Music Audition Quotes

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)

Oh my gosh, don’t you both look pretty!” We looked like rejects from the auditions for The Sound of Music. “I will have to buy them – they are meant to be yours!” Karla waved her credit card around like a wand. “What a shame they didn’t have one in green for me. But then, it is a young girl’s style. I would’ve looked foolish.

Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture," once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. "Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear" (p.251).

Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l'au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l'univers n'ait aucun sens? Il faut qu'il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le néant, le coeur, aussi bien que l'entendement, refuse de l'admettre. Quelque chose doit exister quelque part, un brin de réalité doit être contenu dans ce monde. Ivresse du possible qui rachète la vie. Craignons le retombement et le retour du savoir amer...

Keeping the whole safe for people to practice their audition pieces seems like the one good reason to fight this war. If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?

But when we experience pain or trauma, we’re acutely aware that something is wrong. You want answers. “What is this? How do I get rid of this? Why is this happening to me? I don’t want this.” That’s why so much art, and music, in particular, becomes a great commiserating balm for pain. Joy doesn’t need to be audited. We’re just grateful to have had it at all. But pain, goddammit, we demand to know Who’s responsible for this?

Everyone is aware of the fact that visual and auditive perspective are identical; the only difference being that they are created and perceived by two physically different organs, the eye and the ear. How often the playing of a great master makes us think of a picture with a deep background and varying planes; the figures in the foreground almost leap out of the frame whereas in the background the mountains and clouds are lost in a blue haze.

And I would guess there’s a lot more similarity in how we suffer than the way we experience joy. Rejection stays with you, but I don’t think people register it when they’re happy. They don’t say, “I need to remember what this feels like.” It just goes by, and it’s perfect and awesome, and you feel grateful that you get to experience even a fleeting moment of pure, unbridled, unsarcastic bliss. But when we experience pain or trauma, we’re acutely aware that something is wrong. You want answers. “What is this? How do I get rid of this? Why is this happening to me? I don’t want this.” That’s why so much art, and music, in particular, becomes a great commiserating balm for pain. Joy doesn’t need to be audited. We’re just grateful to have had it at all. But pain, goddammit, we demand to know Who’s responsible for this?

Sacrifice is not the price we pay to earn the celestial kingdom; it is the essence of the celestial kingdom. Testimony is not the word that gets us through the gates; it is the language spoken inside. Charity is not an audition piece for the heavenly choir; it is the celestial music. Service is not a vegetable we plug our noses and have to force down; it is the celestial diet.

When he was barely 14, he auditioned on one of the most prestigious reality shows in South Korea, known as Superstar K. A show designed to find raw talent in the Korean music industry. The show achieved just that with the discovery of Jungkook. Interestingly, Jungkook did not win the show; neither was he part of the individuals who were selected. But his difference was evident to most of the individuals in the room, and before the show was over, he had received more than seven offers from seven different entertainment companies. The decision he made appeared to be the best decision he made all his life. He chose Big Hit Entertainment and started a 36-month training program with them.  Years later, he was quoted to have said that his present bandmate, Rap Monster, in the label was what influenced his decision.

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.

When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Sophomore Lucy Karate took a deep breath and concentrated her moss green eyes on the black squiggles in front of her. The sheet music on the page was exactly the same it had been for the past ten months. The difference wasn’t the music; it was the day. This was the day before auditions – her last opportunity to practice before her fate for the next school year was ultimately decided.

Curiously we did it all over again when we made the Live At Pompeii film, this time using another dog, called Mademoiselle Nobs. On the positive side, even when hard pressed, at least we resisted the temptation to construct an entire album of barking dogs, and to audition a clutch of session dogs desperate to make it in the music business.

In the early '90s a beautiful young Russian soprano who loved music was studying opera at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. She told us how despite her single-minded focus on developing her voice, her teachers thought that perhaps, at best, one day she could sing in a chorus somewhere. But the soprano wasn't going to let her teachers' low opinion of her stop her from achieving her goal. While becoming a part-time janitor may not seem like a brilliant career move for an aspiring opera star, she took a job mopping floors at St. Petersburg's Kirov Opera, the greatest opera company in Russia. Still working hard in the conservatory, she earned the chance to audition for the Kirov and was accepted into the ensemble. During rehearsals, when the lead singer became ill, the stage director asked the soprano if she knew the part. "Of course I knew it", she told us. "I knew all the parts. I was ready." She had worked hard; she had worked smart by putting herself in the right place at the right time. And she performed well. Her once-skeptical teachers never could have imagined the career that the soprano, Anna Netrebko, would go on to have, becoming an operatic superstar and the reigning diva of the twenty-first century.

