<p>phrygian17: Are you a jazz musician? I hope so; otherwise what you write will strike huge fear into every future classical applicant! </p>
<p>Did they really ask for excerpts? Normally, the only excerpts that are requested are orchestral excerpts, and they are never, ever by memory because no orchestra ever, ever plays by memory. What sorts of works were the excerpts taken from? Or was it jazz standards rather than excerpts that were requested?</p>
<p>It would be useful for future readers to know whether you are jazz or classical, what instrument you play, and what school made this strange request. I understand that you may not want to reveal all of that in order to protect your anonymity. </p>
<p>If the request was for some jazz standards not on the list (rather than for excerpts), then the request is not common, but not strange. If that were the case, then you are correct that the faculty was probably trying to test your knowledge of the repertoire and your ability to perform unprepared material. As you mention, for a jazz musician, this would be not unexpected at the professional or grad level. </p>
<p>If this is not one of the stated requirements for the audition at this school, then probably the faculty thought quite highly of your playing or background.</p>
<p>I checked back on your earlier posts and see that you play horn. Yup, it definitely seems strange for faculty to ask for unprepared orchestral excerpts and to ask for them by memory, and, to top it all off, to ask for excerpts that are not on the school’s list from which to choose. Maybe the horn world is entirely different or maybe, as you speculate, this request was more a test of personality than musical ability.</p>
<p>I certainly hope that they were impressed that: a) you had studied these difficult excerpts; b) you had memorized them when you studied them (this suggests that you have a very strong musical/aural memory and an excellent ear); c) you could remember the excerpts after months of spending most or all of your practice on preparing audition material; and d) you kept your stomach contents intact in such a situation!</p>
<p>Actually, phrygian, I’ve seen this over and over. I don’t know about other instrumental areas, but if you’re a brass player, you just need to have the five or so asked-on-every-audition excerpts memorized and ready to go. It took me one time trying to explain to someone that, yes, I had worked on some big excerpt, but not in a while, for me to realize it was a fool’s game. They won’t take you seriously unless you can just do it. The thing that takes the pressure off is that once you work on the things for long enough to really play them you have them memorized anyway. </p>
<p>Similarly, I’ve learned that if you’re going to play one excerpt from a work and there are other important sections in the same work, you should be able to play those as well. Furthermore, and maybe this is more obvious to other people, but I’ve had very bad luck with people seeing something in my music bag and then asking me to play it, so I started being sure never to give a teacher a glimpse of a page I wasn’t prepared to play for them. These apply especially for sample lessons, but I’ve had both of the first two things happen to me in actual admissions auditions.</p>
<p>tuba269: Very interesting and helpful observations and advice. Were the schools that spontaneously asked you for unrequired surprise memorized excerpts top tier schools? I believe that phrygian applied to some top tier horn schools (Rice, NW, if I recall ocrrectly). In Canada even exceptional high school brass players would be unlikely to be able to pull extra unrequired memorized orchestral excerpts out of their hats at a moment’s notice. Perhaps brass professors are, in general, just more spontaneous than other musicians.</p>
<p>That has never happened to my hornist son, and I’ve never heard of it! However, horn excerpts are common lesson fodder, so perhaps they were looking at the extent of lessons, as others have said. My son was asked to submit a list of excerpts he’d studied on his applicaton, and at the end of one audition, they did ask for a couple of those exceprts, but nothing off the wall. As I recall, they asked him to choose an excerpt himself first, and he played it. Then they asked for another, and he said, “how about…?” And one of the teachers said, “Well, I was kinda hoping for …” (I think it was either Til Eulenspiegel or Ein Heldenleben - something standard, but fairly difficult). But they were on his list, so all was fair.</p>
<p>I can’t remember if they were from memory - entirely possible.</p>
<p>These were at top-tier schools. It seems to be almost always in situations with teachers who are also professional symphony performers. I’m a little surprised to hear it for an audition into an undergrad program–I imagine the teacher thought highly of the player to ask if he could do it. </p>
<p>Again, I think there are only a few excerpts for each instrument that this would be asked for, the ones that everyone should be pretty familiar with (Bolero, Tuba Mirum for trombone, Ride for trombone, bass trombone and tuba, Petrouchka, Pictures for trumpet, Til, Don Juan for horn, etc.). Similarly, I think the memorization thing isn’t ever really insisted on, but a lot of the orchestral veterans assume you’ll have them in your head if you’ve really worked on them. I’ve just had good luck with generally having 5-8 excerpts always ready to go; it keeps me from feeling like I’m giving the impression of being inflexible or underprepared.</p>
<p>Two auditions for D this past week in Jazz Voice:</p>
