Wilmer,
You wrote:
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I copied by hand lots of the repertoire that was unavailable in books. This was before I played my first audition.
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That comment is very telling! One of my friends who is one of the best trumpet players that I’ve ever sat beside ended up winning an audition for the Phoenix Symphony when he was still in high school. I always knew that he had an incredible work ethic, and occasionally during lessons when we were working on orchestral repertoire he would pull out hand written parts.
I got the full story when I read an article about him in the paper:
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While studying in the Valley, Jim was in a hurry to learn the orchestral repertoire.
“I didn’t know you could buy books of just the trumpet parts to symphonies”, Benitez remembers.
So he went to the ASU music library every weekend and copied the trumpet parts by hand from the scores.
He didn’t know it, but that sealed his fate.
“When I was a senior in high school, I auditioned for 4th trumpet. That’s a non-contract position, because most scores call for no more than three trumpets”, he says.
There were 10 auditioners including Benitez.
“After everyone had played their audition, Eduardo Mata (PSO music director at the time) asked us to play orchestra excerpts from memory.”
For the 17-year-old who had spent precious weekend hours writing out those parts by hand, it was a snap. Those parts were engrained on his memory.
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