On Auditioning
Taking auditions is one of the most challenging yet pivotal aspects of a musicians’s life. Careers and made or broken every day on these small snaphots of a performer’s life. In fact, this is such a critital skill for every musician that I decided to do a clinic at the 2010 Chicago Bass Festival on this very topic.
I recently sat on an audition panel (something I’ve done frequently in the past), and I thought it might be instructive to put out the comments I wrote down for the candidates. These are all anonymous and randomized, and I think that they give a good impression of the type of comments that auditioners write down during this process. You’ll notice that the comments are, for the most part, short and to the point, and there’s a lot of repetition. You can quite easily tell who did well, who struggled, and who was somewhere in the middle. I offer this information up in the hope that readers will see how the auditioner’s thought process often works (many folks write comments like mine).
Audition comments for a recent panel on which I was sitting:
Candidate #1:
-good tone
-solid
-Glinka: some tone problems
-good intonation
Candidate #2:
-rougher sound
-good
-need more dynamics in Adams
-Russlan: not clear on 8ths
Candidate #3:
-needs to be louder for Adams
-missed notes
-not long enough in 9/4
-some rushing in Russlan
Candidate #4:
-problems
-?
Candidate #5:
-Stravinsky: slow – counting!
-Adams: good – not short enough or loud enough
-Glinka: some rushing
Candidate #6:
-Stravinsky: good
- Adams: well-learned
- some intonation and articulation inconsistencies
Candidate #7:
- nervous
- Stravinsky: too slow
- good character
- Adams: some problem shifts but good overall
- Russlan: rushing, bow out of control
- very musical
Candidate #8:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: missed notes, counting inaccurate at end
- Russlan: good! Nice job
- tone is not where it needs to be, but solid
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Candidate #9:
- Stravinsky: good, could be bigger sound
- Adams: good intonation and articulation, some upbows inconsistent
- Glinka: good
Candidate #10:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: good
- Glinka: good
Candidate #11:
- Stravinsky: slow but solid
- Adams: not the right character, sounds like sightreading
- Glinka: sloppy, not the right bow stroke
Candidate #12:
- Stravinsky: wrong rhythm
- Adams: nice articulation, but I can’t hear the pitch
- Glinka: bow problems, can’t hear notes
Candidate #13:
- crooked bow
- Stravinsky: rhythm good but small sound
- Adams: too soft
- Glinka: bow problems
Candidate #14:
- Stravinsky: slow but good
- Adams: too long and soft but good intonation
- sounds like you have no rosin on your bow
Candidate #15:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: sounds like you don’t know the notes, wrong notes, wrong sound, needs to be closer to bridge
- bow out of control
Candidate #16:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: some missed notes, good otherwise
- Glinka: good
Candidate #17
- not making contact with string and bow
- missed notes
- Adams: wrong tempo and character, slow and soft, wrong notes
- Glinka: many different tempos, wrong style, bow control not there
Candidate #18:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: some missed notes, good otherwise
- Glinka: bow control lacking
Candidate #19:
- Stravinsky: slow but good character
- good audition, very musical
Candidate #20:
- Stravinsky: good
- Adams: good
- Glinka: good
CBC 142: Alan Steiner and audition tapes
We’re featuring double bassist Alan Steiner on this week’s episode of Contrabass Conversations. A graduate of the Curtis Institute, Alan performs regularly with the Chicago Sinfonietta and Lake Forest Symphony. In addition to maintaining a private double bass studio, Alan teaches bass each summer at the Birch Creek Music Performance Center in Door County, Wisconsin.
The topic of discussion for today’s brief (15 min) episode focuses on tips for helping students to make quality audition tapes. Alan listens to many audition tapes each year when choosing bassists for the Birch Creek Symphony, and he offers advice to help students make better tapes and get more out of the process. Enjoy!
