Ben Blaesing can tell you how to get to Sesame Street—and to a principal seat in a symphony.

The 2026 percussion graduate (who studied with Ed Stephan, Principal Timpani at the San Francisco Symphony, while at SFCM) will soon be surveying the Spokane Symphony from one of the best seats in the house: Onstage behind several enormous drums.

Blaesing traces his interest in percussion back to one very specific source. "I started playing the drum set very casually when I was 4 years old," he said, "and it was because of Sesame Street. I was huge into Ernie at the time. So like anything Ernie on Sesame Street did, I had to do. I had the sweater. I had a rubber duck collection. And when I saw that he was playing drums, I was like, 'I got to do that.'"

Growing up in Munster, Indiana, about 30 minutes outside of Chicago, Blaesing was able to frequently see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) play, and saw the ensemble's timpanist, David Herbert, play a concerto there. "I was just like, 'Man, that is the coolest thing in the world,'" he remembers. "And so from then on, I would always kind of just watch what the timpani was doing, the role that it played, how it kind of just drove everything from the outside and how it seemed like everyone kind of listened back to the timpani—that always really attracted me."

Blaesing arrived at SFCM on the direct advice of his undergrad teacher. "He would always tell me, 'Ed's the guy you want to go study with. It seems like all of his students are doing really well at this point in time.'" At SFCM, Blaesing says, his goal never changed: making a living playing timpani. "Over these past two years, I think I've been both lucky and, uh, maybe not as lucky," he recalls: "I took I think over 12 auditions in the span of two years."

That's a daunting number, but Blaesing looks at the auditions as learning experiences: "The great part about that kind of schedule is that you start to understand what works, how to get out of a prelim round, what sounds good, what's across-the-board acceptable and what will get you cut." Stephan's studio, he says, was a source of support as well: "The beautiful thing about having four other guys who were all studying with me was that we all got the chance to bounce ideas around with each other, rather than just blindly follow. We could really tinker with everything and make it our own."

Blaesing highlights that sense of community as something to foster early on in a student's experience: "Make friends who want to do the same thing you want to do." He says the other timpanists in his studio went to the same auditions, traveled, roomed, and ate together, celebrating each other's wins and supporting each other when things went the other way. "That was really one of the most important things that got me through the whole experience," Blaesing says. "If I'd had to go it alone, it would have been a lot more challenging, but having these people who had the exact same experience as I did really allowed me to push through."

"Because there's only ever one timpanist in an orchestra, it can be so easy to just be like, 'I'm fighting against everyone else,'" Blaesing says. "But you're with your friends, so at the end of the day, if one of you wins, you can't help but just be happy because you've seen how hard everyone else was working."

Still, it was a journey for Blaesing to nail his Spokane audition. "Over the past year, I did pretty well on auditions—I never got cut in a prelim. But the flip-side of that was that I would also get cut at the semi-final, because the moment would become that much bigger in my head. I'd be thinking, 'Oh my God, I could live here. This could be my life.' And then everything would just kind of spiral a bit, everything would just get to be too much."

But before his Spokane audition, Blaesing wound up playing Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 with the Winnipeg Symphony—their season closer. "It was beautiful making music with that orchestra, and thinking, "This is what the end goal could be.' So because of that, I didn't really have time to freak out about the audition. I just went in with the goal of making music, just like I'd done with the Symphony. And at one point I realized, 'My hands are moving, I think I sound good, I've got just as much of an ability to win as anyone else here.'"

Blaesing is bringing a sturdy side gig to Spokane with him. For the past few years, he's been wrapping timpani mallets, first for himself as a cost-saving measure, but recently for his fellow percussionists. "There's a lot more reward that happens way quicker if you wrap mallets yourself," he says. "And you figure out what worked or didn't work, like, 'Oh, maybe if I make the stitches a little closer or further apart…' You can really get into the nitty-gritty and get better really quickly if you're thinking about those tiny little details. Now it's kind of a sideline of mine, I'm making a little money doing it."

Learn more about studying percussion at SFCM.