Feeling bad prescreens didn't work out- advice?

musicprnt
Tue, 21 Jan 2014 18:45:06 +0000

I think one of the things you need to tell her is you don’t know the background of what they are looking for, that her playing may have been good enough, but she was the victim of circumstances. One year at Juilliard the admissions people were giving the numbers for flutes being admitted the next year, and the number was, 1…and that was between grad school and undergrad! If your D was a flautist, and gave a prescreen that year, they probably auditioned a handful of kids, and rejected everyone else…

My S got upset that he didn’t get into the second round of auditions at one of the places he auditioned at, while a couple of kids he knew made it into the round, he thought he played really well, but got cut in the first cut. Turned out the two kids were studying privately with teachers at the school (paying $$$$$), so it wasn’t exactly an even comparison (and he got into every other school he applied to…)… There is just so much vaguery and noise built into the process you can’t take too much out of the results, or assume anything. The same school that rejected my son in the first round rejected a good friend of his in the same studio, that kid the same year he auditioned took one of the most prestigious competitions in the world a couple of months after he was rejected…

Tell her this is what music is like, and everyone experiences it, and I know it isn’t easy. After my S’s audition that he got rejected, he was really upset, angry, meanwhile he had had one of the top teachers around be very encouraging about working with him at another school, but he couldn’t see that (it is one of the times I came close to wanting to really slap hi, but I didn’t…:)…it is part of this crazy world, and tell her it is that hard for the very best students:).

Going forward, a couple of pieces of advice:

1)If it doesn’t work out as she wants this year, a lot of music students do gap years, to work on skills and technique, it might be worth it for her to try that.

2)I know you are rural, that it is hard to get to places, but I would highly recommend trying to find someone to evaluate your D outside her current teacher. I would recommend finding a teacher who has a good reputation, and ask him/her for an evaluation. One of the hardest parts about what your D faces is it is very, very hard to benchmark anything, with academics, it is relatively easy, but with performance, it is extremely difficult, and a rejection on a pre screen isn’t an evaluation that means all that much. Yes, it could be that the teacher tells her that her playing is not going to cut it, but they also can give concrete evaluations, where you are strong, where you are weak, and that makes a big difference, it is concrete:).