<p>@Yoshi I’m gonna be honest, I had a really bad tape myself but this is REALLY REALLY bad. I’m guessing you are using an upright piano for your tape? Next time, use a grand or at least baby grand. Also, you need to practice w/ your metronome like CRAZY. Practice slowly and pay attention to details. You will get there!</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound harsh btw, but as violoncello stated, you do have musicality and possibly a future in music. Keep practicing and you will succeed!</p>
<p>Thanks for all your concerns! I was too excited to share that I forgot to mention details…</p>
<p>I’m capable of much better than that, you see I had decided to become a musician (or at least, try my hardest to keep my doors open!) and thus I decided to apply to music schools.
But then I found out that the prescreening date for most colleges was due in 2 days… I ended up skipping school to apply to colleges + practice. I dug up old music because I wouldn’t be able to prepare my harder, more current pieces I was working on.</p>
<p>I was really stressed those 2 days and i was typing my essays and filling out applications so fast that my fingers were feel tired and worn out… that and pressure of knowing that a simple recording could change my life made me play really horridly. + the fact that I only had a few hours to record 3 songs! While I was recording the songs, I felt pretty comfortable with the Traumerei since it is like a grade 6 song and easy and slow to play, but then as I tried to record the Sinfonia and Waltz I was really running out of time… the Waltz I had like 40 minutes left, 10 of which I tried to spend recording. Pressure got to me and I was just not able to prepare it in such a short time. While I was playing the Waltz I felt hurt a lot inside cus I know how bad I was playing, and really regretted a lot of things… for example, not having decided to audition to become a musician sooner. </p>
<p>But now all of that’s over, I’m really happy my efforts paid off. I guess I was pretty lucky then eh?</p>
<p>Thank you for all your honesty guys! Your frankness/harshness has not offended me. If I were someone who didn’t realize how bad my recording was and expected to be able to still have a good chance of getting in, such comments could be life changing.</p>
<p>Note: And yeah it was an upright piano 
I really don’t like my piano, neither. The feel and touch just seems to work against me.</p>
<p>I’m not sure where I could record with a grand piano since I don’t have one… places I can think of so far are a friend’s house or possibly use a church’s during quiet times. Is it ok if they’re out of tune though? Any ideas?</p>
<p>Yoshi, I think there is definitely something there, especially as an education major versus performance. I am impressed that you pulled something out of a hat once you realized what you wanted to do. Now that you have gotten a real audition, I hope you look at this opportunity as a precious gift of time and start practicing with a metronome, and get your songs ready for prime time. Congrats on step 1 … go get 'em for step 2.</p>
<p>Aside from the metronome, you really need some serious instruction in voicing and pedaling. I think you are very lucky to have gotten an audition at UM. Much good luck!</p>
<p>I know my pedaling and voicing is really bad, but my understanding is much better 
I only had a few hours to practice, and like I said I couldn’t really even rest myself because I had to research and apply to some music colleges at the same time. These weren’t songs I had been preparing a long time, I expected no better than to crash and burn. I wasn’t familiar with all the notes and didn’t have fingerings figured out, etc. etc., let alone the pedaling or phrasing etc. :(</p>
<p>Thanks for the opinion though! seems like most agree that I was lucky. Or maybe it’s not truly luck but that they saw something they liked in my recording? (If I were to do this bad against next year, and all other things equal, would I pass again?)</p>
<p>If someone here didn’t pass UM’s prescreening and can check out my recording or share his/hers, that might help me or others judge where they are.</p>
<p>Thanks again :D</p>
<p>Yoshi: You should get a teacher (or in the unlikely event that you have one, definitely get a new one). </p>
<p>From my listening, I did not detect any musicality (sorry to be so blunt, but I believe that you wanted honest feedback), but rather, I detected a lack of teaching and some enthusiasm in the Chopin. [Musicality is the ability to conceive and express musical ideas, and nothing of the sort was in evidence in any of the three pieces recorded. Please note that I am not saying that you lack musicality–I believe that almost every human being possesses musicality. I am merely saying that the near random sounds recorded did not give any evidence of musicality. You didn’t have time to practice enough in order to allow your musicality to shine through.]</p>
<p>Perhaps the clear lack of teaching made the person listening to your recording believe that you could make some significant progress if you had an instructor. I certainly think that with some practice and a decent teacher, you could improve significantly. A teacher would help you express yourself and your musicality. As it was, the errors, misconceptions, and plain inability to hit correct notes at even remotely correct times interfered with any musical ideas that you might have had.</p>
