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Auditioning Singers I

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We're baaack! Hope you've had a good summer break!
 
If you missed the end of my intonation series last spring, I'll post links at the end of this blog.
 
Auditions are something most of us do to evaluate potential singers for our choirs. Some do it in the spring, some in the late summer/fall just before the new academic year/season begins.
 
Of course, the level of your group will determine how elaborate and challenging your audition process will be. Some of you may not do formal auditions (you may conduct a non-auditioned or "ya'll come" choir), but even then evaluation of your individual singers can be helpful at some point (and potentially helpful to them, too).
 
Any audition will look to evaluate:
  • vocal ability/skill
  • ear
  • musicianship/sightreading
  • and possibly ensemble skills
In addition, it's important to evaluate the personality of the singer: are they a team player? How motivated might they be to work on music outside of rehearsal? Will they be suportive of other singers in the choir?
 
I'll take each of these topic in turn. As always, I value your feedback and opinions–you'll greatly add to the dialogue and knowledge base. Read the comments in the intonation series for wonderful examples!
 
Here are links to the intonation series, in order:
 

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Comments

  1. Welcome back to you as well, William! Yes, as you’ll see in my next post (up today), I absolutely look at the quality/beauty of voice (just purely as sound), which is subjective. But it’s part of the mix. I’ll write of what follows later, but at some point all of us (within the level of our singers) has to make choices between beauty of sound from a singer we hear and musicianship and the many other qualities we look for. I don’t think any of us can get all singers to have all the qualities we want–so we figure out what combination of those in our available singers will make the best choir.
     
    Singers can improve the quality of the sound they make with good training and practice, but much of this is inborn and the really beautiful voice is a gift.
     
    For individual singers who ask me, I can recommend working with a good voice teacher or other things to improve their sound.
     
    I’m pretty lucky and have a good natural instrument (which helps in demonstrating to my choir), but certainly not a big one, which means that there were distinct limits to the music I could do as a soloist. Just on quality/size of voice, I wouldn’t have made the Swedish Radio Choir, for example.
     
    On the other hand, if I’d had a bigger voice I might have gone down the vocal career path and missed out on all the fun I’ve had as a conductor!

  2. Welcome back!   I can’t offer much about auditioning, except that the area as a singer, personally, that I have least self knowledge about is what kind of sound I’m making … I feel confident about the four areas you list, but am much less confident simply about how I sound as a singer … is that something else you try to audition for, if you have the luxury? 

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