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  • Noa Kageyama

    Administrator
    November 14, 2022 at 8:03 am

    Ack, Liesbeth – I’m sorry I didn’t respond! I forgot to “subscribe” to this thread and didn’t notice that you had posted updates.

    So a couple thoughts. The purpose for recording your auditions is actually two-fold.

    1. One reason is so that you can compare it with your most recent mock auditions, to see how similar or different they might be. For instance, maybe there is a tendency to rush slightly in certain places, or clip rests, etc., and unfortunately, getting feedback from folks on the committee can be less precise, because they can’t tell you what exactly changed relative to your last few mocks. So even if they say it sounded great, it’s hard to know what exactly that means, and what you can continue to hone and refine in your preparation, and where you can continue to grow in general as a musician. Which can sometimes help with motivation too, in terms of knowing what exactly you want to work on.

    2. The other reason is perhaps more important, and it has to do with helping out with attention control. When you’re not recording, it’s tempting for most folks to devote some of their attentional resources to self-monitoring, and keeping track of how things are going in the moment. Which is a good thing to do when you’re practicing, and you’re listening for imperfections and paying attention to what needs work, but makes it really difficult to fully engage with your mental script, and all of the things that bring you into the present, and into “the zone,” like singing brain, pulse, micro-improv, imagery, etc. Recording your audition, even with a phone in your pocket makes it easier to give yourself permission to just play, and to be fully present with zero resources devoted to evaluating your performance in real time.

    Some folks can switch things off like this even if they’re not recording, but for most, it’s easier when they know there’s a recording they can listen back to later.

    As far as motivation for this season goes, and staying engaged in the process with the same excerpts, a few thoughts there as well:

    1. the micro-improv strategy can help with this sort of “staleness”

    2. the other thing that can help is a two-pronged strategy:

    a) If you haven’t already, it can help to listen to more recordings (like, not just 5-10, but 20-30 different recordings), to establish the ballpark of what is stylistically appropriate for each excerpt, but expand the range of possibilities you can experiment with. For instance, one of the percussionists at the Met (Rob Knopper) would take a week to listen to dozens of recordings for each excerpt, tapping out the rhythm of each section, determining the mean and median tempo of each section, the dynamic range, phrasing, etc., and throwing out the outliers. This way, you can experiment with different new ways of playing each excerpt, but be assured of playing in such a way that isn’t extreme, so you don’t risk alienating any of the committee members. Which is related to the second thing.

    b) The goal is to get as many votes from folks behind the screen as possible, which I’m assuming includes people other than those who play your instrument. So the goal is to play in a way that does feel like it’s your own take on the excerpts, but also aligns with their experience of the excerpts. It’s impossible to know though, what the overall committee’s preferences are, not just those who play your instrument, or a select few whose votes count the same as the others. Some may have gone to music festivals and played the pieces in a very different way, or studied abroad and had teachers who had varying preferences, etc.

    In an ideal world, you’d be able to play for every single member of the committee multiple times in advance to see what version of the excerpts resonates most with every single person, but that’s not possible, of course, so the best we can do is try to assemble a representative sample of the committee by playing for other musicians who are like them. But here too, like listening to recordings, playing for just a few people leaves you susceptible to “sampling error” where if you play for just a few people, if they’re not representative of the people behind the screen, you can be unduly influenced to play in a way that won’t get you the maximum number of votes. Like, if you play for 3 people, and two encourage you to take a little more time in one passage, those two may actually be advising you to play in a way that alienates the folks behind the screen.

    Whereas, (and this is something Rob did as well), if you play for 30 people, and two people encourage you to take a little more time, but 28 don’t, then you can ignore that advice, because it doesn’t fit with the overall trend of the musicians, and probably won’t be representative of the way the committee will see things either.

    This can make playing for other people funner as well, because it means you can try new things and see how far you can take things before it starts to become too much or too far outside the ballpark of what listeners’ expectations might be.

    It can be more of a commitment to get this many different folks’ opinions on things, but even if it’s just a dozen or 20, it can hopefully make the process of preparing more interesting and fun, rather than just playing the same excerpts the same way for yourself, over and over.

    Hope that helps – and I’m subscribed now to this thread, so if you have any questions about any of this, just let me know!

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