not really fun to spend time with people like that. And I think that I was somebody like that much more. I mean, you know, I still, I still battle with that tendency, but that's like kind of who I was before reading that book. And after reading the book, I feel like I've been much, much better about really actually caring about the other person.

Nick, thanks so much for all of this. How about a quick round of rapid fire questions before we wrap this up? Sure thing. So for the people who are dreaming of a career that resemble yours, can you tell us a little bit about what your life looks like? Sure. My day-to-day life is really, I'm so fortunate. I feel like I have a great life.

I'm doing lots of things that I love to do. For me, I need a lot of musical variety in my life. So the San Francisco Symphony is my main gig, and I feel like professionally that's sort of like my marriage. And I am lucky that I love my job, and I love my colleagues, and I love the music that I get to make there. But writing my own music is starting to become a really important part of my musical diet. um so most days I spend uh since over the past month or so I've been working on this silent night arrangement um which I'm overdubbing myself and I recorded it in my home so I've been spending a lot of time you know about a month ago I was working on the arrangement so I was spending a lot of time at the keyboard and in logic and in Sibelius just getting the plan arranged and then the week after that I was doing a lot of just recording all of the parts at home and you know

spending a lot of time researching like what kind of microphone I want to use and recording techniques and and consulting my audio engineer friends who know way more than I do I spend a lot of time teaching every week I work with the the symphony youth orchestra as their low brass coach and so I give them weekly coachings I have a few private students that I work with at the conservatory pre-college division the San Francisco Conservatory of Music I try to attend as many concerts as I have time for. I'm really into, you know, sort of like more funky, poppy, jazzy stuff. I love artists like I got to hear Robert Glasper a couple times recently. I really love Jacob Collier, bands like Nowhere, you know, musicians like Lewis Cole. Those are some of my favorite musicians I love to listen to. So I'd spend a lot of time going to their concerts when they're in town or listening to their albums or, you know, seeking out interviews on YouTube with musicians that I love. One thing that's been really helpful for me in the last six months is I have sort of an accountability group with two of my best friends here.

And they're both musicians and sort of tech people. And we hold each other accountable to our goals. And so we, you know, set goals for like, I want to exercise this amount, I want to finish this artistic project that I'm working on. So those two guys, shout out to Spencer and Mark, have really helped me stay on track with my goals. So I feel like, you know, I've been exercising really consistently and cooking more healthy food and saying no to the things that are not like 100% hell yeah things. making sure that I have time for, for myself and time for like, you know, the most important people in my life and, you know, having time to talk to my parents and let's see what else. Yeah. Oh, one other thing, uh, it's been really great as I, I, when I moved here, I lived, I chose an apartment that's walking distance to the concert hall. So I'm not really stressed about traffic. Yeah. I would say sort of my, my daily life, my daily and weekly life are focused around

making music in the various ways that I love to do it with, you know, the teaching and the orchestra life. And I love playing chamber music and I love writing my own stuff and impromptu jam sessions, all sorts of stuff. And then outside of music, just spending time with people I really like and eating great food. So important. Spending time in nature. Yeah, that's sort of my life in a nutshell. And then of course, also boring stuff like, you know, scheduling doctor's appointments and booking flights and cleaning your apartment and taking out the recycling. I definitely do those things too. Sometimes I'm a little slow with responding to emails. That sounds like a great busy life. And I have to say, I also really believe in accountability

partners. That's something that works for me. Is there a performance that stayed with you throughout the years many performances one that really stuck with me was uh in the summer between uh my audition and when i joined san francisco symphony i was at spoleto and i was playing in this really really special production at that time of porgy and bess which is a story that takes place in Charleston and the festival is in Charleston. And the cast was just unbelievably good. And the orchestra was great. And we got to play Porgy and Bess, which is one of my favorite pieces of music. And there was one performance, which was, I think, a matinee performance the day after, I think it was the nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. This was in the summer of

2016. And I remember hearing about this, you know, horrible mass shooting, and thinking like, wow, you know, of course, I was grateful that I wasn't in Orlando that night. And that I none of my friends were in Orlando that night. But that shooting could have been in Charleston. You know, that's, I could have, I could have been the victim of that shooting. Anybody I know, and anybody I love could have been the victim of that shooting. It felt like very close to me. And I felt just like really emotionally bruised by hearing about that, as I'm sure many of us did.