Posts about learning, practicing, and auditioning
Here are a few classic posts about learning an instrument, practicing, getting ready for music school, and other such topics (from 2006-2008):
- Fifteen Practicing Mistakes that Students Make – These are a handful of common pitfalls that I have seen my students make over the years, and getting going with my bass studio has turned my focus to the practice room and how students can achieve the best results as efficietly as possible and with the least amount of frustration possible.
- Nine Dynamite Practice Room Accessories – When it’s time to hit the woodshed and do some serious practicing, there are a handful of no-brainer items that everyone needs–instrument, music, and music stand. Adding a few extra tools into the mix can make for much more productive and enjoyable practice sessions, however.
- Top 7 Considerations for Music School Applicants – Applying to music school? Think about the following points during the application process–they’re in order of most important to least important (in my opinion, at least).
- Advice for Aspiring Music Performance Majors – Musicians are often lured into university performance programs without a full understanding of what their odds of success are in the music business or what kind of a track record the institution they are investigating has. This article serves as a reality check for prospective music performance students and offer statistical evidence on what schools actually place classical music performers in full-time jobs.
- You Can’t Teach Professionally and Perform Professionally – Misperceptions on Both Sides of the Divide – Encouraging undergraduates to develop their instrumental craft to the highest degree possible is a value not shared by all educators. This article discusses common attitudes found among music educators and music performers and dissects problems resulting from these contrary viewpoints.
Success in the Private Lesson Studio Part 4: The Path to Music School
This is the fourth installment in a multi-part series on private music teaching. Check out part 1, part 2, and part 3 as well, and stay tuned for more installments in the near future.
Choosing a Life in Music
Planning on going to music school, huh? Congratuations. Despite the many roadblocks, twists, and turns facing a prospective musician, a life in music is really a wonderful thing. Every time I have my doubts about this fact, all I have to do is listen back through all the archived Contrabass Conversations episodes with bass players from all walks of life sharing why they chose to be a musician. This reinvigorates me and makes me realize how fortunate I am to do something that I love.
Where Should You Go?
One important thing differentiates music school applicants from other prospective college students: your success as a performer is much more strongly influenced by specifically whom you end up studying with. While a liberal arts student can floursh in a wide variety of academic settings (big schools, small schools, “Great Books” liberal arts schools, and everything in between), options for serious music students are more limited.
I’ve blogged about making this decision in the past before in a post about seven considerations for prospective music majors, so I won’t rehash what was in that previous post, but check this post out for more specifics about prioritizing and winnowing down your list of potential schools.
Can’t students be successful no matter where they attend college? Sure, but there’s certainly a statistical relationship between where you decide to go to music school and your likely procpects, so school choice can help to stack the odds at least a little more in your favor.
After boiling down your school options to between five and seven possibilities, you have a task that nearly every prospective music student faces:
The “List”
How do you balance the requirements of a half-dozen schools in such a way that you’re well-prepared for each and every auditon? This dilemma faces most prospective music students, and finding a way to intelligently and efficiently chart a long-term practice strategy is a major concern.
The following steps may help to organize your practicing in preparation for those impending auditions:
1. Get repertoire lists from potential schools – The first step to getting your audition repertoire ready for music school auditions is to figure out what each school requires. One of my former bass students did a great job putting together a list of required repertoire for many of the major music schools for double bass, but most people will have to a little phone, email, and internet research to get a solid list of requirements.
2. Winnow down the list to the least number of pieces – You’ve done your research, finding that every school wants a concerto, some want sonatas, solo Bach, and others want an etude from a certain composer. Your task is now to figure out the smallest number of pieces that satisfy these requirements. What you don’t want to be doing is playing one concerto for school A and another one for school B. This might not seem like a big deal six months before your auditions start, but you’ll discover that there’s an “audition season” of about 4-8 weeks in January and February, and you’ll likely be doing one or more auditions each week for a period of time. Travel, fatigue and keeping up with high school homework is going to be sucking up a lot of your available time, and the last thing you want to be thinking about is having to switch gears from one concerto to another.
