I have a university audition early next year. How can I be fully prepared for my audition? What should I be doing now to make sure I can get in?
Obviously, choose your repertoire sooner rather than later! Every university has their own requirements, so follow those. If the requirements are vague, here are some good rules of thumb:
Classical singers: include an English song, a foreign language song (Italian is a good choice, don't be afraid of the 24 Italian Songs and Arias!), and potentially a musical theater piece. If you need more songs, branch out into extra languages!
Musical theater singers: Choose songs from multiple eras. Also, as much as you love Wicked or Into the Woods or The Last Five Years or Next to Normal or Cats or Phantom of the Opera, those shows are heavily done. It's worth looking for less well-known shows.
Instrumentalists: You probably have to choose from a list of excerpts. It's not cheating to play excerpts you've already learned if the chance comes up! It's always better to play a simpler excerpt that you can absolutely nail than to choose the hardest one and maybe fumble it.
EVERYONE: Memorize your music holy shit please. Even if it's not required. Just do it. You have so much time right now! Memorize and everything will be so much easier!!
EVERYONE AGAIN: Choose pieces in contrasting styles. Happy/sad, upbeat/slow, funny/romantic/angry, etc. Show off your musicality and range!
Start practicing your rep carefully now and you're going to be so incredibly set.
Next, practice your sightreading. Lots of auditions include a short sightreading portion. It won't make or break your audition, but it will make your life easier in ensembles if you can sightread well. There are sightreading example books you can get to practice! (Instrumentalists, this isn't an audition tip, but a life tip: start learning how to sightsing simple melodies. Otherwise aural skills will be a bitch.)
Oh, also practice repeating melodies. At least in vocalist auditions, they'll play you little atonal ditties and you need to repeat them back as well as possible.
Instrumentalists, practice your long tones and scales. You should already be doing that, but it will come up in your auditions.
Finally, you can do your absolute best in an audition and still not get in. Even if you're an incredible prodigy, I still recommend auditioning for at least a few schools. There are basically infinite sopranos out there, ditto for violins and flutes and pianists. Oboes and bassoons and bass players, you're going to have less competition but schools also have fewer slots for you. Sometimes a school just won't have room and you won't get in. Auditioning multiple places gives you a better chance.
Space those audition out, too. I only applied to three grad schools, and I only got into one. Why? Because during the audition period for two of them, I had mono! And didn't realize it! (Before the plague, sometimes people shared drinks at parties and gave an entire dorm floor the same disease.) The one audition I did when healthy got me in no problem. Hedge your bets: apply to multiple schools.
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