Burning Down

Concentration on music education. I did six auditions for six different schools, but the requirements for the auditions were generally the same for each school. Two of them had to be on DVD because I lived too far away to go in person. I played flute for all my auditions, and they all wanted me to play 4 pieces with a piano accompanist. One 20th century piece, one Romantic piece, one Classical piece, and one Baroque piece. I played the same pieces for every audition.

Two schools wanted the pieces played from memory and I only had about a month to memorize all of them, from the time they told me what I had to play to the actual audition date (mid January to beginning of March '08. My last audition was in mid April '08). Oh, and I was preparing for these auditions while finishing up high school.

On top of all those pieces, for the 4 auditions I did in person, I had to play them 3 different major scales, minor scales, and a mode (lucky me, I had to play a Locrian mode for three of them ) - all chosen at random by the judges and each one had to be two octaves. And I had to play a simpler piece of music that I had never seen before (sight reading). I lucked out on one audition for that portion, as I had already played the piece they chose for a talent show at school.

I also had to write an exam for the in-person auditions. Those took about 45 minutes to an hour each, and I basically had to spit out all the music theory I learned over the course of my schooling, including some jazz harmony (which I aced as I had played jazz guitar all throughout high school). And then there was the ear training portion - one of the judges played different chords and intervals on the piano and all I had to do was identify the quality of the chord or interval (so major, minor, perfect, diminished, augmented, seventh, tritone, etc).

I also had to do an interview for each school. That was the hardest part, because it's more intense than your average job interview. Each school's music department has a reputation that they want to uphold, and so the interview is really the only way they can evaluate if you'll be a student who can help uphold the department's reputation.

That's basically how the auditions went. I got accepted to 4 of the six schools I applied to. For once in my life, I felt like I actually accomplished something.

Based on what my friends and fellow students have told me, flute is one of the easiest instruments to audition on, followed by clarinet and all the saxophones. Guitar and piano are the hardest, generally, because they require that you have some formal classical training (even if you apply to a jazz program for either one!), and they are looking at minute things like the correct finger and hand positions, where you place your fingers on the frets or keys, finger picking on the guitar - stuff like that.

It all sounds really intense but if one prepares well for the audition, it'll go smoothly.

Edit: Most schools in the US also have the same audition requirements and process. I applied to two American schools for music - DePaul in Chicago (my cousin just started her freshman year in September there as a piano major), and Julliard (really just for kicks - I got as far as sending them my DVD audition, and of course they wanted everything memorized).