hi!

My name is Alyssa, I'm 15, and every Saturday morning from September to May I get up at 7:00 (on a SATURDAY) to sit in a college music building with about eighty other kids and play the viola for three hours. On purpose. I love it more than almost anything.

I made this page because our youth symphony's official web page is one paragraph long. It says when we rehearse, it says how to audition, and it has a phone number. That's it. It doesn't tell you anything about what it's actually like, or what we're playing, or why the violas are the best section (we are). So this is the unofficial page, made by me, on my family's computer, mostly after my homework was done. Mostly.

I played violin from when I was six until I was twelve. Then one day my teacher, Mr. Vath, handed me his viola at the end of my lesson and said "Try the C string." I did. It was like the floor of a really old house creaking, but in a good way, low and warm and kind of sad. I switched that summer and I've never looked back, except to make fun of the violins.

This year I'm second chair in the violas, which I am extremely proud of, and which also means I sit on the inside of the first stand and turn the pages for our principal, Adrienne. I am now a world-class page turner. You have to do it fast, quietly and at the exact right moment, and then get your viola back up in time for your next entrance. Nobody claps for this. I'd like that noted.

who we are

The youth symphony is for students from 12 to 18 from all over our part of the state. Some of us drive more than an hour each way. We rehearse Saturdays from 9:00 to 12:00 in the rehearsal hall of a college music building, with a break at 10:30 that everybody spends in the hallway eating vending machine crackers. This year there are 81 of us:

Our conductor is Dr. Chiasson, who is in his seventh season with us and teaches at the college during the week. He is very, very patient, until he isn't (see "The Look," below). Our orchestra manager is Mrs. Maxie, who knows where every folder, chair, stand and kid is at all times and has never once lost her temper, even the day the bus was late for the spring tour. The violas have sectionals with Mrs. Simonson, who plays viola in a real orchestra and who is the reason I can play in fifth position without making a face.

how auditions & seating work

Everybody auditions every year, even if you were in it last year. (Yes, even the concertmaster.) Here's how it goes, from someone who has now survived three of them.

Spring auditions (May) decide who gets in for next season. You sign up for a time, you wait in a hallway listening to everybody else warm up (this is the worst part), and then you go into a room with three people sitting behind a table. You play:

• two or three scales they pick, two or three octaves, and an arpeggio
• a solo piece of your choice, or part of one, about two minutes (I played the first movement of a Telemann concerto, because every violist does)
• the excerpts, which are short bits from real orchestra music. The list goes out in March so you can practice them. This year's viola list had a really fast part from a Mendelssohn overture that I practiced so many times my little brother can hum it.
• sight-reading, which is where they put something in front of you that you've never seen and you just go. Breathe. Keep the beat. If you miss a note, keep going. They care more about the beat than the notes.

Fall seating auditions (September) decide where you sit. We play the excerpts from the fall music for Dr. Chiasson and the coaches, and here's the part I think is cool: we play behind a screen, so they can't see who it is. They just hear a number. This year they put me second, and I literally screamed in the car.

Seating isn't permanent. In the back stands of the strings Dr. Chiasson moves people around from concert to concert, so everybody learns to lead and everybody learns to follow. The first stands stay put for the season, which is why I'm turning Adrienne's pages until May.

rehearsal survival guide

*~* fall concert *~*

This is the hardest program we've had since I joined, and I think the best. The Capriccio is five little movements played straight through without stopping, and it's SO fast and Spanish and fun, and Raymond, our concertmaster, has big violin solos in it that he plays like it's nothing (it is not nothing). Then Ruben plays the Grieg, which starts with a drum roll and then the piano comes crashing down the whole keyboard, and every time he does it at rehearsal the whole orchestra goes quiet afterward for a second because it's so good. Then the New World Symphony, which you know even if you think you don't. The slow movement has the famous English horn solo, which is Rosa's, and she sounds like a person remembering something far away.

Fun fact that is extremely important to me: Dvořák played the viola. He played it for years in an opera orchestra in Prague before he was famous. So the New World Symphony was written by one of us. I mention this to the first violins every week.

There's a line about every piece on the concert programs page, along with the winter and spring concerts.

summer music camp memories

This July I went to music camp for two weeks, up north on a lake, for the second year. Lacey went too, and we were in the same cabin again, the one with the screen door that slams no matter how carefully you close it. Some memories, in no order:

• Practicing in a cabin on a wooden porch at 7:30 in the morning with mist on the lake. It was beautiful and also there were about four hundred mosquitoes.
• Our camp viola coach, Ms. Vaccaro, who is young and tiny and plays a 16 1/2 inch viola that is almost as big as she is, and who taught us to play from our backs and not our arms. My tone got so much better. I'm serious.
• The camp orchestra playing Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings on the last night, outdoors, with the sun going down behind us. The second movement is a waltz, and the counselors danced in the back. I almost cried. Lacey did cry. She says it was allergies.
• The talent show, where all the violas did a skit about viola jokes, and we won "Most Spirit." Which is what they give you when you don't win.
• Canoeing, swimming in the lake (FREEZING), the mess hall pancakes, and a thunderstorm that knocked the power out during dinner so we all sang camp songs in the dark.

in defense of violas

Okay. If you play viola you have heard every viola joke there is, usually from a trumpet player. (I put my own versions of the classics on the Viola Stuff page, because if you can't beat them, tell them better.) But here's the truth:

• The viola plays the middle of the music, the harmony that holds everything together. Take the violas out of an orchestra and it sounds like a sandwich with no filling.
• The viola has a sound no other instrument has. Darker than a violin, warmer, a little bit sad. People say it sounds like a voice. I agree.
• Mozart liked to play the viola when he played string quartets with his friends. Dvořák played viola. Hindemith played viola. Bach supposedly liked to play viola too, so he could be in the middle of the harmony. That's not a bad list.
• We read a clef nobody else does. That's basically being bilingual.
• When we do get a melody, everybody turns around to see who's playing it.

Violas of the youth symphony, 1999-2000: Adrienne (principal, senior, going to be a music major, is the calmest person I have ever met), me, Grant and Julian (stand two, best vibrato in the section, will not stop talking about baseball), Terry and Juan (stand three, both 13, both new, both doing great), Jesse and Alfonso (stand four, the youngest violists we've ever had, both 12 and both braver than I was), and two more who asked to stay off the Internet, which I respect.

*~* Thanks for visiting! *~*

You are visitor number

since February 1999

E-mail me! [email protected]
(Violists especially. Trumpet players, I'm watching you.)

This is NOT the official page of the youth symphony. It's just mine. Dr. Chiasson has not seen it. If you know Dr. Chiasson, please don't show him the part about The Look.

Last updated September 25, 1999