And I remember dedicating in my mind and in my heart the performance of Porgy and Bess, which is highly emotionally charged, dedicating it to just sort of that emotional focal point, thinking like this performance, like I'm going to give it everything I have. And however, you know, spiritually it means, you know, I know, I knew what it meant to me, but that performance was for those victims and for their families. And I just sort of dedicated it silently myself. And that was one of the most important performances of my whole life. Music with a, with a purpose, like, as I was sort of

saying like music as, as like a gesture of love, music can be way more powerful when it means something, uh, specific like that. And even if people in, and you know, there's no reason that anybody in the audience that day, or even my colleagues in the orchestra around me that day would have known that, that that's why I was playing the way that I was playing that day It was because I was thinking about this very real event. But I really, really seriously, truly believe that some kind of my emotional intention that day reached people. And that any time we as performers are thinking about some kind of powerful, deeper meanings to things that we are sort of like subconsciously sending that out, those intentions out into the world. And we have real power to do so. So when there's, you know, there's a reason that, you know, after 9-11, there was a performance of Brahms Requiem in New York City. You know, Brahms Requiem meant something different when it was originally performed, and it'll mean something different for every other performance.

But I think like those, the performances that are the most special to me are the ones with like really strong intentions like that. So that Brahms Requiem in that particular moment, or, you know, we performed in San Francisco, a benefit concert for to raise money to help the victims of the, of the horrible fires that happened last year. And we dedicated a performance recently to the victims of the campfire that happened recently. I think that performances with lots of like extra emotional intention and intensity are the ones that really stick with me the most. That's a really touching memory. You know what, going on a more down to earth topic. Sure, yeah. What skills do you think young musicians studying today should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments? Oh, what a great question. So many things.

Okay, things that I notice in students now that I'm doing a lot more teaching. And so these will be sort of brass specific, but I think it'll apply to everybody. Don't fall in the trap of just being a total specialist on your instrument. While that is important, it is absolutely crucial that you be able to play your instrument at a really high level. No one is interested in working with somebody who only plays the oboe at a high level and doesn't have any understanding of other styles of music, doesn't have any kind of like emotional maturity. I think that we are as musicians we are the product of all of the music that we've listened to all the concerts that we've been to all of the musical friends that we have and you will be a better classical violist if you are friends with a jazz drummer and you understand something about jazz drumming or if you are friends with a hip-hop artist or if you're friends with a visual artist

or if you're friends with a dancer or you know just basically the message here is get out of your box. And understand, of course, that when you're preparing for an audition, when you're preparing for your recital, that is the time to focus. That is not the time to go to 20 art museums and ponder the meaning of life. But going to art museums and pondering the meaning of life is a crucial, crucial step for being the best trombonist or being the best violist or being the best percussionist ever. All of the musicians that we admire have gone out and sought other experiences. So if you have never improvised before, now is the time to start improvising. If you have never painted before, you should try painting something. If you haven't read any great

books recently, take a day off of practicing your scales and read a book or travel to a foreign country or try making some new food that you've never made before. Expand yourself as a person. And one really critical thing that I tell my students all the time is whatever is your greatest weakness that is probably the thing that you need to be spending the most time watering sort of figuratively speaking like the the the plant in your garden of skills that is not thriving that's not like the tallest plant but maybe the shortest weakest plant that's the one that needs the most attention and water and and sun and love from you so like you know for me my natural gifts on the trombone did not really include my upper register which is like really an important part of being

employable. So I remember like the thing that I was focused on the most while I was in college was learning how to play high notes better. And there, of course, you know, there were people my age who didn't have that technical difficulty. And there are things that, you know, I did better than they did. But whatever is the weakest part of your playing, whatever is the weakest part of your life, run as fast as you can toward that thing and work on that the most. I think that's like, so expand yourself and work on your weaknesses. I think those are the two, the two little, uh, comments that I would, they're not little, they're pretty big comments I would have towards, uh, young musicians still and older musicians. We only, I, you know, people needed

