Tips for a Satisfying Audition – Help Your Accompanist
by Brad Kaenel
Let’s face it – auditions can be stressful; not only for you, but for your audition accompanist! You want to be at your best, and so does your accompanist — they really do want to be able to play well, so that you will feel comfortable and be able to perform confidently and skillfully. Providing your accompanist with music that is easy to read and play is just as important to your audition as your singing.
Sight-reading music requires a huge amount of concentration, and your accompanist only has so much — you want them to be able to focus most of their attention on you, without having to struggle with, or be distracted by, your music. You will have only a brief moment with your accompanist to communicate all the musical details of your audition, so the music you provide to them should be simple to work with, and contain as many performance instructions and interpretive clues as possible.
Here are the three most helpful things you can do for your accompanist:
1. Always include the first page of your sheet music, even if you’re not singing anything from it. The “title page” often includes musical cues like key/time signatures, tempo, style, and other performance notes that your accompanist will be looking for.
2. Make sure your sheet music always contains these four compositional elements: melody notes, lyrics, chord symbols, and song title. If any of these are missing, find a different edition or version of the music that contains all of them.
3. Your music should be able to lie flat on a table or music stand. If it doesn’t, copy it onto single sheets of paper, and/or mount it in a three-ring binder.
Lastly, practice your audition song until you can sing it confidently without accompaniment (“acapella”). Piano accompaniment will be simpler, and will sound quite different, than an album recording. Prepare yourself for that by not always just “singing along with the record.” Rehearsing only with pre-recorded tracks can give you a false sense of how well you actually know your song.
Thank you for auditioning.