But before it came to that, the show needed a quizmaster, an adult who, like Clifton Fadiman on Information, Please, gave it exactly the right edge. This chair was as vital to the show’s success as were the young panelists. A pair of college professors auditioned: they were too impressed with themselves, giving the kids no time to talk. A candidate from the lecture circuit gave away half the answers. Among the 20-odd people who auditioned was Joe Kelly, a thirdgrade dropout, seasoned vaudevillian, and host of the hayseed music show The National Barn Dance. “His height of intellectual polish before The Quiz Kids was to ring a cowbell and chortle, ‘I’m teakettled pink to be here,’” wrote John Lear in the Saturday Evening Post. Kelly was far from dumb: he had finished third grade a year ahead of schedule but at age 8 had gone into show business.

Judging the musical ability of a top-ranked musician auditioning for a symphony orchestra might seem pretty straightforward. Some people are clearly superior musicians and presumably any expert can tell the difference. As it turns out, this is far from the case. Two economists found that the use of a screen to hide the identity, and thus the gender, of auditioning musicians increased by a full 50 percent the probability that a woman would advance in the audition process. Using a screen increased the likelihood that a woman would win an orchestra seat by 250 percent.

that everyone else has probably completely forgotten the incident, but I think it’s going to take quite a while for me to get over it. For some reason though, I suspect that one particular girl in our class had something to do with it all. Call it gut instinct or intuition, but I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow she was involved. Thinking back before that doomed day, life had been pretty good. My best friend, Millie and I had auditioned for the school musical and we were both selected for major roles. Being in grade seven gave us an advantage over the younger kids, that and of course the fact that we were both dancers. The best part was that we’d also been asked to choreograph sections of the performance and this was a huge honor. Miss Sheldon, the performing arts teacher who was in charge of the production, had given us the responsibility of coming up with some routines and teaching the other kids the dance moves they needed to learn. We were so excited about this, especially because we’d been left in charge. Miss Sheldon is the coolest teacher ever!

deliberate practice” to describe this style of serious study, defining it formally as an “activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.”4 As hundreds of follow-up studies have since shown, deliberate practice provides the key to excellence in a diverse array of fields, among which are chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music.

Matt’s Creation Room was a wide, colorful space dedicated to music. The walls were splashed with bright orange paint, green sofas, and cushions, which contrasted with the serious, dark upright Yamaha piano in the center of the room. There were other instruments in the room: several guitars, a violin, several drums, a bass guitar. The walls were like a private Hall of Fame covered with posters and even relics of famous singers. One wall was covered with pictures of Matt and his three platinum albums Matt, Superstar, and Moving On. The room was bathed in light entering through the wide windows. It was Matt’s Creation Room and he had obviously decorated the room according to his own tastes. After finishing her scales while waiting for Matt, she posted herself next to the windows to practice her audition song for La Cenerentola that Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, sorrowful song that Cinderella sang in the first scene about a king who looked for true love not in splendor and beauty, but in innocence and goodness.

she also thought it would be helpful to send Bernstein a copy of a book of conversations I had done with the pianist Glenn Gould, who, it turned out, was one of Bernstein’s musical heroes, as well as a close and adored friend. It was a long wait, but at last, in September of 1989, Maggie telephoned to give me the good news that I had passed Harry Kraut’s audition, that Bernstein had read my book, and that he had not only agreed to give me an interview but had also suggested that we do so over dinner at his country home in Connecticut on November 20.