<p>Congratulations on passing the prescreen and best of luck with your auditions! I am certain that if you have been practicing hard and heeding a good teacher’s advice that your playing has improved considerably.</p>
<p>Listening to the recording, I have to second what violindad said about the playing. Leaving out the technical issues I think you display enthusiasm in the playing but musicality is not showing, as violindad said musicality is about expressing the music, shaping it and so forth. As he said, it doesn’t mean you aren’t musical, the prob I would hazard a guess is you had your hands full trying to play it as well technically as you could…even for kids oozing musicality, the struggle to get the technical issues correct can overwhelm any attempt to ‘musicalize’ it (if that is a word…).</p>
<p>I don’t know a lot about music ed, but it does have different emphasis then performance, and they prob saw something in the playing that made them think you would be a good candidate to teach, maybe it was the enthusiasm or something along those lines, and that to me isn’t a bad thing by far (lots of students who play piano really well, who would stink at being a music teacher…). </p>
<p>I am very happy for you you got the audition date at Umich like that, that is great! My recommendation is the same as others, besides practicing your pieces intensely, I also recommend finding a teacher to help you prep for the audition, to bring all the pieces together and such, among other things, to help bring out the musical elements and make the playing more well rounded. Music education is a different beast then performance so take my comments with more then a grain of salt…and knock em dead on your audition!</p>
<p>Good luck to all of you auditioning in the weeks & months ahead! Busy time!!
I have a question.
How many vocal students does Curtis audition in the semi-finals usually?</p>
<p>No real pattern with Curtis. They have been notorious for having very,very few, if any, voice students make it past the pre-screening process- because they simply concentrated on their graduate students- but this year it seems to be wide open. Either they are expanding their program or the new dorm cost a whole lot more than they planned!
Given the new numbers, I would be sure to inquire as to how the undergrads are going to be integrated into the overall vision the department has for itself.</p>
<p>This is why I so enjoy this site. Thanks for your answer!
I will ask the question about integration when we are there.
Thanks again!</p>
<p>@violindad/musicprnt</p>
<p>Yes that is correct, I wanted blunt, honest feedback, and you gave it to me, thanks!</p>
<p>I definitely don’t practice enough, but my teacher didn’t motivate me or pressure me to do better. But now that I’m practicing more now that I’m taking music a lot more seriously, (average 1 hour a day ish? and now that exams are over, i’m trying to go for 2-4 a day) and he is giving a lot more feedback and help.
I have been actually thinking about getting a new teacher, it doesn’t feel like he’s helping as much as he should (though he definitely is helping, it’s just that maybe it’s not as much as I’m paying for) and even if I do, buying a couple lessons from a really good piano teacher at least temporarily for the auditions sounds like a good idea! </p>
<p>Hm thanks for the opinions! Violindad, you said one reason they accepted my recording may be because they feel I might significantly improve with a good teacher – is there any way you think they could conclude this other than my recording simply being bad, and lacking basic musicality? Also, you both mention that it might be something like “enthusiasm” that showed through. I don’t think I quite understand the difference between “enthusiasm” and “musicality” here. Do you mean that they might have heard effort in it, but the effort is simply unguided, and thus not very musical?</p>
<p>My understanding is that admissions people can hear “potential,” whatever that means. Some teachers only want incoming students with a strong foundation, while others enjoy the challenge of taking a diamond-in-the-rough and helping them develop musically. I didn’t listen to your prescreen (and my comments wouldn’t be helpful anyway!) but if it’s as described here, maybe there was someone on the committee who heard something they liked.</p>
<p>Enthusiasm and musicality are not necessarily the same thing, though usually kids associated with being ‘musical’ are also enthusiastic. Musicality, though, generally means a musician/music student who ‘gets’ the idea of the music, seems to understand it on some level and are playing the piece as a piece of music, not a bunch of notes, so they are shaping it, maybe unique ways of doing the dynamics, or understanding let’s say what in a baroque piece a composer likely was intending, it is a whole range of things. There are plenty of music students I have seen who are high level technically, can bang out a paganini caprice at full speed with the best of them, but seem to have the musicality of a brick, or appear to be simply imitating what their teacher told them, there are kids who aren’t quite as technically up there who seem to be expressing the music from within…</p>
