Audition

The following is part of a series of journal entries of my experiences and reflections using LearningMethods in my private voice teaching. The two students followed are “Emilie” age 14 and “Courtney” age 13. Both students began lessons with me September 18th 2018, and the journal entries continue until December 4th 2018. All lessons were audio-recorded for the purpose of these reflective journals.

Emilie, lesson 2.

After body mapping we went through some song selections to decide what song she should sing for an upcoming musical audition. We sang each song about once through and then wrote down the pros and cons on a whiteboard. Emilie had very clear opinions about the songs saying things such as, “I like that this song shows my chest-voice, that song has too much speaking in it for my liking, I really know the words in this song, etc.” When I heard Emilie use the term chest-voice I decided to address her understanding of the terms chest-voice and head-voice.These terms aren’t always popular in voice teaching because it creates a dichotomy whereas the voice can create a spectrum of vocal qualities-not one or the other. Emilie’s understanding was that chest-voice is associated with lower notes, sounds more like our speaking voice and head-voice is associated with higher notes. I asked Emilie to think of an alternative term for head-voice and chest-voice that would make sense to her to which she wittingly suggested, “Loud high-screaming man voice.” From there we had a sort of back and forth conversation about beliefs of upper and lower registers. Listening back on the recording I realize I said,

“The terms head-voice and chest-voice can be a dangerous path to walk because that gets us caught in the idea that we have different voices.”

I do not like that I used the word dangerous because I think it sounds like someone did something wrong and the word dangerous may have a slightly threatening attitude to it. While in the moment I clearly did not register I had used this word, I wonder if it may have caused Emilie to feel somewhat uncomfortable and resort to a more comedic attitude in conversation.

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Emilie, lesson 4.

Emilie asked for my opinion on two monologues she was debating between for her upcoming audition, and I was flattered that she wanted my opinion after only studying with me for three weeks. Both monologues were pretty dark topics that took place at an all-women’s insane asylum. I am curious about Emilie’s interests in dark/sad art (repertoire, poems, class projects she has told me about) and how her life’s experiences have led her to these interests. Because Emilie’s audition was this Saturday we had to jump right into choosing a song, which Emilie instantly decided on Reflection from Mulan. It personally would not have been my first choice for her however, she seemed very confident in her decision and in the end I would always recommend choosing a song that brings you the most joy because that is what will come across at an audition. I felt bad because we had spent our first 3 lessons trying to decide on a piece only to end up having 20 minutes to work on the chosen piece. If I had known that we had 3 weeks to prepare, I would have tried to dedicate more time to the piece itself. However, this has been a lesson for me that if a student has an audition coming to be clear when it is.

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Emilie, Lesson 5.

Emilie shared her audition experience with me saying that she was nervous and that her hands felt freezing. Because the audition panel was so physically close, Emilie felt uncomfortable looking at them in the eyes and looked above them instead. The accompanist accidentally played the wrong key and so she was asked to sing it again.

Overall, she described it as a terrifying experience because the panel did not say anything.

Granted, she said terrifying in a joking way and to me, she did not appear traumatized. I would have liked to use a LearningMethods approach to talk about performance anxiety, as this is a significant aspect of LearningMethods and I feel confident in my ability to help navigate those feelings of stress and anxiety. However, it did not make sense to discuss performance anxiety after the audition and so I told Emilie that I can help with performance anxiety for her next performance/audition opportunity should she want to discuss it with me and purposely left the conversation open-ended.