By Andrew Zhou

Note: all headings represent the five compulsory components for an audition for piano at the undergraduate level at Northwestern University

I – a contrapuntal baroque composition equivalent in difficulty to a three-voice fugue
I perform a suite of Brahms’ late piano pieces for a recital held by my professor that evening at one of Berlin’s best-known higher education institutes for art and music.  I was in good company, hearing alongside my performance some prototypical Schubert, Liszt, Bach, and Mendelssohn.

In a very German tradition, the performances are celebrated by a post-recital drink.  Twenty-something-year-old musicians, still analyzing every minor imperfection after putting out the results of their hours of incarceration in practice rooms, are given the chance to unwind, or at least drink away their sorrows.
Where am I from?  one of those students asks me.  All ceremony.  I answer ‘the US’ and throw the question back to him, although truth be known, his brand of Hochdeutsch already gives him away.  Turns out that he has lived in Berlin his entire life.  Ein echter Berliner-‘a true Berliner’.

-And uh, how did you hear about this professor?  he asks.  Translation: How did I cut in front of all those other hopefuls in line for this coveted studio time?

-A colleague of the professor’s…

I answer with hesitation, partly because of my scrambling for German adjective endings but mostly because I know I’m revealing that I hadn’t gone through the full terror of auditions to earn a spot in the schedule.  My fears are confirmed when he clarifies:

-Oh, so you didn’t do a full audition.

I take a nervous sip of my beer to stall time, but what he says is clearly true.  From that moment on, no amount of Pilsner can prevent the feeling of judgment being poured upon me.  From that moment on to him, I am no musician, there is little echt about me.  Schtum he keeps, but his irritation, compounded no doubt by the German love for doing things through the proper channels and fine print, is clear.
And, as what happens when time runs out at all auditions, he needs to move on.

“Thank you for coming today.”

II – a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert

I sometimes want to believe that conservatories are places of sabotage, where fierce competition between musicians leads to some rather impetuous offstage behavior.  In reality, though, the saboteurs are generally the unwarmed hands of the pianists, the unwatered throats of the singers, and the unprepared nerves of the chokers.  The music audition, then, becomes the optimal scene of a crime.
This past summer over one hundred musicians, of which only ten could be selected, arrived in Berlin in hopes of securing a future in the world of classical music through the channels of a well-established music school.  This future, contingent upon the assent of big-name professors and the attention of record labels, would all be determined in about fifteen minutes of stage time.  Given the circumstances, one would imagine that musicians would be given full liberties to present ‘themselves’ to the faculty.  Yet, as it is practiced in the great music schools and conservatories of the world today, the audition allows little room for variation.   Audition parameters, and the space of self-invention they delimit, tend to confine talent rather than liberate it.  The audition poses the individual against the canonized conceptions of the proper repertoire and its standards of “interpretation”—whatever meaning that word still has given the context.

The set lists of audition repertoire define the range of music in which every student must demonstrate competency.  Although each music school has its own slightly different take on what is or is not musically significant, there is a general format, a square prix fixe menu: the Bach prelude and fugue or suite, the classical sonata, the large Romantic work, the  work written in the twentieth- or twenty-first-century, and the virtuosic étude.

Each school has managed to make this simple, albeit restrictive, arrangement into a veritable menagerie of repertoire requirements, limiting the potential repertoire list even further as auditioners are forced to resort to Venn diagrams to find where all the schools can agree.  For example, the “classical sonata” requirement at five of the nation’s most important graduate music schools reads as follows:
Yale: “a sonata or variations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert (for the recording, prepare at least two contrasting movements; for the live audition, prepare an entire work)”
Manhattan School of Music: “complete sonata by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Beethoven”
Northwestern: “a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert”
New England Conservatory: “a complete Classical sonata.”
Juilliard: One of the following:
a. An entire sonata by Beethoven (excluding Opp. 14, 49, and 79), or
b. Haydn Sonata in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 52, or
c. Mozart Sonata in D major, K. 576, or
d. One of the following Schubert sonatas: G major, Op. 78; A minor, Op. 143; A minor, Op. 42; D     major, Op. 53, or one of the three posthumous sonatas, or the Wanderer Fantasie.

