It's part of auditions that percussionists and timpanists must play on unfamiliar instruments, most timpani auditions in the U.S. are on timpani with Dresden pedals, sometimes balanced action, and Berlin pedals. For my non-percussionist readers, these pedals all have different physical demands, from pedaling with your ankle to your whole leg, as well as the placement of the pedals themselves, creating a fair environment for all, is impossible as certain players will have access to instruments that others don’t.
Just had a recent timpani audition in Las Vegas where the drums that were provided were Berlin pedals, which are common drums in Europe and the rest of the world, but not in the U.S., and to most of the players' detriment, the prelim round asked for John Williams Superman excerpt which is one of the trickiest pedaling excerpts in our repertoire. Seattle in their recent audition asked for 3 pedaling excerpts, 2 Bartok, and Strauss, all in the prelim. I know some like to assume that this is done with the intent to give certain players who have been playing with said orchestra an advantage, or maybe it's just a lack of thought. There are plenty of excerpt choices to choose from to showcase a musician's full abilities, I wish timpani auditions would save pedaling excerpts for the semi-final or preferably the final round, where the players have had 2 rounds to get accustomed to the feeling of the pedals. This has been done in percussion auditions, where certain excerpts were listed as “only in finals”, so I don’t see a problem with this being applied to timpani auditions.
I wrote this in hopes of explaining the difficulty of executing these excerpts to non-percussionists, as I'm sure committee members must be scratching their heads as to why so many players sound out of tune. These pedaling excerpts played on unfamiliar drums, can feel like you're just shooting blind and hoping you land somewhere near the in-tune pitch. But to reiterate, there are plenty of non-pedaling excerpts that can showcase a player's intonation skills.
I hope this gives the percussionists and especially non-percussionists who are choosing the excerpts on the audition committees something to consider.
This is an interesting discussion but I have to respectfully disagree. Las Vegas was definitely unfortunate in sending out instrument info on relatively short notice upon invite (about two weeks for me). I will say that this likely left a decent amount of people with little time to find a set of drums to practice on a set of leg action pedals.
Having said that, I think pedaling in any round is completely fair game in this day and age of auditions. Quickly adapting to a new set of pedals is difficult for sure, but there are definitely ways to work on managing it under the gun. It takes a few seconds to quietly pedal your way through a scale on a new set of drums, you can adjust your gauges through the round to collect accurate pitches, there’s a gameplan for each pedaling excerpt, etc. At Seattle, all the pedaling excerpts were at the end of the round and the truth is the level is high enough that this was enough time for candidates to figure out what they need to demonstrate solid intonation/pedaling skills.
This is all just my opinion. It’s a challenge for all of us but I appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate the skill in the early rounds rather than not. I’d fear waiting for the later rounds could potentially result in less committee satisfaction as the pool is narrowed down and they discover that the few people left were perhaps lacking a skill that could’ve have been shown by others earlier in the day.