How I divide an audition list

You spend five weeks on the two hardest things on your list. Then you walk into the audition and have to play the exposition of the Mozart concerto, something you tried to brush up on in the last three days.

I won my first audition out of school, which still strikes me as funny. I think I won it because I'd never prepared anything before. I didn't have any shortcuts to fall back on, so I just did the work. The trouble showed up around my tenth or eleventh audition, after I'd gotten comfortable enough to assume the easy excerpts would take care of themselves. That's when I started walking in, playing the Mozart, and not advancing.

The excerpts that don't scare you are the ones that quietly wreck your audition. They're what you have to play well in the early rounds to even reach the rounds where your technical material comes up at all. And they're the easiest to underprepare, because nothing about them feels urgent.

The system that came out of the next 20 years of auditioning is a rotation that touches every excerpt every two days. It went through plenty of iterations to get here, but the core idea has been stable for a while now. It's the spine of the practice chapter in Behind the Screen, and it's worth pulling out here on its own because, in my experience, getting this part right changes everything else about how your prep feels.

Four categories

Before any of this becomes a rotation, every excerpt on the list goes into one of four buckets.

• Daily: Excerpts so technical they give me anxiety if I don't touch them every day. Peter and the Wolf. Try to keep this group small. Part of audition prep is managing your anxiety, so if skipping a day on something makes you anxious, give it a little time every day. But if you put twenty things in here, the rotation collapses under its own weight.
• Technical: Excerpts where the work is fingers, tongue, articulation, evenness. Beethoven 4 movement IV. Mendelssohn Scherzo. Capriccio movements I and III. Scheherazade IV. Shostakovich 1 movement II. Sibelius 1 movement III. These can wait a day between sessions because the muscle memory doesn't go away overnight.
• Expressive: Excerpts where the work is musical, not mechanical. Brahms 3 movement II. Schubert 8. Rach 2. Bolero. These are the ones that win or lose you a round, in my opinion, and they're the ones most candidates leave to the end of their prep when there's no time left to actually work on them.
• Other: Everything else. Not technically scary, not deeply expressive. Somewhere in the middle. Brahms 3 movement I. Galanta. Beethoven 8 trio.

Where you put a specific excerpt is your call, and you'll move things around as you go. Two clarinetists could disagree on whether Dances of Galanta belongs in Technical or Other, and both could be right for themselves. The labels aren't the point. The point is that you've stopped looking at the list as one big undifferentiated wall of work.

The two-day rotation

On day one I practice all of my daily excerpts, plus half of my technical, half of my expressive, and half of my other. On day two I practice the daily ones again, plus the other half of technical, expressive, and other. Then I'm back to day one.

Each day is balanced. You're never doing "technical day" or "expressive day," because either of those leaves you out of shape for the other half. If you only work technical material on Tuesday, by Wednesday your hands are tight and you've forgotten how to phrase. If you only work expressive material on Wednesday, by Thursday your fingers are stiff.

Think of it like a workout routine in a gym. Many people divide up their workouts into specific days, "leg day" or "shoulders day," to give one muscle group time to recover while they work another. But playing the clarinet is a full-body workout. I want a nice balance of each kind of excerpt, every day, because everything needs to be ready on audition day at the same time.

Color coding and the audition book

This is a bit complicated to describe in writing, but once it's set up it's very simple to use.

Once the rotation is sorted, code your chart so you can read it at a glance. I use yellow for daily, green for day one, blue for day two. The exact colors don't matter. What matters is that on any given morning you can look at your chart and instantly know which excerpts you're touching that day.

Then I put a matching colored pull tab on each excerpt in my audition book. Yellow tab on the Mozart, green tab on Beethoven 4 movement II, blue tab on Copland. On a blue day, I can flip through the book by tab and never lose ten minutes hunting for the next excerpt.

Pull tabs sound fussy in writing. They take fifteen minutes to set up and they pay off every practice session from now until the audition.

Three things that quietly wreck a rotation

The first is missing a day. A sick day, a teaching day that ran long, a kid who didn't sleep. One missed day turns into two, two turns into a week, and by the time you sit back down at the stand you've quietly drifted back to practicing only the technical things, because that's what scares you most. Don't try to make up the missed day. Pick a day, Day 1 or Day 2, and start the rotation again from there.

The second is the rotation taking too long to get through. If half your list is more than you can fit into one practice session, the system breaks down. You skip something, skip more, and the rotation stops being a rotation. Two ways out. You can stretch the rotation to three days instead of two, so each day's portion is a third of each category instead of half. Or you can set a timer per excerpt and force yourself to move on when it goes off. Remember, you don't have to perfect anything in one sitting.

The third is a heavy playing day. A long orchestra service, a school rehearsal, a pit gig that ran long. There are days where you physically can't play through half of the list. On those days, do mental practice. Listen to recordings of your excerpts and follow along in the part. Sing the openings out loud. Visualize the tempo and the room. The rotation stays alive even when your chops aren't available.

What this looks like after two weeks

After two weeks of practicing this way, every excerpt has been touched six or seven times. Your daily excerpts have been practiced fourteen times. And you haven't dropped anything. You also have a paper trail: at a glance, you can see which excerpts you've hit, how recently, and whether you've been intentional about touching the expressive material or quietly avoiding it.

Perhaps the chart looks a little bit empty to you on any given day. You'll glance at it on a Wednesday morning and see maybe twenty checkmarks where you expected fifty. Trust me, the rotation is doing its job. The sum across two weeks is what matters, and across two weeks the chart fills in.

What's in the book

This post is one piece of the system from Behind the Screen. The book also covers how to build your audition book in the first place, how to construct a listening list, how to plan the physical and mental sides of your prep, and how to use the chart in later phases when the audition is close and the practice shifts from learning to performing.

If you want the full version, the book is available on Lulu. If you want to talk through how this might work for your specific list and your audition timeline, reach out about audition coaching.

The next post goes into the 48 hours before the audition, where most people do exactly the wrong thing.