I think it is a very good thing that I had my freak out at five in the morning, because if it was any later, it might have messed up my audition a great deal.
Once everyone was at Kennedy, we started to warm up. This got my mind off the actual audition and I started to focus on the singing part. Warming up really helped me calm down. Also, people were freaking out about a tenor being late, which took my mind off of things. This was a big deal because a few days before, our director made it very clear to us that if you arrived late to Kennedy and missed the bus, we weren’t going to wait for you. You would have to find your own transportation to the auditions. We then loaded up onto the bus with our sack breakfasts, pillows, blankets, and music, and started our two-hour bus ride to the audition. I shared a seat with one of my fellow sopranos, and we talked the whole way there. Normally I wouldn’t talk so much that early in the morning, but I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to warm up my voice, and I liked the distraction of conversation.
When we finally go there, it was go time. We all huddled up in the gym around the portable keyboard and marked our music and sang through the audition selections. If you aren’t familiar with the All State audition process, it goes like this: Everyone learns about full songs that are really hard and get them as close to perfect while singing with 3 other people on different voice parts than you acapella. Then, once you arrive at the audition place, you are told what portion of the song you are singing. For the audition, you sing not even an eighth of the giant song you had to learn and you don’t even sing all of the songs. You have no way of knowing what you will have to sing for the auditions so you have to prepare the entire song and hope you are lucky enough to get a portion you are good at.
After we warmed up for the second time together, we were on our own. Because my group had to audition around 9:45, I immediately changed into my nice clothes, did my makeup, and revamped my hair. I stood around and talked for about fifteen minutes and then my group and I started to rehearse the audition on our own. After we finished practicing, our directors came over and it was time for us to head to our actual timed “warm up.” We walked around the maze of a school and finally arrived at a little home ec room with a kitchen, a piano, and a table. When we were singing, I got kind of scared. I was going kind of sharp on pitch and our group’s adrenalin was affecting our singing.
After a scary warm up, me, my group mates, and our directors headed down to the room where we would be singing for a judge. While we were waiting, I saw my old choir teacher from last year! He wished us good luck, and it made me want to do really well for him. My group and I took a big deep breath, and then headed in for our dreaded audition.
The lady judging us was really nice (well, at least nice-looking). She was a small woman with a pleasant smile. When we started singing, I forgot she was even there. For the first few songs I was focused on singing well and wasn’t even concerned about the judge. Then I started to notice her writing things down. This made me nervous. I couldn’t tell whom she was writing about. There was a specific column for the tenor, bass, alto, and soprano, but she didn’t seem to be writing in mine. This freaked me out because I thought she stopped listening to me. As a judge, you listen for specific parts in a song. If the singer messes up, then you decide they automatically didn’t make the choir and you stop listening to them. I was so scared that this was the case for me. I was also really concerned because there is a very hard part with close harmonies that the judges picked for an audition. I felt really sad because there was a clash between the soprano and alto that I nailed during warm up, but it sounded iffy during the audition and it was my fault.
Anyway, we finally finished our seven-minute audition that lasted forever, and returned to the gym to wait for hours for the results. (782 words)
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