Music Auditions as a Psychological Test
I don’t perform well under pressure. Not artistically, anyway. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
By artistically, I mean musically. I’ve trained in classical piano for as long as I can remember, and in flute for nearly as long. When it’s just me and my instrument, it feels perfect — not all the time, of course, but I can really let loose and relax, and some of my best performances have been in the company of only one or two close people. Put me on a stage in a high-pressure situation though, be it an exam, a competition, an audition…and I usually freeze. I’ve rarely walked away from a high-stakes solo performance feeling that I’ve performed to 100% of my capability.
This last situation is of particular interest to me: the audition. For many looking to pursue a professional career in music, the university entrance audition is of seminal importance. The lead-up involves years of preparation, and hundreds of hours spent in lessons and practice rooms. The aftermath can make or break a career: you get in, or you don’t. The audition itself? Ten, maybe fifteen minutes of playing, in which a panel of judges or music professors assesses whether those hundreds of hours have prepared you enough for the career ahead.
Fifteen minutes is not a long time, especially when it isn’t even filled with continuous playing. A typical audition might include two contrasting musical pieces and a study — but seeing as how a solo piano sonata can run forty minutes long, only very short snippets of each piece are played during the audition before a judge interrupts you and asks you to move to the next. It can be hard to really get into a piece when you’re only playing a tenth of it, and it can be a jarring experience jumping from piece to piece on command.
On top of this, the context of the audition is incredibly influential. Did you get enough sleep last night? How does the audition room affect the sound of your instrument? Is one of the judges having a bad day? What are you wearing — is it both comfortable and professional? All of these factors, and more, can have an impact on how you play and are perceived during those fifteen minutes.
Take my music school audition, for example. My family and flute teacher were on the other side of the country, so I went alone. In the weeks leading up to the audition, I had spent at least four hours a day in practice rooms, mostly working on a single ten-minute piece of music. I had sought out music teachers in the faculty for advice and lessons. And the audition itself? It was five minutes long. Five minutes. It was the last audition of the day, and the judges were, a) likely tired and ready to go home, and b) probably more or less decided on who was getting in and who wasn’t, seeing as they had already heard everyone else audition. I left feeling distinctly unsettled, and not at all like I had had a chance to demonstrate the full range of my capabilities.
If you’d brought me back another day and another time, the entire process would have likely been different. Maybe I would have gotten longer to play, and so would have relaxed more and played better. Maybe it would have been the day my dog died, and so I would have been distracted and depressed and played worse. In short, the process is hardly reliable.
And in those five minutes, could the panel of professors really have gotten a clear picture of the time and effort I did or didn’t put into the audition? It’s like taking an entire course in school, only to have one multiple choice question on the final exam. Sure, those five minutes could have perfectly captured my musical ability — but it also could have captured the fact that I might have been getting over a cold and wasn’t feeling too well, or that I was having a fluke of a good tone day and was playing miles above my usual level. So the audition process isn’t really a valid one, either.
How about the “data” that the entire process generates, and how it’s used to make a decision? Well, it doesn’t really generate any quantifiable data. Of course the judges are looking for vague markers of ability — technique, rhythm, intonation, etc. — but there’s no scale they can reliably point to and say, “Yes, she scores a 67/100 on phrasing.” To illustrate this, one of the markers judges might look for is “musicality”: how musically tasteful you are and how much feeling you put into the piece. This in itself is incredibly broad and subjective, and there is no way to really assess musicality aside from gut feeling.
In essence, the music school audition isn’t a reliable nor valid measure of musical ability, yet it continues to be an incredibly important test that determines the life course of some individuals. Some improvements to the process have been made — for example, most auditions for professional orchestras are performed from behind a curtain so that judges aren’t biased by the auditionee’s appearance or sex. And of course, practical constraints place limitations on improvements. As much as a series of hour-long auditions for each applicant would improve reliability, professors simply don’t have the time to listen to that many auditions, and it would be physically and mentally exhausting for the applicants themselves. The problem of validity isn’t easily solved, either. Music, as an art form, is inherently immeasurable — you simply can’t produce objective, quantifiable measures of musical performance. The whole point is that it isn’t something easily measured or observed, but something that somehow makes you feel something…and so we see where the vagueness originates.
Perhaps someday we’ll completely overhaul the entire audition process, and someone will come up with a genius and novel solution. Until then, the best that auditionees can do is to continue to put in those hours of preparation, and hope that audition day goes smoothly.