Significant composers of great classical era music like Clementi (we’re talking his sonatas here) and Hummel have been pushed out by the classical quadropoly: Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven.   The judges are trying to control quality by canonizing a set of works they feel equipped to adjudicate, all the while severely marginalizing other worthy works.  “Classical” then becomes a narrowly represented style instead of a process of broad exploration.  The intent it seems is to prevent those who thump out the first few bars of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” in the common room of a dormitory from ever getting a few feet from a sustaining pedal; perhaps this much they have accomplished.

But the required list of repertoire is simultaneously too restrictive and too inconsistent.  The judges look for elements like technical ability, musicality and competency, but have dissociated these skills in a rigid format from creativity—the prime locus of true musical genius.  Interestingly, the French and the Germans refer to this whole practical study as “interprétation” and “Interpretation” respectively, whereas the North American system refers to it as “performance.”  The French and German models stress intellectual thought and recognize almost explicitly the subjectivity of the art.  Each musician becomes a type of “re-inventor” and this type of informed re-invention is the acme of music making.

I decided to play Copland’s “Piano Variations” for a competition last year.  My interpretation was overlaid with “bell-like” tones in the third variation and “coloristic” flourishes, the professor told me.  He explained:
-I really like it, but this judge has grown up with this work and has admitted to me that he is predisposed to being prejudiced against any interpretation that doesn’t line up with his.  Best avoid alienating him.
I ended up getting second place in the competition, alienating all the way through.  When I received my judging sheets back, one judge told me that my sound judgment intelligently shaped the trajectory of the piece.  Another told me to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the structure altogether.

III – a romantic work
It is quite a romantic notion to use the arts as a mode of re-enchantment of the world, as a force of heroism that reinvigorates one’s faith in mankind.   Perhaps there are some ways to be creative and circumvent these narrowly-defined repertoire lists and re-invigorate one’s faith in music as an art rather than sermonized pedagogy.

Some tinkering is possible in Juilliard’s “Romantic” requirement:

“A substantial composition by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, or Mendelssohn.  (Etudes, nocturnes, short dances, waltzes, or comparable pieces are not acceptable).”

Who is to say then, that Schumann does not mean Clara Schumann, whose artistic and performative talents were the subject of envy from her husband Robert, the Schumann to whom the designation clearly points?  What about Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel’s Largo con espressione No. 9, WV 322, a large work wrought with more disquiet than most, if not all, of her brother’s piano works?  If we must resort to wordplay and onomastical divertissement to upset the system and bring back some fresh imagination to our musical regimens, it is only to reinvigorate a history of classical performance that seems to believe there is a dearth of good, “acceptable” standards.

(To be fair, there are many schools that specify, simply enough, just a complete romantic work, or better yet, a complete work of the 19th-century.  Those playing Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel would probably be considered with a fair amount of skepticism but also grinning appreciation.)

IV – a work from the impressionist or contemporary period
The spirit of the audition destroys the visceral character of music, and seeks to break down aesthetic balances of structure and form in favor of scheduling efficiency.  We would be wrong to believe that the last refuge of the classical sonata is within the conservatory.  No, even musicians must often become deejays, cutting and pasting a work, disjointing and wrecking its inherent symbiotic relationships to meet time requirements.  Despite the requirement for a complete contemporary work, a student who was making her rounds of auditions last year entered conservatories prepared to play only select movements of Boulez’s Douze Notations, a brittle, glassy, atonal, and at times extreme work from 1945, knowing full well conservatives would be more than willing to fragment this divisive piece.  In more extreme cases, I have been forced to cut and paste phrases from single movements together to make sure I did not go over the audition time, the musical equivalent of actors making décollage of verses iambic pentameter.  (In fact, artists recording back in the days of 45 and 78 rpm discs had to do something similar, accommodating “creatively” to fit 4-minute chunks of larger works onto a single side of the record.)

Auditions have also led me to believe that the moved audience member at live concerts is a complete faker fully able to contain his emotions.  There is some vast, barren landscape on the psychological map separating a sweating candidate having just experienced musical catharsis and the sobering banalities of the adjudicating panel thereafter.

