<p>I am late posting our experience at Duquesne. My apologies.</p>
<p>We arrived early in the morning for their last regularly scheduled audition date (Mar. 26). The staff had bagels, pastries, fruit, juice and coffee ready and waiting. That was nice as we had driven through Pittsburgh’s awful traffic for over an hour, and it was a freezing cold morning. The college faculty greeted parents, told the kids to take deep breaths and relax before playing their music, and introduced chairs of each department to answer questions. I was impressed with the music tech department’s presentation, but of course that is not my daughter’s major.</p>
<p>My daughter auditioned for the organ department. Dr. Labounsky is the organ chair, and she is very warm and grandmotherly. We had been to campus earlier to practice on the organ in the school of music; it is a terrible mohler, in an acoustically dead room that encourages you to play to quickly! Be warned to keep it steady as if the room sounded better than it does. Dr. Labounsky warmly welcomed me to the audition, saying she likes to have moms there. That was a surprise. She commented on each piece dd played, and then asked her to sight read a hymn, with pedal, and then sight read a simple exercise. </p>
<p>We ran through the music building to get to theory, being a bit late from the organ performance audition. Took dd 20 minutes, and started with easy stuff like key signature, naming notes. Moved to chord naming. We then had an hour break and went to the on-campus Starbucks for a break. Other kids from the audition there told us the upcoming musicianship test was also easy. DD was nervous about sight singing, and the VP majors we spoke with all said to go slowly and relax.</p>
<p>Back to the music building, and the musicianship test. Dd’s name was not on the examiner’s list, but took her in spite of this. I could not hear the exam through the door. Tone matching, in and out of your range, recognizing chords, singing triads above a pitch, clapping rhythm, echoing phrases the examiner sang or played on piano and the dreaded sight singing. Dd came out smiling. I went back and checked with the staff in the office to make sure the exam results would be counted since dd’s name wasn’t on the list.</p>
<p>It took about a week for the letter with dd’s acceptance to arrive from the music school.</p>
<p>Everyone was very friendly and nurturing and warm. I highly recommend Duquesne for the audition experience!</p>