<p>I cannot probably give a logical/rational explanation of how I heard enthusiasm in your recording, I basically sensed that the player (you) were really into playing the piece, you really wanted to get it out there…I would also guess there is musicality inside yourself, but as I wrote on another post I think the struggle to play the pieces well technically probably overwhelmed any attempt to show the inner music vision, so to speak:). Again, take that for what it is worth, I am not a pianist or even pretending to be one, just someone who has listened to a lot of music of all sorts…</p>
<p>I don’t know when your audition is, but if you can, schedule the extra lessons and put in as much effort as you can into practicing and shaping your audition pieces, especially as you feel you are behind the curve. If you go into that audition and show them you have improved, I suspect it will help (though I don’t know if they would remember the audition recording for the pre screen), and the other thing is all that practicing should help boost your confidence and allow your musicality, whatever it is, to come through…music ed is a bit different then performance, and if you show the enthusiams and dedication on the audition it might help a good deal, considering a music ed degree is about teaching kids music, trying to get them interested in it, trying maybe to get them passionate about it, too:). Put it this way, in performance on Piano, kids heading towards piano performance majors tend to put in many hours a day practicing, prob averaging close to 4 hours a day, and given where you are, the more the better:)</p>
<p>There is a point when a musician ceases to play only the notes and plays the music. That was not present on the tape. Notes being attempted sound likes notes are being attempted. There is no flow, no legato. So much concentration is paid to executing the notes that dynamics, phrasing and other marks are lost. I am sorry to say but the tape sounded like practice at trying to get the notes. Also at this point given the school, the drive to practice and do well should be within, not dependent on an outside source. Music is made or composed because the player or composer wishes for nothing else. There is no replacement for talent and time spent working at the craft.</p>
<p>I’m just a fellow student so my opinion is probably not worth that much. Your posts on this board have shown great enthusiasm and self-motivation and it definitely comes through your performance, which is why I don’t understand why you would only practice 1h a day as you say. This not enough, and anyway as a piano major, you would practice much more so why not start now? Most of my friends were practicing at least 3h a day when they were in junior high, adding hours as they grew up until 6-7h a day. Personally, when I was auditioning for schools I went for 5 hours a day. In the recording, the technique you display does not sound very developed, but this isn’t really a problem as practice and a good teacher can fix that rather quickly. However, I guess if I were a teacher listening to this, I think I would wonder why would somebody tape something that has rather apparent mistakes (wrong chords, unheard notes, etc…) and not thrive to provide their very best work. I think I spent about 3 months to finish making my audition tapes (there were like 5 pieces or so), since I would make one tape, be unhappy with it, practice, rehearse with piano more, and start again, and again, and again. I did maybe something like 7 or 8 recording sessions that were a 1-2 hours long (I have my own equipment and did not have to pay the accompanist). I would encourage you to maybe try and do more practicing, and tape again if you have any more schools that are requesting you to send in a tape. I don’t know if it’s good advice or not, but I’ve always thought that missing a deadline or asking for more time to get a much better recording was always worth it. I am not a pianist but one of my sibling is and I take piano at my school, and it sounds like some slow practice and metronome could probably fix the issues rather quickly. I don’t mean to be rude or mean, but you said that you were looking for criticism so I thought I would just share my thoughts.</p>
<p>So, all prescreens are in for my soprano D.</p>
<p>Invited to audition at:</p>
<p>CCM - auditioned in Jan
Michigan - auditioned in Jan
Eastman
BU
NEC
BoCo
MSM
Northwestern
Ga State (safety school)</p>
<p>We’ve already heard from CCM, she was accepted. The month of February she will not be home a single weekend. Good lord, how are you supposed to graduate and miss so much school!</p>
<p>One last thing about all the application fees, be sure to save all your receipts etc, but the application fees, according to my tax guy, are deductible, not for 2011, but for they year they actually go to college, so 2012.</p>
<p>Well said Skieur. As an actual student, your opinion means a great deal. You’ve lived it in the trenches.</p>
<p>GGS yes
NEC yes
Peabody yes
Eastman yes
Mcgill No Prescreening required
Juilliard rejected
MSM yes
Mannes yes</p>
<p>Anyone can tell me what kind of questions may be asked during the piano audition or what should I prepare??
My English is quite bad so i was veryyy nervous of interviews OMG :(((((</p>
<p>@Curlymom</p>
<p>I agree these auditions are taking their toll on senior year! My D says she just wants to spend a full week in school! But we only have 2 more trips (nxt wk to IU and the end of Feb to NW)…and I do think the experience is well worth it for a performance major!</p>