Carnival Cruise Lines has its own successful way of doing things, which in this case involved creating a musical group called “The Hot Shots!” The word “Fantastic” comes to mind when thinking of this musical group! Each member auditioned separately at the Carnival rehearsal facility in Miami and then rehearsed as a group until they were ready for the big leagues aboard ship. Fortunately for me and my team, which includes Jorge Fernandez, a former guitar player from Cuba and now a top flight structural engineer in the Tampa Bay area, who helps me with much of my technical work; Lucy Shaw, Chief Copy Editor; Ursula Bracker, Proofer, and lucky me Captain Hank Bracker, award winning author (including multiple gold medals), were aboard the Carnival Legend and were privileged to listen to and enjoy, quite by chance, music that covered everything from Classical Rock, to Disco, to Mo Town and the years in between. Talented Judith Mullally, Carnival’s Entertainment Director, was on hand to encourage and partake in the music with her outstanding voice and, not to be left out, were members of the ship’s repertory cast, as well as the ship’s Cruise Director. The popular Red Frog lounge on the Carnival Legend was packed to the point that one of the performances had to be held on the expansive Lido deck. However, for the rest of the nights, the lounge was packed with young and old, singing and dancing to “The Hot Shots!” - a musical group that would totally pack any venue in Florida. Pheona Baranda, from the Philippines, is cute as a button and is the lead female singer, with a pitch-perfect soprano voice. Lucas Pedreira, from Argentina, is the lead male singer and guitar player who displayed endless energy and the ability to keep the audience hopping! Paulo Baranda, Pheona’s younger brother, plays the lead guitar to perfection and behind the scenes is the band’s musical director and of course is also from the Philippines. Ygor, from Israel, is the “on the money” drummer who puts so much into what he is doing, that at one point he hurt his hand, but refused to slow down. Nick is the bass guitar player, from down under New Zealand, and Marina, the piano and keyboard player, hails from the Ukraine. As a disclaimer I admit that I hold shares in Carnival stock but there is nothing in it for me other than the pleasure of listening to this ultra-talented group which cannot and should not be denied. They were and still are the very best! However, I am sorry that just as a “Super Nova” they unfortunately can’t last. Their bright shining light is presently flaring, but this will only be for a fleeting moment and then will permanently go to black next year on January 2, 2020. That’s just the way it is, but my crew and I, as well as the many guests aboard the Carnival Legend, experienced music seldom heard anywhere, any longer…. It was a treat we will remember for years to come and we hope to see them again, as individual musical artists, or as perhaps with a new group sometime in the near future!

Nothing, not an IRS audit, not even waterboarding, is worse than having country music forced on you.

At the time, pre-debut promotional initiatives for K-pop idol groups generally meant publicizing the audition process through music channels on cable TV, or having members feature on reality shows. But instead of appearing on television, BTS members expressed their genuine selves to audiences through vlogs posted on YouTube.

I became friendly with [a] bass player. . . . He told me about this place called the Berklee College of Music, and said that you didn’t have to audition. . . . They had a summer session you could attend; that was “Come one, come all.” So I went there and it opened a lot of doors for me. First of all, the ear training—to work on your ear and learn to hear things you’d heretofore not been able to ascertain, individual instruments, chords and where they went, and remember melodies better . . . I’d just thought, either you could do it or you couldn’t. That plus learning about chord progressions and music theory, and which chords sound good going into other chords . . . that was really a revelation. . . . So I started applying that to writing songs. Which were all terrible. But you do it enough, and you get better at it.

There are some great dancers in our grade; even some of the boys are particularly good. One boy named Alex has been dancing pretty much his entire life and is probably the best dancer in the whole school. When he was younger, he said that the other kids had bullied him and called him a girl as well as a heap of horrible names that he really didn’t want to mention. But I could see that everyone had finally developed a huge amount of respect for Alex and those who were still unaware of his talents were in for a big surprise. Hip hop is his specialty and he’s so cool to watch. I kept telling him that when he’s old enough, he should audition for “So You Think You Can Dance” and he told me that he’d really like to. As well as Alex, there’s another kid in our grade who is kind of overweight and dorky looking. But it turns out that he has an awesome voice. I had no idea that our school has so much talent and it certainly came as a huge surprise to find out that Liam can actually sing really well. The look of amazement when we heard his audition pretty much spread like wild fire. I even caught the teachers raising their eyebrows in astonishment. It just goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover! I never really understood what that meant until hearing Liam sing. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever look at him in the same way again. It’s also a really big lesson for me. From now on, I will never judge a person by their looks alone. I’ll wait till I get to know them because I’ve found out that until you do get to know people, you really don’t know what type of person they are or what hidden talents they might have. Anyway, the musical was shaping up to be a huge success. The dance troupe we had put together was really coming along and we rehearsed during every lunch break and sometimes even after school. Then one afternoon, an amazing thing happened; Blake Jansen, who I’ve had a secret crush on since the fourth grade, turned up at rehearsals with his friend, Jack.

