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Out of a whole year filled with most improbable and sometimes inelegant arm movements, bow or baton in hand, there is only one Monday when I always come to work with a sore wrist. That’s usually the first or second Monday of February, after the annual weekend of auditions for the Junior Bach Festival, now in its fifty-first year in Berkeley. 

Founded to promote the appreciation of the master among young musicians, the festival draws hundreds of students from the Bay Area and beyond to its annual auditions. I have for several years had the honor and pleasure of being one of the dozens of local musicians engaged as judges for this extraordinary event. 

The auditions are a logistical marvel. All the judging (except for vocalists) is done behind screens; judges are grouped in panels of three-violin panels, piano panels, cello panels, and so on. Thanks to careful maneuvering among the classrooms of UC Berkeley’s Morrison Hall, we judges do not see auditioners enter or exit. Though we may run into them in a hallway before or after they’ve played, we never really know who played what. To give the audition something more of the feeling of a performance and less of a grilling, the players enter in small groups (five or six at a time, say) and perform for each other-and those mysterious figures in the back behind the screen. 

This festival is not a competition in the sense of having a first prize winner; judges are not asked to make a ranking of all the players (indeed, how would it be possible?) but to offer their opinion as to whether a given performer or group is ready to perform at the festival’s high standard-more or fewer performers may be selected. This year, as many as nine programs are planned featuring those selected from this weekend to perform. But it could be eight. It all depends. 

Yet this is only part of the judges’ task, and from my point of view, not even the most important one. For as we listen to each eager young performer, we scrawl comments (usually furiously) on a small sheet of paper (hence the sore wrist on Monday). Our comments are clipped and copies sent to the students’ teachers. We try to gauge our advice to what we are hearing—suggestions of a technical nature, observations on interpretation, encouragement—as much as we can come up with in an impossibly short time. 

And there is so much to say! Over several hours my two judicial companions and I heard dozens of young string players, and the fruits of hundreds if not thousands of hours of preparation. Some played short single movements, others groups of movements, still others complete concertos, or entire partitas for unaccompanied violin. Sure, some were more assured than others; some have better control of their fingers and bow, some have thought more about what they want the music to say (these two groups are not always the same!). Some valued rigor, others exuberance. Some sounded nervous, others swaggeringly confident. 

Yet every single one of them was, for that brief moment at the very least, fully invested in a great enterprise-one that has occupied and fascinated students ever since Johann Sebastian first sat his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann down and started to teach him to play. Any comments we judges might offer on the spur of the moment can only have a certain small value. Bach’s music admits of so many possible interpretations and responses. The real work is going on in the mind, the heart, the soul of that young person on the other side of the screen. To those invisible young players, embarking on what I hope is a lifetime of engagement with our joyous art, I offer my heartfelt best wishes and profound gratitude, as I look forward to another sore wrist a year from now. 

The Junior Bach Festival continues at several Bay Area venues through Sunday, March 21. For more information visit the Junior Bach Festival website at www.juniorbach.org. 

George Thomson is a conductor, violinist, violist and director of the Virtuoso Program at San Domenico School, San Anselmo.›