3. Prioritize your practicing – So much to practice, and so little time! How, you may wonder, should you approach organizing your practice time? The answer is both extremely simple and frustratingly elusive: practice what needs the most work. The challenge, of course, is recognizing exactly what needs the most work! The objective perspective of a teacher can be invaluable for this kind of decision-making. Sit down with your teacher and try to come up with a general plan for practicing. Do you need to be spending an hour a day on that etude that is only required at one school (which isn’t your first pick of schools anyway)? Maybe…but maybe not. Are there some fundamental skills–intonation, rhythm, spiccato, vibrato–that need to be solidified prior to your auditions? Fundamental skills take months and years to improve (most bassists are still working on all of the aforementioned skills every day!), and the time to identify what you really need to work on is not days or weeks before your auditions, but months or even years before.
4. Generate a “recital” mentality – I’ve found that looking at our audition repertoire as a kind of mini-recital rather than as a disassociated glob of etudes, excerpts, and solo movements is a very healthy way to approach this repertoire. If you feel like you’re putting together a recital that just happens to be made up of short little bits from different sources, you may be in a better place mentally–you’re not doing an audition (well, you are, but you see what I mean), but rather doing a performance, and your goal is to assemble this list into a unified whole that you can play at a moment’s notice. This is a tough distinction to draw in a text blog post (as I’m discovering right now!), but there’s a bit of a different mentality between recital preparation and audition preparation, and if you can harness the healthy things about the former for the latter, your preparation may be more peaceful and confident.
5. Start preparing early! – No matter how hard you try, if you’re auditioning for five or six (or more!) schools you’ll probably have a lot of repertoire t get under your fingers. Should you completely ditch technique and any other repertoire to focus on your college audition music, or should you keep a more balanced approach? I’d recommend keeping up a balance until 6-8 weeks before “audition season,” at which point I’d transition into an audition preparation mentality. Starting early and devoting a healthy percentage of practice time (perhaps 50% of your time) to this repertoire about a year before your college auditions should put you in a good spot by the time those stressful couple of months roll around your senior year.
Auditioning
Good morning readers! Peter Tambroni here from MostlyBass.com.
There’s gigabytes of information on auditioning out there. Here’s a page my book, “An Introduction to Double Bass Playing” – it’s just a short, clean checklist to get you on track.
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Auditioning
A competent teacher in a quality college program will be of the utmost importance when preparing for auditions. Find out who is winning auditions and what school they attended. There are many classes, masterclasses, and books on the subject of auditioning. Here are my suggestions.
• Preparation, preparation, preparation. The primary cause of nervousness is the lack of preparation.
• Decide on an interpretation and stick with it – don’t change things at the audition.
• Video-tape yourself regularly. This cannot be emphasized enough.
• Simulate nerves by running for a few minutes then play excerpts. This increases your heart rate and can you give you that ‘under the gun’ feeling.
• Play for many different people including musicians that do not play the bass (cellists are particularly unforgiving).
• Do mock auditions with teachers, colleagues and friends.
• Study with musicians in the orchestra you are auditioning for.
• Study the music. You should own several recordings and printed versions since editions do vary. Get an urtext or unedited / original edition. Edited editions such as the Zimmerman excerpt books are very helpful for getting a traditional bass perspective. However, don’t limit yourself to those fingerings!
• Solos – some auditions will specify the solo, most will not. Some will give parameters – a movement of Bach, a movement of a concerto, two contrasting movements. If you have the choice, play something you play well. It is better to play an easier piece well than a difficult piece poorly.
• Practice auditioning – set aside time in your practicing to run through excerpts with minimal time in between and without speaking, judging, or correcting.
• Count rests accurately – know the other parts so you can hear them in your head.
• Be musical!
• Arrive on time – which means early. Give yourself ample time to warm-up, tune, and be at ease.
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