Audition Day

Saturday, February 12, was the day of my Berklee audition.

The night before, I was confident that I would have a good night’s sleep. I was exhausted from a day of walking around Boston, and practicing for nearly three hours with the Pinoy choir. Besides, with the two hours of piano practice Jett had gotten me at Berklee that afternoon, I thought I had overcome whatever audition jitters remained. After all, GP had advised me months before: “Just be cool and have fun. The panel likes meeting applicants who just enjoy making music.”

But then, after sleeping for just two hours, I woke up, wide-eyed, unable to fall asleep for the next two hours as I watched an epic flashback flicker in my mind: a montage of every piano, keyboard, and organ I had ever played. The miniature, Schroeder-esque baby grand piano I had destroyed when I was three by repeatedly banging out my rendition of Beethoven’s 5^th; the yellow-keyed piano owned by the little old lady who gave me piano lessons as a kid, down the street from Lola’s house; those Electones during lessons at Yamaha in kindergarten and grade school; the monophonic battery-operated keyboard Tita Josie sent from New York one Christmas; the progressively more sophisticated keyboards, and finally the second-hand piano, that my parents bought me as they saw year after year how was serious I was about playing; that hideous, musty organ in the Kingsville chapel during my brief stint with the village choir; that jangly old piano in the high school chapel that I had played for morning Masses and for Days with the Lord; the keyboard in the college chapel, and the keyboard ACMG got the funds to buy in fourth year; every piano and Clavinova and Electone I had played at Hangad weddings and concerts and recordings, in Manila, around the Philippines, and in the US; Hangad’s trusty Yamaha keyboard; and the electric grand piano in my condo, that I had bought for myself two years ago.

I finally fell asleep at 6 AM—which gave me only a 30-minute nap before I had to get up, get to Berklee, have a quick breakfast in the area, and be at the audition venue by 8 AM.

Thank God for coffee—and to Jett, for recommending that amazing Spanish Latte at the Berklee students’ de facto hangout, Pavement Cafe. Kyle and I had breakfast there after he took Lance to work earlier that morning; after which I walked the short distance to the audition venue, Berklee’s Genko Uchida building down the street.

Student volunteers took my name and led to the recital hall on the ground floor, where several kids, around high school age, were seated with their parents. Some kids were happily jamming together on their guitars; some were fidgeting nervously, with their violin and saxophone cases on the floor beside them. Some were in torn jeans, sneakers, and sweatshirts; some were in suits and ties. Ten chairs, numbered one to ten, were set up along the far side of the room. On a large screen at the front of the room were the numbers one to ten, and beside each number the auditionees’ names would flash to call them to the chairs. From watching the names on the screen, I realized that while half of the kids looked like white Americans, there were actually several Europeans among them: Spanish, Italian, French, Eastern European. (The other half of the kids was a mix of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.) Along with auditionees’ names, their principal instruments would flash too—and I found it interesting that for every batch of 10 names, there were only one to two pianists. I had thought there would be more of us. The majority, four to five per batch of 10, were guitarists; one to two were electric bassists; one to two were vocalists; and the rest were violinists, flautists, saxophonists, drummers, acoustic bassists, and more.

It wasn’t long before my name flashed on the screen to call me to chair number four; and it wasn’t long again before a student volunteer, a freshman guitarist named Oliver, led me into an elevator and brought me to an upper floor. An auditionee ahead of me was still using the room, so Oliver used the time to remind me of that I would have 15 minutes in this room to warm up and study a piece of music that would serve as a sight-reading test.

The warm-up room was a classroom, but instead of desks there were rows of electric pianos, totaling about 12, facing the front of the room. Resting on one of the pianos was a binder of music sheets, which Oliver opened to the “piano” tab. To my surprise, there were eight pieces of music that I had to study. Sure, each was only around eight bars, but I also had to do one run of my five-minute prepared piece.

I dove right into the warm-up. I started with studying each of the sight-reading pieces. Most of them had both the treble and bass clefs notated—there was an easy dramatic film score-ish piece, an easy pop piece, a jazzy piece where I had to struggle not to improvise—and there were also lead sheets that just gave chords and rhythm. Luckily, I got through all of them, and had time to do a double-tempo run of my prepared piece.

