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  • Noa Kageyama

    Administrator
    January 29, 2019 at 8:15 pm

    Hi Michel,

    Hmm…that’s a toughie. I’m assuming you’ve already tried to find out what past lists have looked like in previous auditions for this opening (or instrument), and perhaps could make an educated guess about what you’re likely to see.

    Beyond that, I’m reminded of clarinetist Ricardo Morales, who has said that he spends a good bit of time working on fundamentals and basics (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg6qKCQvHtY), so this might be something that you could spend the next 8 weeks on as well.

    As far as a schedule goes, I wonder how you would feel about establishing a weekly prep cycle. Let’s say, for instance, that you decide to spend the next 8 weeks working on a list that you think has a good chance of including most of the excerpts you’ll have to play. Since performing the list when not totally comfortable/warmed up is probably what you’ll have to do on audition day, you could start every morning with a recorded run-through, after the same warmup that you’ll use on audition day. During that recorded runthrough, you can practice all of the skills that you’ll need on audition day – like getting centered before each excerpt, practicing your transitions between excerpts (anxiety regulation lesson), staying focused during (the focus lesson), etc.

    Then, when listening back to the recording, you can use the list of issues that you come up with to prioritize your practice time for the day. And then, perhaps, you can do a more formal mock audition every week (or perhaps more often), as a bigger test of how your preparation is going.

    Might that work as a general template for the next 12 weeks?

    In the meantime, this is a great question to ask someone like Rob Knopper (auditionhacker.com) or Nathan Cole (natesviolin.com), both of whom I’m sure would have something to say about this.

    Noa

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