to give me that advice too. I still need to work on my high playing, still need to work on my fast playing and my intonation, all these things. So, so good. Nick, how about a quick and read more books. Always, right? Yes. Nick, how about a quick actionable tip that listeners can implement today in their musical lives? Oof. Okay. In your musical life, when you're practicing today, record yourself, first of all, and be brutally honest in a loving way with really, really objectively, how does this sound to you? Is this the kind of music that you want to be making? Is this is this recording something that you would show to yo-yo ma is this something that you would feel comfortable sharing with somebody that you're dating and if it isn't why isn't it that is the

intonation the issue is it that it's like really not as expressive as as it needs to be don't settle for like okay this is fine this is good enough good enough is not how yo-yo ma became the great artists that we all know. Really strive for what you intend. Strive for this is the greatest performance of this piece that's ever been given. Strive for the most beautiful sound that's ever been created with the smallest amount of effort that has like the greatest amount of alignment and flow in your body. Strive for great, strive for special and be okay with, you know, accept yourself for what you are and who you are and how you sound right now but don't settle for where it is until it is like absolutely truly objectively what you want it to be

it's fantastic nick you were mentioning some of your other creative projects in addition to your work with the symphony any cool upcoming uh project i mean we're going to be on the lookout out for this arrangement of Silent Night. And I'll put links to YouTube videos in the show notes. But any cool project happening soon? Well, that is sort of the big one. And I'm filming the video for that tonight. You know, we're getting down to like the final mix. So expect that post. It'll be on my Instagram and Facebook and my website and my YouTube channel within a week. That's sort the big one, if you're around the Bay Area, one concert that I would definitely recommend coming to in the next week is our Symphony Brass concert. That'll be this Sunday, the 16th at 7.30 at Davies

Symphony Hall. I think there are probably some tickets still available. Yeah, come hear the amazing brass players of the symphony. These are, you know, my colleagues and my dear friends. And yeah, those are sort of the two things that I would shout out. If you're interested in hearing more of my music, then, you know, there's a few other of my projects are on YouTube. That's amazing. And I'm going to put links in the show notes, like, as I mentioned, Nick, I'm so grateful that you took the time from your busy schedule to sit with me and describe this whole process to my listener and talk more about you and your career. So much value in what you shared with us today. And I'm sure that the listeners will find it

extremely useful and very inspiring. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. It was fun. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this chat with Nick Platoff. I personally loved hearing about his preparation process, and I loved how mindful he was in choosing where to spend his time and in managing all the parameters he could control. It really goes to show how important it is to take a step back when you're gearing up for a big event. To not just walk in and move your arms around for a few hours in the practice room and call that practicing, but to actually take the time to research what is effective.

I think that really applying yourself to craft a process and a routine that fits you is so worth it. take a minute to visit his website at platoffmusic.com that's p-l-a-t-o-f-f music.com to check out all of nick's other musical projects as always i have included this information in the show notes and i've added links to his social media pages youtube channel and more info about him you can find this and more resources on mindful and deliberate practice at mindoverfinger.com I would love to connect with you and know what your favorite takeaway from today's show is. So join the conversation on social media. Let me know what inspires you and what specific questions you have about mindful practice. Also, what other topics and guests you would like to hear about in future episodes. I am Mind Over Finger on all platforms. and if you're looking for a community of mindful practice enthusiasts join the mind over finger tribe at facebook.com slash groups slash mind over finger tribe there you'll find inspiration

motivation and support as well as information and discussion on how to take your practice to the next level and enjoy the process next week i'll be talking to anthony mcgill principal clarinetist with the new york philharmonic and we chat about his approach to mindful practice and music making. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to head over to iTunes to rate and leave a review. Your support means the world to me and your review will help people find out about the show. Again, thank you and à bientôt!