Auditions: Your one shot or an experience of many?

Do you love to sing and make music? Does it feel like your calling, or something that feels deeply important to you that you’ll practice for your whole life? If so, take this moment right now to make a commitment to yourself to stick with it, whatever that looks like in your future. Love it, and remember YOU are in charge of your relationship to your music. No one else.

As a performer and a voice teacher, I have experienced and prepped a lot of auditions. Because of this, I prefer not to console students after the fact when they don’t get the part. Often times there’s a real loss and disappointment involved. For this reason, I try to have the “audition talk” well before the actual audition takes place and use that as an opportunity to reframe the way we approach auditions.

We really love competition in our culture. We want to pin only 1 winner in the search for the best singer, designer, dancer, chef, or makeup artist. Even Alexander Hamilton has ONE SHOT. If he blew it, maybe history wouldn’t be the same…

But you know what?

It probably would. The ONE SHOT idea makes for good TV and drama, but it isn’t really true.

People who succeed fail all the dang time. All the time. Can I say it again? ALL THE TIME. That’s really the hallmark of longevity. They try a lot, too. The experience of trying is where we grow.

We like games, but we really don’t like to talk about the emotional weight of competition and what “losing” feels like. The truth is, you’re going to blow a lot of shots in life. I wish someone had told me this. As a young person, an audition feels very important and can be agonizing. We have a lot of ceremony around auditions and often we are pitted against our own friends simply for wanting to sing or participate in the school play. That never feels good.

So here’s my suggestion: What if we chose to look at auditions as experiences instead of our “one shot!”?

If you’ve never had the experience before, all you really have control over is how much you prepare. Once that’s done, there’s not much else you can do but show up and well, EXPERIENCE it. Will you still practice and prepare and do the absolute best you can? Yes. But the only person you need to convince of your devotion to your music is you. If you did the utmost preparation and went in and did the best you could, then you win regardless of the outcome. If you know in your heart you didn’t, well you’ve just built a roadmap for what you will practice next time. Be gracious, thank the adjudicator for their time, and hold your head up high. If we don’t try, we never know how much we are capable of. The only way to get better at auditions or any performance, really, is to do it again. And again.

Auditions teach you a lot about yourself. After some auditions or competitions I had to decide if I was going to quit, throw a tantrum, lash out, blame someone else, try again, or keeping moving. I have taken many a “brisk walk around the block” to cool off and every time I came back to this: I love music. Sometimes after being rejected several times from something, I had to have a good tough look at the situation and ask, is this for me? In one case I realized I was going after an opportunity that was asking me to be something I wasn’t. In that moment, I freed myself of who I thought I should be, and I learned A LOT about myself.

Here’s what I know to be the most important piece of preparation for an audition: Never put yourself or your love of music on the floor to be judged. That’s yours. It’s personal, and no one gets to decide how good that is. When you audition, you’re auditioning with a specific piece of music and the judge is using a rubric that they have likely not even created. See how that’s different? You might be the most soulful and moving singer they’ve heard all day. But did you observe the rhythm of the song precisely at measure 53? How was your sight reading? In this instance, they cannot give you the part or give you a good score, even if they’d otherwise buy a ticket to your concert. And THIS is why you must think of these as experiences. They are not personal judgements of you. They’re judgements of one performance you’ve prepared.

As we start the new school year and auditions commence, I hope you’ll keep this in mind. Your love of music isn’t going anywhere. Your audition isn’t your “one shot.” It’s an experience of many to help you grow your craft and mature. What you do with the audition results is your choice. As Nelson Mandela famously said, “I don’t lose. I either win or learn.”