Percussion Alum Says Aloha to Hawai'i Symphony

James Nickell is trading in San Francisco's fog for something a little sunnier.

Nickell won a seat in the Hawai'i Symphony Orchestra earlier in 2026 and spent his summer preparing to relocate for Honolulu. "Hawai'i ended up being one of three auditions that I decided to take in two weeks," Nickell says. "That was crazy. I will never do that again. Hawai'i was also the first audition, and I peaked there. The next two… I did not play great," he laughs.

Those may have been Nickell's hectic travel schedule, because it certainly wasn't for lack of preparation. During Nickell's time at SFCM, Percussion Department Chair Jacob Nissly was "... was very helpful with always playing for other people," Nickell recalls. "Not just encouraging us to bring people into the practice room to play for them, but I remember doing mock auditions for him, and he would just go and grab a few other students and bring them in."

One thing Nickell highlights is Nissly's annual Winter Term project, essentially a department-wide series of mock auditions. "He would send us this big repertoire list to prepare, and then we would have an enormous amount of time on stage in the Hume concert hall where we were able to have all our percussion instruments out on stage with the entire studio there." Nickell says.

James Nickell.

He continues, "All of us would be out in the audience, and then we'd get up and play, and I'd never been able to do something like that—hear what the instruments sound like in a space like that by myself. Everything sounds different at different distances, and some audition committees will sit on the stage, or be out in the audience."

Nissly's Winter Term project was a turning point for Nickell, who says, "I'd  never realized how different the instruments sounded at a distance in a big space, and how important that makes tempo choices for auditions when you're playing by yourself because of clarity and articulation."

"Some people are a little more hesitant to play in front of your colleagues—which is fair enough, it's definitely nerve-wracking," Nickell says. "But playing so much in that space with a whole group of other percussionists and Jake giving comments and feedback on how it sounds in that space was definitely a big learning experience for me."

Nickell's audition tip is simple in concept if not execution. "I have a pretty consistent schedule that I started doing in the last two years," he explains. "I'll give myself six to eight weeks, and the first week will just be reading any unfamiliar rep. Then I'll start about a four to five-week process of just increasing tempo: I start very, very slow and play everything every day before bumping it up. By the time I get it up to tempo and start addressing musicality and phrasing, the accuracy is already totally dialed in."

Nickell and his wife got married on the island of Kaui, so "When I saw that that audition was posted, I just was so excited," Nickell says. "I would've never thought I'd be auditioning for an orchestra in Hawai'i. It also worked out well that there was another audition the week after Hawai'i that had all the same repertoire. So I thought, 'Well, at the least, I'll just use this as a chance to warm up for the next one.'"

Moving to Hawai'i presents its own specific set of challenges: The Nickells had to drive their car to Long Beach to have it shipped, and their two cats are subject to Hawai'i's strict vaccination and quarantine protocols. But, he says, "The biggest thing I've noticed so far with members of that orchestra is how excited they are to have new people there. The timpanist even went and looked at an apartment for us, so that's how we got that set up."

Learn more about studying percussion at SFCM.