After my fifteen minutes were up, I was led to another floor to wait for my audition. It was embarrassing that I slightly overestimated my waiting time, and found that my panel had been waiting when I returned from the restroom. Thankfully, both my panelists—they introduced themselves as Danny and Susanna, and I presume they were from the piano department (Jett said later that Susanna is an incredibly talented pianist)—were still good-natured as I entered the classroom that served as an audition room, and was directed me to sit at the Yamaha upright at the front of the room. They asked my name and where I was from (they seemed impressed that I had flown halfway across the world); asked if I had had any piano education; asked what I would be playing; and finally, asked me to play.

“Can I take a video of myself while playing?” I asked before starting. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a very good idea,” Susanna had said; and so all I have is a memory. I remember taking a deep breath, rolling my shoulders back, stretching my arms outwards to loosen them up one last time, putting my fingers on the keys and flexing them there and—taking one more deep, slow breath—starting to play. I remember that my suite from Cinema Paradiso, which I had spent the last weeks arranging and adjusting and polishing and perfecting, had never sounded better. I remember being so happy during those five minutes—so in love with what I was doing, then and there, as I moved from the nostalgic main theme, to the playful childhood theme, to the sweeping love theme—that I almost started to cry. I remember that I had remembered not to put on my dead face, as Anama had so often chided me, and instead put as much intensity and emotion on my face as I could. And I remember that, for maybe only the third time since I had started practicing the piece, I got through it without any mistakes.

I heaved a sigh of relief as I played the final chord. They didn’t applaud or say “good”; I didn’t expect them to, after all it was an audition. They just said “okay” and wrote down their notes.

We moved to the next part of the audition, which was the music tests. There were several parts. First, Susanna asked if I could do blues improvisation; “Kinda,” I said, and she sat beside me on the piano bench, played the notes of the blues scale in C (which I had familiarized myself with some weeks back, with Kenneth’s help), and started on a basic blues progression, while I improvised at the right end of the piano keyboard. My own assessment of my improv was that it was correct, but uninspired.

Susanna moved on to having me form chords. “Can you play a dominant 7^th chord?” Check, with a C7. “Can you do that in G?” Check. G7. “How about a D minor 7^th?” Check. “How about an A flat minor 7^th?” Whoops. I played an Abm+M7, heard immediately that it sounded wrong, and said , “Oops, that’s not right.” Susanna said, “Okay, how would you fix that?” I flattened the G. “Good,” she says. (I figure now that even if I got it wrong, at least I knew it was wrong, so that should get me at least partial points. Haha.)

Then came progressions (“Can you do a II-V-I?” “Okay, can you do it without moving all the notes?”—I think I did okay, with Dm to G chord without shifting the D, and then from G to C chord without shifting the G); chord-naming tests (Major? Minor? Augmented? Diminished?—I had two mistakes, argh); rhythm-matching tests (Susanna counted in the time, played rhythm sequences of two to four bars, and I repeated; I got two right the first time, I had to repeat two); and tone-matching tests (Susanna played sequences of notes while I looked away, which I would then imitate; perfect score for me in this part, hooray).

Lastly Susanna asked if I could sight-read. I said yes. She laid a copy of the audition binder on the piano’s music rack and asked me to play number two, the easy pop piece. I got the rhythm wrong the first time, since I had practiced it much faster in the warm-up than her count-in now; the second time, it came out perfect.

“We’re done. Thank you,” they both said after that. I replied, “Already? I’d love to do more.” And I meant it. I found myself hugely enjoying the tests—particularly, the fact that there were people who spoke and appreciated the same musical bwabwabwa that I did.

