Posts Categorized: Auditions

Aria Frequency Lists Are Up!

Data nerds, rejoice, the aria lists from this fall’s audition tour are now available on our Audition Resources page. And, as a special bonus this year, the spreadsheet with tabs for all voice types is available as a Google Sheet for download, sorting, and churning here. A little under-the-hood info for those of you who follow and

Read More

2019 Audition Tour Musings

We’re almost done… One more day of auditions at our home base in Vienna, and then it’s off to the drawing board (well, literally, a big ol’ white board) to choose some repertoire and select singers! On today’s blog menu are some fragments of would-be posts… things that I wanted to share along the way

Read More

Keeping Up With the Audition Tour

If you follow us on Facebook (and btw, if you don’t, you should!:)), you might have seen the clips below. I’m sharing them here for those of you who eschew social media, or those whose feed algorithm hasn’t faithfully served them up! Chicago, New York, and Virginia await.

Read More

Untranslatable Words: Audition Tour Edition

During her pre-audition visit to LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Lee Anne picked up a box of Untranslatable Words (20 cards of Perfect Words from Other Languages). We’ve decided to feature one of them on each day of this 2019 Season Audition Tour. Check back here or on the WTO Facebook page for updates! WALDEINSAMKEIT [GERMAN]

Read More

List of Starter Arias

Hi, singer friends. As y’all are preparing your aria packages for this audition season, I thought you might want to see these lists of first arias from last year’s audition tour. Unlike the master Aria Frequency Lists (which represent the full complement of 4 arias that singers put on their applications), these starter aria lists represent the

Read More

Numbers

Today, a few interpretations of audition tour statistics. Numbers can tell stories. Important stories. But a single set of statistics can sometimes tell stories that seem at odds with one another. First, the raw numbers: Audition Tour 2019 1,134 applications – a 300% increase from just a couple of decades ago. 444 auditions scheduled 3% expected to

Read More

Empathy

As I fire up this engine to chronicle this year’s audition tour (and how is it happening as early as September 13…?), I see that I abandoned the blog in the middle of this past season. So many good things went undocumented, so many beautiful stories were untold. But regret is cheap; it’s now time

Read More

Hearing with All the Senses

In the wake of this fall’s audition tour, we are furiously programming and casting next summer’s season. It’s a quiet time of the year for the blog, but I had to take a moment to share this article that came across my RSS feed this morning. My audition tour notes are strewn with multisensory descriptions

Read More

ASoD: Coda

It’s been an amazing month. 478 auditions, over 9,000 miles, more than 800 arias. We are privileged to do this work, and I am regularly gobsmacked by the amount of talent, goodwill and personal courage exhibited by the artists who come into our audition rooms and then into our lives. The singing is over, but the

Read More

ASQoD: Outcome

As we near the end of our audition tour, we are thinking about resolution, and offer this #ASQoD* “You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.” Swami Satchitananda I came of age in the 60’s and the 70’s, when the Serenity Prayer was already becoming clichéd. That powerful mantra that helped so many people get

Read More