<p>Peabody: The audition was exactly as described in their booklet with written theory test and ear training – pretty basic. There were 4 adjudicators in the live audition, who did not introduce themselves and none of which was the jazz voice teacher. They did not seem particularly excited to hear a vocalist. D sang only 2 of her songs and not all the way through. They also asked for sight singing and scales. D has a wide vocal range so they asked her to sing her lowest and highest note. Strangely, Peabody was the only audition with pre-recorded music accompaniment. </p>
<p>The info session was good with lots of jazz parents asking lots of jazz questions. However, not many of the questions were answered and we did not get a good feeling for the strength of the jazz program. For example, they knew that there are about 40 jazz students out of about 700 total students but did not know how many were voice. They referred us to the jazz faculty to ask questions but then there was no opportunity to talk to the jazz faculty. </p>
<p>We stayed at the Peabody Inn which was convenient and inexpensive but in need of some renovations. We had a relaxing dinner at Maisey’s where the food was good and they played recorded jazz music.</p>
<p>NEC: The live audition was a very straight-forward process and there were no separate or written tests. The panel consisted of just the jazz chair and the jazz voice teacher. They were very friendly and interactive but, in terms of level of difficulty, this was the most demanding of all of D’s auditions. The ear training was challenging and they asked some theory questions. In addition to her 3 songs, they had her solo over a song that she didn’t know and she was asked to sight sing. It was a comprehensive and tough audition.</p>
<p>We stayed overnight at the Back Bay Hilton. We got a great rate on LastMinuteTravel.com, where they don’t reveal the name of the hotel until you book it but you can sometimes tell from the pictures which hotel it is. </p>
<p>One more audition this week and then D is done. The audition is really stressful for the kids but until now I didn’t appreciate what a toll it takes on the parents.</p>
<p>Interesting comments, and thank you for the advice, tuba269! Good memory; my instrument is indeed horn and the school was of the middle-high tier. Retrospectively, the toughest part of the audition was trying to play the excerpts I HAD prepared when the faculty requested them after the nerve-wracking events of the previous few minutes…It seems to me that while extra excerpts are not common place per se, they are a part of bringing one’s A game to every audition. That said, I don’t think it makes sense to practice unrequired excerpts for more than a few minutes each day as there is a relatively small chance that they will be requested.</p>
<p>I agree. There gets to a point, anyway, when you can just run through a few standard, familiar excerpts a couple times every once in a while to keep them fresh.</p>
<p>does anyone know why not all of the faculty are present at the auditions? a lot of times there were 1 or 2 faculty members not present at the auditions. how will they admit students if they are not there to hear people? there weren’t any recording devices either. so how do THEY know which students they’d like to admit? </p>
<p>that seemed soooo weird to me. i couldn’t come up with any reasons for that lol.</p>
<p>Every conservatory has a different system. At Juilliard they make sure that most, if not all, teachers you list are at the audition (it must be quite a puzzle to put the schedule together.) At other schools it’s more hit-or-miss. My daughter auditioned at IU last year and neither of the teachers she listed were there. She was admitted quickly and received a scholarship, but when she contacted the two teachers they had not heard of her. So she flew back to Indiana to play for one and went to a totally different city to catch another while he was on tour. She actually played for a third Indiana teacher while he was on tour in NYC, on the fly. It was very complicated because apparently there auditions and studio assignments are totally different matters. At Juilliard you might be admitted to the college but not to any of the studios you listed, so you have to scramble for an assignment. If the teachers you were applying to were not at your audition that’s not a good sign. It could mean that they were unable to be there because of some other commitment, or maybe that their studio is already full so there was no reason to be there. But it does not necessarily mean that you won’t be admitted to the school.</p>
<p>rachelee92: I think that the faculty members trust each others’ judgments as to who should be admitted and therefore they do not all have to be present for auditions. While two heads are better than one, nine heads are not that much better than three or four. Faculty time is very expensive. Many faculty members bill out at $100 to $200+ per hour, so to have 8 faculty members present for a 20-minute audition costs the school about $400 for faculty time alone (disregarding wages of other employees who help organize and set up auditions and the costs of the space, paper etc.). With tuition at many places being so high, schools look for ways to economize. </p>
<p>Schools want to admit students that have the chops to play well or to learn to play well. It doesn’t take the entire music faculty to determine that, just as it doesn’t take the entire math faculty to mark an exam. While musical performance ability and potential is certainly a subjective matter, I don’t think that it is nearly as subjective as, for example, writing ability or composing ability. </p>
