Casting for Stanford's nine a cappella groups might be described as Rush Week meets American Idol—except that nobody behaves like Simon Cowell. When a couple hundred people try out for only a couple dozen openings, you might expect things to get snarky—but no. The a cappella group members who judge their prospective ensemble-mates are unfailingly supportive. Standard auditioner etiquette is to clap, smile, put out lots of positive energy and “don’t laugh at anyone unless they say something funny on purpose.” Testimony, which sings Christian music, gives auditionees the option of starting with a nerve-calming group prayer. Here are additional observations from the thinning of the heard:
Everyone who auditions will be sharp; a very few will be the E-flat above high C.
An audition always involves a determination of vocal
range—the singing of scales up to the highest note you can hit and down to the lowest note you can hit. Thus are two moments of physical failure built into every audition. Auditionees meet these petit Waterloos with eye-rolling and wincing and little make-it-stop please of “That’s it” and “I can’t.”
What fresh hell follows the determination of vocal range? Pitch matching.
An auditioner plays three discordant notes on a piano. The auditionee must sing them back, pitch for pitch, after hearing them once. Then come four notes. Then five. Some groups do the same kind of exercise with complicated clapped rhythms. After that, the auditionee gets a chance to do what almost everyone dreads: sing an unaccompanied solo to a roomful of strangers who are almost certainly better musicians than you.
What are the odds?
The popular group Talisman heard 121 individual auditions. They invited 40 singers—10 each of sopranos, altos, tenors and basses—to their intense callback auditions. (Auditionees should not be fooled by the groups’ white lie that hopefuls will know how they fared when callback lists are posted. Lists are posted, but singers who advance to the second round of auditions get a CD of practice music delivered to their rooms before breakfast on the day of callbacks.) Talisman cast 10 singers, including one alto who wouldn’t be available to join the group until next year.
After you stand out, you’ve got to blend in.
An auditionee needs star quality, but the callbacks are also about vocal teamwork. As Nicole Bonsol, musical director of Talisman, explains, “When we’re all singing together, we try to make our own voice indistinguishable in the whole.” At the tenor callbacks, Talisman member Misha Chowdhury, ’07, sang the same snippet of a Swahili song 20 or 30 times along with various combinations of prospective singers. At the session’s end, Talisman performed “Amazing Grace” as a parting gift to the auditionees. A voice not heard before took a solo: it was Chowdhury.
What’s at the highest pitch? Singers’ emotions as they contemplate leaving their group.
A cappella group members have until the end of callbacks to decide whether to re-enlist for the new year. Jennifer Alyono, ’06, musical director of Testimony, says that the commitment of six hours of rehearsal a week plus additional hours in performance and group management takes its toll. By spring, “the group’s fire was dying down.” Then fall auditions rekindled the joy. Of 12 Testimony members who planned to retire, five changed their minds and re-upped.
A cappella is easy; comedy is hard.
Groups have different needs, and the auditions sometimes screen for them, too. Fleet Street, known for its comic style, asks auditionees to tell a joke or demonstrate some offbeat talent. For example, Michael Feldman, ’07, the Fleet Street business manager, can sing the round “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a solo. (The tune hops like a flea circus and the lyrics sound like “ly, row, mer, boat, errily, down, but, dream.”) Feldman wants to do his senior thesis on another prized talent: vocal percussion, the ability of a singer to mimic all the sounds in a drum kit.
When the callback music stops, some singers are left without a chair.
At freshman orientation, Paul Mark Elizondo, ’07, fell in love with a cappella. The San Diego tenor tried out for five groups and got five callbacks. He says he felt “a little cocky” going in, then “disappointed for the whole year” after no group cast him. “Zealous, spiritual, obsessive” Paul—those are the three words he chose to describe himself on a Talisman application—vowed that this year would be different. Heeding earlier audition advice (“better to be confident than ambitious”), he chose a song—the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Under the Bridge”—that didn’t unduly tax the high end of his range. He tried out for eight groups this year and was called back for four. His first-choice group chose him, and now when he walks across campus in a certain baseball shirt, people come up to him and say, “Wow, you’re a Mendicant.”