Next I was led upstairs to the admissions office, where I was interviewed by an Asian-American student admissions representative, a senior at the school. I honestly found the interview anticlimactic: what I had hoped to be 15 minutes packed with drama and sound bites about pushing the reset button on my very comfortable corporate life to follow my dreams and live out my passions turned out to be boring, even annoying, as my interviewer blandly ran down his checklist of questions—“Why do you want to study music at Berklee?” “What will you be able to contribute to the Berklee community?” “What do you plan to do afterwards?” “In three words, how would you describe your music?”—and just stared into his MacBook, typing non-stop, as I spoke. At one point I stopped and said, “Uhm, should I wait for you to finish typing?” He looked up and answered, “No, just keep talking. I’m trying to get this all down.” The writer and HR person in me was aching to give him a lesson in conducting interviews. No probing of any answer I gave, no reaction to anything specific; only a patronizing, “That’s great! Amazing!” after every answer I gave. No wonder the interview was only 15 minutes long. Or looking at it another way—maybe he interviewed that way precisely because each applicant was given only 15 minutes. Oh well.

After that, my audition and interview were done. My interviewer told me I would get my admission and scholarship results via e-mail on March 31.

I decided to stay on at the school for some activities prepared by admissions team. I headed back down to the hall, where many more students and parents were now waiting. The anxiety and energy had built up considerably, with parents asking the student volunteers in the hall about the audition process, the interview process, housing, and scholarships. A few minutes after I arrived at the hall, an Eddie Murphy-ish student ambassador named Will Wells, a graduating double-major in Film Scoring and Music Production & Engineering (and, I learned from Jett later, one of the school’s star students), gave a talk about his experience at Berklee. He had gone to Finland to perform on the school’s behalf; he had worked in a studio with John Mayer, Wyclef Jean and Sara Bareilles (note to self: look up Wyclef Jean and Sara Bareilles), and he had a job waiting for him (in Hollywood, I think) after graduation.

Joining Will on stage at the end of his talk for Q&A (most parents had questions about financing, scholarships, acceptance rate, and housing) was Todd, the school’s director for admissions. After the Q&A I approached Todd to air two concerns that had built up inside me during Will’s talk: first, that I had been unable to share anything about my songwriting (I had a complete set of Hangad CDs and songbooks, and a MacBook with videos of performances and film scores in my bag); and second, that the interview was short and not very substantial, and that there was much more meat in the 11-page single-spaced set of essays (the Berklee questionnaire had 17 essay questions with no word limit) that I had sent with my application last December.

Todd was very reassuring on both my concerns. First, he said that the audition really was for performance, not for writing, and that if I had applied for the Berklee Songwriting and Composition Scholarship (which I had last January, with a CD and scores of 15 of my songs), then for sure my work would be evaluated by the writing department. And second (in retrospect, it was rather stupid for me to ask, even humorously, “Do you guys actually read the applications?”) he said that the interview is used to validate what’s written in my application, and that the Board of Admissions does read the applications. (GP, who had worked in the admissions office as a student, later validated this.) Whew, I was able to breathe much easier after this talk with Todd.

It was noontime by then, and my last activity for the day was a tour of the campus. While waiting in the lobby for it to start, someone (either a faculty member or an administrator) asked the crowd, “So who’s flown the farthest to audition?” “Chicago,” called out one parent; “Florida,” said another. I, standing at the back of the crowd, raised my hand and said, “Manila.” Everyone turned toward me, beaming with what was either fascination or condescension, and said: “You win.”

The tour was quick: a student representative took us to a selection of the 12 buildings scattered around one of Boston’s busier intersections, that comprise the Berklee campus. Highlights were the performance center, the music library, the practice rooms, and the studios.

We were done around 1:30 PM. Before heading to the nearby mall to have lunch and meet up with Kyle, I stopped again at the Berklee bookshop. The day before, I had been struggling with the decision whether or not to buy a Berklee College of Music collegiate sweatshirt, which I had seen online and drooled over weeks before. Apart from there being no fitting room, or even a mirror at the store; and the Philippines really not being a sweatshirt kind of country; I also realized that, as excited as I had been for the audition and interview these past weeks—climaxing in my previous night’s sleeplessness—now the real excitement began. I had put my heart and soul into my application and audition—the eleven pages of essays, my trips to Ateneo for my grades, the portfolio for the songwriting scholarship, my audition piece, flying halfway around the world to be im Boston, and pouring my whole self into the audition itself—and now, all I could do was wait, and hope.

I walked out of the store, deciding I would get that sweatshirt in the Fall. For now, my fingers are crossed for March 31.