Audition Prep Season: Part 1--Excerpts

Because I have almost finished my end-of-year violin recital process (another long and arduous preparation period that honestly could merit its own blog--but alas I lack the time) I get to--no, not rest, are you kidding?! Oh, you were, of course, I knew that. Yes, so now I get to start on new pieces for all the auditions for orchestras and programs in the fall, and competitions in the winter and spring, NYO's 2016 season lying not-so-low among these of course. *If you're a musician and you're crying clap your hands CLAPCLAP* So I thought I'd take the chance today to share with you how I went through the audition process for NYO this past year. Who knows, maybe you'll find something useful out of this basically useless post. Anyways. We continue!

So while I'm not going to post the actual videos I submitted to NYO this year, due to privacy/copyright/etc. issues and whatnot, I will tell you how they came to exist at the end of a 7-month duration, with the release of the 2015 excerpts in early April (like, really early). That's one thing that I have a tendency to do: carefully stalk the page of whatever it is I'm applying to for days until they release what I need; and yes, I stay up until midnight sometimes (go ahead, judge) waiting agonizingly. Somehow, I always forget that they don't necessarily post them at 12:00 AM; sometimes "on June 9th" means "on June 9th at 3:45 PM." So I have to wait through school and everything, just to get it/them.
I started practicing the excerpts as soon as I printed them out (literally), but I soon realized that there was one excerpt (there's always that one excerpt) that isn't easily sightread, so I just skipped it. For 2015 it was (for me) from Brahms's Symphony No. 1, Mvmt. 2, and for this year (2016) it's from Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. Although part of the problem might be that it's the second violin part. But still. So for those I just put them aside for as long as possible until I guilt-tripped myself into searching up the Youtube videos for those (the worst is when there are no good Youtube videos) and marking on my music where the music starts in the video, fingerings and bowings if there's a live orchestra, and key/time changes that I'd otherwise miss, because again, I'm bad at sightreading.
I then ran through all the excerpts once whenever I practiced, and picked out one each time (always rotating) to practice thoroughly that day. I did this to try to keep everything as fresh in my mind as possible, but it also kinda backfired, as the pieces soon became routine for me and it was hard to make them sound unique. So, to combat this, I listened to whatever I was playing whenever I got that "same-old" feeling, so that I'd be listening to it from an outsider's perspective on a third-party's interpretation of the music. So that definitely helped, because I'd find a new recording each time, so by the time recording sessions rolled around, I'd heard countless interpretations and was able to make a weird combo of everything I liked and perform it in my audition video.
In the end I submitted my recordings along with the essays with five or six days to spare, and that gave me five or six extra days to worry about results. I was actually pretty successful about forgetting about it, though--I only started having nervous breakdowns like the week before results were supposed to be out. So, in truth, I think I was overly zealous about the whole process--I was worrying about the tiniest things like whether or not they'd notice that I changed their bowings in that measure, when I could have been worrying about things like whether or not my response for the oral response was legit or not. :P
So I hoped you liked this (rather long) post; I cut it into various parts to make it shorter than what it would be otherwise. So stay tuned for following parts for this post, because I will definitely make this group of posts rather elaborate in an attempt to past the time between now and June 27th. The next post in this series of posts will be focusing on my solo piece and how I prepared that. And as always, comment below any and all questions!