I am reminded of Gene Weingarten’s feature in the Washington Post about renowned violinist Joshua Bell’s 45-minute stint as a street performer, when he could not so much as get spare change performing in disguise on a $3.5m Stradivarius in a Washington Metro station (L’Enfant Plaza, to be exact) during the morning commute in January 2008.  The experiment presupposed Joshua Bell’s “greatness” and tested people’s reactions to this greatness packaged in a context of shoeshiners, doughnut vendors, and other fixtures of urban junctures.

In auditions, the process is reversed: the greatness is attributed to the listeners, and it is the musician who must measure up.  In either case, music is dropped into a particularly unfavorable environment-the victim, like so much great art, of “viewing conditions.”  With professors listening eight hours a day to “Pathétiques,” “Appassionatas,” “Springs,” “Pastorales,” “Hiccups,” “Wild Hunts”, “Forest Murmurs,” “Happy Islands,” and, if they could be so lucky, “Dried-up Embryos” (that would, of course, be Satie’s pianistic ménage à trois invertébrés) listening less for intuitive impact but rather for the ability and potential to make such an impact, then shouldn’t we all concede that music simply cannot be judged in such sub-optimal conditions?  Even if the state of modern music is that Cageian doctrine that music is where you find it, I sincerely doubt anyone ever thought Sibelius to stoic silence qualified as such.

V- an étude of virtuosity
Entering the practice rooms for the ten-minute warmup at auditions one spring, I entered an Ivesian world of cacophony, with snatches of the coda from a Chopin ballade and mammoth chords heaved out of a Rachmaninoff prelude, complete with sweaty-palmed conservatory hopefuls pacing, humming, playing passages into the pulsating air.  We all know what we are up against—every single performance of the piece ever heard by the adjudicators, every pre-conceived notion of how a phrase could and should be shaped, every factoid written on how the composer might have intended such a work to be performed.  Why do we put ourselves up upon the rack as so many before us have?

In a sense, the answer seems contradictory to what I’ve been writing about this entire time.  Perhaps if we cannot escape the canon, we must become a part of it.  It’s a tough, but not impossible task to woo the listening public over with your brand of interpretation.  Some performers have “legitimized” their interpretation to such an extent so as to have left an indelible mark upon the work itself for future generations.  Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Uchida’s Mozart sonatas, and Bernstein’s Appalachian Spring immediately come to mind.  Music, like most other disciplines, is an art of persuasion, and it is a particular challenge in this case because all the persuasive arguments in the form of “definitive recordings” have come before.  Finding the new—this is the art.

So as I head into auditions, I won’t let my audition be my musical persona, but my persona will fully be present in the audition.  The canon has potentially dire consequences for someone like me, who simply cannot accept a musical persona drawn up from audition repertoire lists.  As a result, I’ll have to partially divorce my audition repertoire from my other active performance repertoire.

Take, for instance, a performance of a Messiaen piano work planned for February as part of a belated centennial celebration that took over the 2008 classical music scene.  In addition to a Messiaen work of my choice, I was told to perform a work by a composer influential on or influenced by Messiaen.  After scouring the literature for a compelling connection, I stumbled upon Albéniz’s Iberia suite, a collection of 12 impressions of Spain, infamous for its finger-contorting difficulties.  The sheer profusion of notes, dynamics, and marks of articulation make the score of the ninth piece ‘Lavapiés’ look like Jackson Pollock’s ‘Lavender Mist’.  Albéniz has little room in my audition program though, and it would frankly be a more economical choice to play a Bach prelude and fugue and push for the association with Messiaen so I can recycle it for my auditions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Bach, but in a more intimate setting.  Am I stupid to be pursuing far more hours than I need in the practice rooms learning the Albéniz for a single performance than to revive a multi-purpose, easily transferable Bach work?  Maybe, but perhaps this is where the audition comes back with a wagging finger.  It’s like a mother telling a child to eat his vegetables, that he can’t actually live on cookies and ice cream alone.  This is true, at least when you are under your parents’ roof.  When you grow up and free yourself from the confines of other people’s rules, that’s when you can eat to your heart’s content.