039 – Dr. Kate Boyd: Preparing Students for College Auditions

Guest Host

Items Mentioned

Free PDF – College Audition Timeline

Transcript

Amy: Welcome to episode #39 of the Piano Pantry Podcast, and the final of the guest host episodes while I’m away. Before we get started, as promised, here’s a little peek into where we are in our travels. If everything pans out, we’re currently in the northwest region of France, visiting Mont Saint Michel, as well as the World War II sites in the Normandy region.

This coming weekend, we will be heading to Bordeaux, France, to visit a friend who was our exchange student. She stayed with my family for three summers while growing up and even came back to visit once or twice as an adult. This will be the first time anyone in my family has been able to visit her, so I’m really looking forward to it.

We’ll finish out the final leg of our trip, taking in the sights in Paris before flying home. I’ve been especially looking forward to introducing you to today’s guest host, Kate Boyd, whom I first got to meet 10 years ago when I joined the board of the Indiana Music Teachers Association. Dr. Boyd teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana.

She holds degrees from Stony Brook University, Oberlin Conservatory, and the Hanover Academy of Music in Germany. Last October, she started a YouTube channel called The Piano Prof, where she posts instructional videos about piano-related topics, such as piano technique, collegiate piano study, and musicianship every Tuesday.

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Welcome to the Piano Pantry Podcast, where together we live life as independent music teachers. I’m your host, Amy Chaplin. In this space, we talk about all things teacher life related, from organizing our studios to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between. You’ll get loads of easily actionable tips on organizing and managing your studio while balancing life and home.

Welcome Kate.

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Kate: Hi, I’m Kate Boyd, and I am so glad to be here today and have the opportunity to talk with you about college music study. As a college professor with a lot of experience preparing students for auditions, and also listening to auditions, I get a lot of questions about how best to approach the college audition process.

Not everyone is destined to go on and study music at the collegiate level. A lot of students have a very meaningful experience taking piano lessons as a child, but over time, other interests might come along, which then causes them to lose interest in the piano and stop taking lessons. But sometimes students do continue to play the piano and take lessons.

All the way through high school, they set their sights on being a music major in college. For the independent piano teacher, it can sometimes be hard to know where to start when preparing advanced high school students for college auditions, and that’s why I’m gonna walk you through the process today.

I’m going to start all the way back in 10th grade. I always tell students that they don’t have to know what they’ll major in college when they’re just a sophomore in high school. However, I will tell you, the teacher, that if you have a student who’s in 10th grade who seems like they may be interested in college music study, that is actually a good time to start preparing them.

For a student who wants to audition for college as a music major, the sophomore year of high School is an opportunity to work on sight reading, solidify scales and arpeggios, and learn some music theory. I’ll talk a little bit about each of these. Sight reading is, in my opinion, one of the most valuable skills a pianist can have.

If you sight read well, you will not only be able to learn music more quickly for yourself, but you will also become marketable, and you can even earn money. I remember when I was in 10th grade, I accompanied the Greek piano concerto for someone who was playing in a big competition. I was a pretty good sight reader, but looking back, I don’t feel like the performance was at a super professional level.

Nonetheless, I was pretty pumped when afterward, the pianist handed me an envelope with cash in it. And that wouldn’t have been possible had I not been able to read at a decent level. Now, about scales. I have found that students often come to me at the university level, and when I ask about scales and arpeggios, they say, yeah, I’m good.

I learned them all. But then, when I probe a little deeper, it turns out they can’t play them anymore. At some point, many students pick up the idea that you graduate from practicing scales and arpeggios once you’ve learned them all. But, dear teacher, this is where you come in. Scales and arpeggios are helpful to practice for a couple of reasons.

First, classical music is full of patterns, particularly scales and arpeggios, and really learning them well is like pre-learning entire passages of music. Also, scales and arpeggios and related exercises provide a backdrop against which you can practice other skills like touch, Balance, sound, dynamics, articulation, and so forth.

And music theory, which is the third thing I mentioned earlier. The reason I suggest that high school sophomores who are thinking of collegiate study start getting serious about music theory is that Once you start studying music in college, you soon learn about music theory, music history, different musical traditions, how music intersects with culture, and so forth.

And so learning theory will help a student start out college on a confident footing. They may even be able to pass out of a semester or two of the required music theory sequence. Also, you don’t need me to tell you how important it is to be able to use music theory to help support a student’s own learning at the piano, identifying chord progressions, sequences, cadences, and so forth.

When your prospective college student is a high school junior, that’s a great year to start researching schools. Schedule some time outside of a lesson with your student to sit down and talk about what they’re looking for in a college. What do they envision for their future? Do they want to double major in music and something else?

And by the way, this is the path I recommend for students who are strong in music. and an academic field. Do they want to be a band, choir, or orchestra director in the public schools? Then they should look into studying music education. Do they want to be an independent piano teacher just like you? Then it would be good to look for a program that has a strong piano pedagogy emphasis.

Also, this is a good time to talk to them about college size. Does your student see themselves at a large university or a small college? Nearby or far from home? This will help narrow down options. Once you have a list of 10 to 15 schools, show your student how to find the music department on the website of each university.

