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Paul Mark Elizondo
Glenn Matsumura |
casting for Stanford's nine
a cappella groups might be described as Rush Week meets
American Idol—except that nobody behaves
like Simon Cowell. When a couple hundred people try
out for only a couple dozen openings, you might expect
things to get snarky—but no. The a cappella group
members who judge their prospective ensemble-mates are
unfailingly supportive. Standard auditioner etiquette
is to clap, smile, put out lots of positive energy and
“don’t laugh at anyone unless they say something
funny on purpose.” Testimony, which sings Christian
music, gives auditionees the option of starting with
a nerve-calming group prayer. Here are additional observations
from the thinning of the heard:
Everyone who auditions will be sharp; a very
few will be the E-flat above high C.
An audition always involves a determination of vocal
range—the singing of scales up to the highest
note you can hit and down to the lowest note you can
hit. Thus are two moments of physical failure built
into every audition. Auditionees meet these petit Waterloos
with eye-rolling and wincing and little make-it-stop
pleas of “That’s it” and “I
can’t.”
What fresh hell follows the determination of
vocal range? Pitch matching.
An auditioner plays three discordant notes on a piano.
The auditionee must sing them back, pitch for pitch,
after hearing them once. Then come four notes. Then
five. Some groups do the same kind of exercise with
complicated clapped rhythms. After that, the auditionee
gets a chance to do what almost everyone dreads: sing
an unaccompanied solo to a roomful of strangers who
are almost certainly better musicians than you.
What are the odds?
The popular group Talisman heard 121 individual auditions.
They invited 40 singers—10 each of sopranos, altos,
tenors and basses—to their intense callback auditions.
(Auditionees should not be fooled by the groups’
white lie that hopefuls will know how they fared when
callback lists are posted. Lists are posted,
but singers who advance to the second round of auditions
get a CD of practice music delivered to their rooms
before breakfast on the day of callbacks.) Talisman
cast 10 singers, including one alto who wouldn’t
be available to join the group until next year.
After you stand out, you’ve got to blend
in.
An auditionee needs star quality, but the callbacks
are also about vocal teamwork. As Nicole Bonsol, musical
director of Talisman, explains, “When we’re
all singing together, we try to make our own voice indistinguishable
in the whole.” At the tenor callbacks, Talisman
member Misha Chowdhury, ’07, sang the same snippet
of a Swahili song 20 or 30 times along with various
combinations of prospective singers. At the session’s
end, Talisman performed “Amazing Grace”
as a parting gift to the auditionees. A voice not heard
before took a solo: it was Chowdhury.
What’s at the highest pitch? Singers’
emotions as they contemplate leaving their group.
A cappella group members have until the end of callbacks
to decide whether to re-enlist for the new year. Jennifer
Alyono, ’06, musical director of Testimony, says
that the commitment of six hours of rehearsal a week
plus additional hours in performance and group management
takes its toll. By spring, “the group’s
fire was dying down.” Then fall auditions rekindled
the joy. Of 12 Testimony members who planned to retire,
five changed their minds and re-upped.
A cappella is easy; comedy is hard.
Groups have different needs, and the auditions sometimes
screen for them, too. Fleet Street, known for its comic
style, asks auditionees to tell a joke or demonstrate
some offbeat talent. For example, Michael Feldman, ’07,
the Fleet Street business manager, can sing the round
“Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a solo. (The
tune hops like a flea circus and the lyrics sound like
“ly, row, mer, boat, errily, down, but, dream.”)
Feldman wants to do his senior thesis on another prized
talent: vocal percussion, the ability of a singer to
mimic all the sounds in a drum kit.
When the callback music stops, some singers
are left without a chair.
At freshman orientation, Paul Mark Elizondo, ’07,
fell in love with a cappella. The San Diego tenor tried
out for five groups and got five callbacks. He says
he felt “a little cocky” going in, then
“disappointed for the whole year” after
no group cast him. “Zealous, spiritual, obsessive”
Paul—those are the three words he chose to describe
himself on a Talisman application—vowed that this
year would be different. Heeding earlier audition advice
(“better to be confident than ambitious”),
he chose a song—the Red Hot Chili Peppers’
“Under the Bridge”—that didn’t
unduly tax the high end of his range. He tried out for
eight groups this year and was called back for four.
His first-choice group chose him, and now when he walks
across campus in a certain baseball shirt, people come
up to him and say, “Wow, you’re a Mendicant.”
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