Keeping the world safe for people to practice their audition pieces seems like one good reason to fight this war. If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?" - Lovely War

Crazy for You opens backstage at the Zangler Theatre, New York, where Bobby, desperate to break into showbusiness, performs an impromptu audition for the great impresario Bella Zangler. This is not a ‘book number’ – that’s to say, the music is not an expression of character or plot point arising from the dialogue, the defining convention of musical theatre. Instead, more prosaically, it’s a real number, a ‘prop number’: Bobby is backstage and doing the song for Zangler. So it’s sparely orchestrated – little more than a rehearsal piano and some support; it’s one chorus; and its tap-break ends with Bobby stamping on Zangler’s foot. This is grim reality: Bobby is expelled from the theatre. Outside, he makes a decision, and sings ‘I Can’t Be Bothered Now’ – the second song, but the real opening number: the first ‘book number’ in the show. There is an automobile onstage (it’s the 1930s) and, as Bobby opens the door, one showgirl, pretty in pink, steps out, then another, and another, and more and more, far more than could fit in any motor car; finally, Bobby raises the hood of the vehicle and the last chorine emerges. The audience leans back, reassured and content: Susan Stroman’s fizzy, inventive choreography has told them that what’s about to follow is romantic fantasy. More to the point, it’s true to the character of the song, and the choice of song is true to Bobby’s character and the engine of the drama: My bonds and shares May fall downstairs Who cares? Who cares? I’m dancing and I Can’t Be Bothered Now … This lyric captures the philosophy of Ira Gershwin’s entire oeuvre – which is important: the show is a celebration of Gershwin. But it’s also an exact expression of Bobby’s feelings and the reason why he heads to Dead Rock, Arkansas. So the number does everything it should: it defines the principal’s motivation; it kick-starts the plot; and it communicates the spirit of the score and the staging. Audiences don’t reason it out like that; we just eat it up. But that’s why.

Caitlin Ross was a pretty blonde white girl in a room full of pretty blonde white girls. She looked over the sea of heart-shaped faces and sighed. Every open call was the same, a swarm of female actors putting the lie to all of her father’s ungrammatical assurances that Caitlin was “very unique.” The audition was for an all-white musical adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun, which the producers were re-titling Caucrasian. It would undoubtedly be horrible and it didn’t pay, but Caitlin hadn’t been working lately and was getting desperate to appear in something. When she had emailed the company her headshot and résumé she had claimed that a reviewer had once described her as “like a young, white Debbie Allen,” and almost immediately she was asked to come in and read for the part of Beneatha. She

You have produced a riveting tale of your circuitous route to the NY Philharmonic, a history of who's who in the mid-20th century music world, a blueprint for audition preparation, and a clear treatise of (Marcel) Tabuteau's teachings. THIS BOOK IS A MASTERPIECE!" Louis Nicholson Bradley, oboist/teacher, Vancouver. BC

I sang… Oh my God! “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” I was auditioning for the musical.” “I walked face-first into a set of lockers listening to you. It was like a fist to the heart. I was a goner.

the psychologist turned to Gillian’s mother and said, “You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” I asked Gillian what happened then. She said her mother did exactly what the psychologist suggested. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it was,” she told me. “I walked into this room, and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.” She started going to the dance school every week, and she practiced at home every day. Eventually, she auditioned for the Royal Ballet School in London, and they accepted her. She went on to join the Royal Ballet Company itself, becoming a soloist and performing all over the world. When that part of her career ended, she formed her own musical theater company and produced a series of highly successful shows in London and New York. Eventually, she met Andrew Lloyd Webber and created with him some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, including Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. Little Gillian, the girl with the high-risk future, became known to the world as Gillian Lynne, one of the most accomplished choreographers of our time, someone who has brought pleasure to millions and earned millions of dollars. This happened because someone looked deep into her eyes—someone who had seen children like her before and knew how to read the signs. Someone else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. But Gillian wasn’t a problem child. She didn’t need to go away to a special school. She just needed to be who she really was.

Your body is nothing special. You can turn in your music box all you want, but you’ll never be anything more than the sister of a criminal. A poor little wretch, clawing for scraps. That’s you, Bethany. That will always be you. And there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it.