Send them off to do some research and ask them to make a list of the required repertoire, the application deadlines, and the names of the faculty at the schools they’re looking at. For my students, I create a shared Google sheet with a column for each of those things, and then they populate it with the information they get from their research.

From there, help your student narrow down the list by focusing on having schools in three categories. One to two stretch schools in the more competitive category, three to four schools that they could get into with a good scholarship if they work quite hard, and one to two safety schools where you think they have a good shot of getting in and getting a good scholarship.

After you’ve narrowed down the list to about five to seven schools, the next step is to help your student choose audition repertoire. There are several factors to consider when choosing audition repertoire. First and foremost, I think it’s very important to choose pieces that highlight your student’s strengths.

Now is not the time to choose something that will be the test piece the student uses to fix or improve something about their playing. Secondly, it’s definitely worth it to spend some time thinking through what you assign your student and avoid overplayed repertoire. If faculty have heard students play the same handful of pieces over and over, Like Chopin’s Fantasy Impromptu, Rachmaninoff’s C sharp minor Prelude, or Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, it really is a breath of fresh air when a student comes in and plays something totally different than what everyone else did.

Also, for auditions, it goes without saying that the students should plan to play something they really know very well. Everything should be totally learned and memorized by September of their senior year, so they have that remaining time before their auditions. to refine their pieces and practice performing.

Sometimes, I hear auditions by students who could play very well but simply didn’t have enough preparation time, and it always breaks my heart just a little bit. When you’re helping your student apply for college, please do write a letter of reference for them. Sometimes, piano students apply at my university, and they only have a letter from their choir or band teacher.

But if they’re applying on piano, their piano teacher is the person we faculty most want to hear from to learn about that student’s strengths and areas for growth as a pianist. The fall semester of the senior year of high school is a great time for the student to visit campus and meet with individual professors.

I always encourage students to make direct contact with professors and ask them for a meeting and or a session sample lesson. You can find their contact info on their faculty page through their school. Not all professors will give sample lessons, but many will be delighted to. A sample lesson is a chance for a professor and a prospective student to get to know each other a little bit and get a sense for whether it would be a good fit for them to work together in college. Also, a sample lesson is a great opportunity for your student to get coached on something they’re planning to play for their upcoming auditions. If a university or music school requires a pre-screening audition, those are usually due around November 15th or December 1st.

My advice there is to make sure the recording quality is as high as it can be and also to make sure the student knows the entire piece. Because unlike in an audition, a panelist listening to an audition recording can skip right to the hardest parts if they decide to. So, the coda of a piece, for example, should be just as strong as the beginning.

December and January are a great time to do lots and lots of practice performances and playthroughs of the student’s recital program. One of the most common issues I see during audition season is students who just haven’t practiced performing enough. I recommend doing 10 to 15 complete playthroughs, both for audiences and also where the student records their own playthrough and listens back to the recording.

This can all take place during December and early January. Most college auditions will take place in January and February. I recommend scheduling dates that are earlier in the cycle because, at a lot of schools, more scholarship consideration is given earlier in the process, and sometimes music scholarship funding is not as abundant for the last one or two audition dates.

After the student finishes their auditions, they’ll have to wait for their results. This is a good time to debrief with your student about the audition experience. If they auditioned at several schools, they’ll have impressions of their visits, and I recommend helping them make a ranked list of their choices.

You can expect to hear back from schools by about April 1st. Students have until around May 1st to weigh their scholarship offers, if any, and let the schools know their decision. I advise against going into major debt for a music degree. Many schools will be able to offer competitive scholarships on the basis of a music audition, combined with academic scholarships.

However, if there are multiple offers from schools with significant scholarships, I don’t always think it’s the best option to just go for whatever is the cheapest. This is a good time to make a list of pros and cons and consult the ranked list your student, and you made after the auditions. My final tip is to have your student be in direct contact with the professors at the schools your student applied to and encourage your student to be honest with faculty about where they are with regard to their choice.

Don’t be coy if a student isn’t interested anymore in a School they applied to; it’s good etiquette to let them know so the university can make an offer to another student. As the professional world of music is small. A student has the chance to make a positive impression on a professor, and even if the student doesn’t attend the school where a particular professor teaches, their paths might very well cross again in the future.

It’s therefore prudent to make a good impression at this stage. So there you have it. My tips on preparing your student for college auditions. I have created a free collegiate audition timeline that you can get in the podcast show notes. It’s a handy checklist of the process of preparing for college auditions.

I hope this has been helpful, and I wish you much success as you prepare your students for college auditions.

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Amy: Thank you so much to Dr. Kate Boyd for taking the time to be with us today. You can connect with her online by following her YouTube channel, The Piano Prof, or on Instagram at Kate Boyd Pianist, both of which I have linked for you in the show notes. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please consider taking a moment to jump over to Apple Podcasts.

Visit pianopantry.com/podcast if you need a little help on how to do that. Stay tuned next week for teacher talk number 40. I’ll be chatting with a good piano teacher friend of mine, Valerie Merrill, who is also coincidentally a current student of Dr. Boyd’s at Butler University. Valerie and I will be chatting about both of our experiences heading to grad school later in life.

See you then!