<p>My son’s experiences: at Rice only the single teacher to whose studio he applied heard him (in violin–other instruments are different). At CIM, three teachers heard him (his top three preferences all of whom were very busy people–all perform, one was the president and another teaches at multiple schools and is one of the most in-demand teachers in North America; we were pleasantly surprised that all three managed to make it to the audition and certainly did not expect to see all of the entire violin faculty at it); at Juilliard about 8 heard him; at McGill I believe about 4 violin faculty heard his initial audition for acceptance and then the entire string faculty heard his scholarship audition; at Mercer the entire string faculty heard every audition (but there were only about 25 string auditions, those auditions fit into about 6 hours, most students would work with at least 3 or 4 of the faculty members regularly and every admitted student was granted full tuition, so the stakes were very high).</p>
<p>Given the performing and teaching schedules of many teachers and the expense of holding auditions, I am surprised that there were at most 1 or 2 faculty members absent from your auditions.</p>
<p>Violindad, I assume that full-time faculty are not paid piecemeal to attend auditions; it is a departmental responsibility. It may be different for adjunct faculty, but I doubt adjuncts would be involved in admissions decisions. I know that at some conservatories faculty are asked to make an effort to be at auditions, although the same outside responsibilities that make them so desirable as faculty (e.g., busy performing careers) sometimes preclude them being at all auditions. If you are auditioning for a particular studio at certain schools, the school will schedule you in on a day when that faculty member is there. At other schools, it is probably worthwhile to call ahead and ask what days certain faculty will be attending auditions, if you are determined to audition for a particular studio. So the question, rachelee92, might not be “will they all be there” but rather “will the ones I want to play for be there”?</p>
<p>Yes, certainly full-time faculty would not usually be paid by the hour or anything additional for the auditions; being present at auditions is generally assumed to be part of their job responsibilities. While there is no direct payment to those faculty members for participating in auditions, there is still an indirect cost to the school in that as the school increases the duties it expects from an individual faculty member, the more faculty it must hire.</p>
<p>I didn’t make clear enough that my point was time is money. As a school increases the various job responsibilities of faculty, the faculty members find themselves running out of time for their primary responsibility (teaching) and thus they take on fewer students which means more faculty members must be hired to cover the same number of students and thus the auditions are costing the school the faculty time as any other time-consuming responsibility does. </p>
<p>Additionally, at many music schools a majority of the teaching faculty are not full-time: not only do adjuncts sometimes outnumber full-timers, but there are many part-timers that are not adjuncts. A surprising number of top-level faculty teach at two or more schools or choose to accept part-time employment in order to preserve time for their performing careers and their private studios. </p>
<p>Some adjuncts are involved in admissions decisions at some schools, if they are the only person that teaches a particular instrument. For example, if only an adjunct teaches tuba, then that adjunct will usually be involved along with perhaps a trombone teacher or two and maybe even a horn or trumpet person.</p>
<p>well not ALL of the auditions had 1 or 2 faculty members missing. i had 8 auditions and…maybe 3 auditions? haha i didn’t actually count haha. and thankfully the one i wanted to play for was present so it’s all good.</p>
<p>My worst audition was Peabody ,since the very beginning I found it chaotic , couldn’t find a place to warm up until 10 minutes prior to my audition, also during the audition I felt nobody was interested at all in my singing or even paying attention to me, I got not feedback at all and I want to know if anyone here had a similar experience there</p>
<p>Texansoprano - My son had a similar experience last year at Peabody – absolutely no reaction from anyone on audition panel. His entire audition was over in 10 minutes. Afterwards, he felt that he didn’t want to go to Peabody even if he was accepted because the whole experience left him cold. He was accepted at Peabody but ultimately went elsewhere.</p>
<p>My daughter’s experience at Peabody was stressful and chaotic (hard to find a warm-up room, hard to find the theory exam, kept getting lost, etc.) But her panel was very warm. That made a big difference in the way we felt about the school upon leaving at the end of the day.</p>
<p>For whatever reason, my D’s audition at Peabody was not stressful, confusing or chaotic (which may have been because we had visited previously so had a basic mental map of the maze). She found a practice room easily, all her paperwork was well in order, her panel was pleasant, there were helpful students stationed every 50 feet in case we got lost. We had gone in fearing the worst after reading messages here, but the most stressful part of her day was not having a camera to photograph the fantastic igloo some students had built in the courtyard. If only their financial aid had come through…</p>