<p>ok so ive got 5 or so auditions a head of me now. so far i had 2. they were good auditions....except! at the last audition i wasn't asked to play my etude! WHICH I PREPARED FOR THE WHOLE TIME UNTIL NOW. i'm starting to think that ....maybe other schools won't ask me to play that either. can i just not practice that to save time or should i just practice that also. i'm also worried that they might ask me to play and i will not do a good job if i don't practice it. so i wanted to know if the schools don't really ask for the etudes. </p>
<p>p.s. my teacher also said 'hahaha THEY WON'T ASK YOU FOR ETUDES!' yeah. so i'm just wondering.</p>
<p>Rachel if etudes are listed on your schools’ audition requirements then you better know them. You just have to know everything that is required and expect that they won’t get to a lot of it. Each school will decide what they want you to play and how much of it. They may give you some choice but you won’t know that until you’re in the room.
Best of luck!</p>
<p>I agree with CLRN8MOM: you should be prepared to play whatever is listed in a school’s requirements. Schools do vary in what they require and in what they ask for. </p>
<p>One famous school has a unique requirement for a post-1939 work; the tradition for years has been that it is never asked for–guess what? My son was asked to play it. No one else that he knew was asked for it.</p>
<p>Son’s concerto first movement was btwn 15 and 20 minutes long, so no one heard all of it and every audition started at the beginning of it; after that though, every audition was different–some heard only the beginning, others skipped to one of the cadenzas, and one skipped to the end (the least likely to be asked for). Be prepared! </p>
<p>You may want to realign your practice time proportions in accordance with the likelihood of being asked for something (e.g. instead of practicing the etude for 1 hour per day, sonata for 1.5 hours, and Bach for 1 hour, maybe do 20 minutes on the etude, and somewhat more on the sonata and Bach if they are much more likely to be requested)–if the etude is ready to go now, it should not take too much time to keep it in decent maintenance mode.</p>
<p>thanks for your advices! yeah i have to prepare 6 pieces for my auditions: 2 etudes, 1 concerto, 2 bach movements and one mozart. and it’s been a struggle to fit all that into 5 hours or less practice. so i was just tempted to not practice the etudes but now that i read your replies i better keep practicing them. ahhh. it’s REALLY hard to practice ALL that. and sometimes i dont get stuff done in 1.5 hours so it’s a real problem right now that i’m facing.</p>
<p>My son has had 5 auditions so far and has had to play all pieces requested including etudes. Some of the schools did skip the scales however. Good luck!!</p>
<p>If you’re a violinist and by etude you mean Paganini, you’d better practice it. You might not be asked for it, especially in 10-minute auditions where they are more apt to request your Bach and part of a concerto. But audition panels <em>do</em> request etudes and you can’t risk coming across as the candidate who was banking on not being asked for Paganini.</p>
<p>Agree with glassharmonica: Paganini is close enough to real music (unlike most of the etudes which most instrumentalists prepare for auditions and which are not part of the repertoire which is ever recorded or performed) that panels will often ask for the Paganini. While my son played portions of both his Bach and concerto at all auditions, I believe that more than half also wanted to hear at least part of the Paganini (and they always wanted the impossible part!).</p>
<p>hahahaha impossible part of paganini…
anyways my etudes are not paganini thankfully… but yeah i realized i should keep practicing them. thanks all of you!</p>
<p>I think that being asked for the hardest part of the Paganini would be a good sign. If it takes something like that to demonstrate any limitations in your technique, you have probably done pretty well with the rest of the audition.</p>
<p>One more personal experience to add to this topic: D is recently back from an audition where only classical pieces were listed on the audition requirements. She had been neglecting one of her modern pieces, required by another school, because that audition is later. I made her stay up later to practice it the night before this audition, remembering some words of wisdom I picked up from folks right here. Sure enough they asked her if she had “anything else to play”. She must have wowed them because they started talking scholarships on the spot.</p>
<p>My daughter had an audition today at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. She was asked to prepare 3 orchestral excerpts. Her trombone teacher suggested that one of them should be contemporary, so she prepared a Hindemith excerpt. Guess which one they asked for? BTW, she had a good audition.</p>
<p>My child isn’t at the point of auditioning (yet) but he is starting to put together his repertoire and such, and he has been asking around. What he is hearing, including from admissions people, is that if it is on the list, you can be asked it, and often auditioners deliberately ask for things usually not asked for, like scales and etudes (some say to throw the auditioner off, others to see if a technical issue in a piece was a slip or bad technique that the etude might uncover). </p>
<p>One other suggestion I thought sounded like a good one is to practice everything in your repertoire, even if the program you are auditioning for don’t require all of it, both to keep yourself sharp, and also because as others have pointed out they may ask if you have anything else prepared…the basic answer seems to be “you never know”. The other reason someone pointed out is that the work you do on etudes and scales can help improve the playing of the pieces they are likely to ask, that you do etudes and scales in your training specifically because they support the rest of your playing and that doesn’t change:)</p>
<p>That depends on the size of his repertoire. If he is spending lots of time practicing pieces that are not required for auditions, then maybe it would be better to drop a few of those in order to focus on what is required. Having an extra piece or two to pull out when requested is a good idea, but he will not need lots of extra pieces.</p>
<p>Practicing scales and arpeggios is time well spent because, as you say, they improve the playing of everything else. The judges at the auditions will be able to tell from the major works played if the scales and arpeggios got short shrift, so that is not the place to cut back. Etudes can be in that class as well, so long as they are of an appropriate level of difficulty. Trying to hack through something he is not ready for is a waste of everyone’s time.</p>
<p>rachelee, look at it this way. One audition didn’t ask for it. Is it safe to assume the other did? If so, that is your answer. The best advice is to be ready for anything they ask for in their audition requirements.</p>
<p>My D has memorized her etude!! Because she thought you have to memorize all the pieces on the list.
She was happy when one school asked for the etude as her second piece.
She said, she played it with memory and professors (it was very formal type of audition with 4 professors with video taping) looked “smiling”…
Then, following audition, also was asked to play it as well.</p>
<p>Ok now that my auditions are all over. haha funny thing only ONE school asked me for it haha oh thank god i practiced that the night before hehe.</p>