Playing for and being a single member of an orchestra is a number of things. It is educational, boring, tedious, exciting, exhausting, and rewarding. The thing you do most in an orchestra is rehearse. I would say it is 80% rehearsal and 20% performance. And that is just the time that you are all together as an orchestral unit, not including personal practice time, which is all together different. Being in an orchestra is what I imagined being in the military would be like. Instead of weapons and machinery we have instruments and instead of built agile bodies we have musical skills. We become a “militia” of strings, brass, winds, and percussion all focussing on a single goal, sound. We strive to mould and perfect our sonorous output to the highest quality possible.

As I said previously, being a part of an orchestra is a number of things. Rehearsal gets tedious with all of the stop and go. You take four measures and play it four times in each section separately. Or “oh no, the winds are having trouble here, me must have them play by themselves until problem is fixed.” But, the end result is better for having gone through the tedious struggle, otherwise these musical problems would not have been ironed out. So we revel in our struggles. It's about defeating our weaknesses.

Rehearsals are pretty pointless without personal practice. It takes quite a few hours to go through an entire symphony, plus the other concertos or overtures or what have you. This practice has to happen slowly so you the performer can have to time to comprehend the music, the rhythm and the sound of it, or basically the gist of it. Once the music has been gone through a couple of times, then you can work on “problem areas” the parts that are technically demanding. And then finally you can practice speeding up a piece to proper tempo or even slowing something down if need be. Most of all, practice builds confidence. You will be a lot more comfortable once you know you've been around the block a few times with your music. You won't be unpleasantly surprised in rehearsal in that something is complicated. When you don't practice you will find rehearsals unbearable and confusing. And sure like all other self-motivated tasks that we do, practice is hard to “want to do it” so we have to overcome by doing it anyway. You always feel better after you do.

The performance is always the most rewarding experience out of all of these. The performance is your chance to share your music with an audience. And also there is no stop and go, it is all go and energy and that's the fun part. Performing is all about connecting and ignoring your audience. You ignore, because you are focused on your music and you connect when you move with the music, your personal energy radiates on stage, therefore connecting with your audience. And there are better ways of doing this than pompously whipping your bow around and throwing your hand up in the air during pizzicatos. The point is not to stand out because in an orchestra you are not a soloist, you are a particle of an organized cell, it hardly gives one a right for self-exaltation. Being attentive and excited make you a good orchestral performer, as well as being aware of your facial expressions and knowing whether they are serious, ugly or pleasant. All of these little things make a difference in a performer.