Waiting to Hear

Sometimes my parents can be so embarrassing! I'm sorry. I'm ahead of myself. Let's start earlier.

For the past 6 1/2 months, I've been working on this piano audition for a camp at St. Olaf. You see I have to send in a 10 minute long recording of two pieces of contrasting styles. I learned three, but the time was good.

Anyway, it's been killer. I wrote a post earlier about how my hands hurt so much from all the practice, and it didn't let up. Finally, though, I got to record my audition tape. So here's basically how my first official day of spring break went:

Monday, March 16

7 am: Wake up, shower, eat breakfast. This was hard because I had already gotten into my spring break sleeping late mode, and Philip told me I had to get up extra early so I could practice a lot beforehand.

8 am: Practice piano in the Nicholson Center. I had to warm up my hands. Let me tell you, Handel at 8 'o clock in the morning is NOT pretty.

9 am: Philip (my piano teacher) shows up and we start getting ready to record. Ms. Wantock, my band teacher, was there, and super helpful. She did the actual recording stuff with her computer and one of the microphones they use for concert recordings.

9:20 am: 4 takes of Debussy's "Girl With The Flaxen Hair". It went pretty well. I was really nervous at first, but after I got my first usable take, I relaxed a little and played pretty well.

9:35 am: 3 takes of Schumann's "Traümerei". After I was done, Philip told me that I'd played it just like Horowitz played it. For those of you who don't know (which I assume is all of you), Horowitz' recording of "Traümerei" is considered to be the best in the world. I'm sure I didn't play it that well, but I've been working on those two sheets of music since September. It better be pretty damn beautiful.

9:50 am: 3 takes of Handel's "Harmonious Blacksmith Variations", Theme, Variation 1, and Variation 2. The variations are my longest and hardest piece (that's what she said. It had to be done :]). I couldn't possibly play them all together well enough for the recording, so we did them in parts. The first part I did was the easiest. I made one glaring mistake, but otherwise it turned out pretty good.

10:15 am: 4 takes of Variations 3 and 4. This is the part of the piece that hurts my hands. I have to play these fast triplets really clearly. In order to do well, I had to practice each measure individually over and over again, then play them all in reverse order. Every Day. Again, I worked hard on this part, so it better have been good.

10:35 am: 2 takes of Variation 5. This variation was the fastest piece of music I have ever had to play. It took months to learn how to move my fingers fast enough to play it clearly. Now I had never played it without a mistake until the day of the recording. In fact, I had never played it without a mistake until the first take of the recording. I don't know what happened, but I sat down at the bench, and nailed it. Perfect, didn't miss a note, clear, even, and artistic. I played it so well, you can hear my mom make a grunt of incredulity on the recording. We tried one more time for a good take, but it didn't compare to the first one.

10:45- 12n: Post-production. This is where we listen to all the takes and decide which one is best, and what order we want to put them in on the cd. I am not lying. This took over an hour. I was sitting there thinking, I'm done playing, and I'm still here. Will it ever end?? Post-production is a job for the perfectionists. My piano teacher literally listened to each piece twice, some three times back to back, just to decide which I should use to give a good first impression.

12n: Walk out of school a free girl, kind of sad, and go to Panera :)

Anyway, back to my story (and, subsequently, the title of the post), the recording turned out pretty nice. And why shouldn't it have? This recording was literally the hardest I have worked on anything before in my life. It turned out so nice, in fact, that my parents have made copies. They're handing them out to whomever they see. My mom has listened to it every day this week. And she makes me listen to it, too. But she doesn't realize that while she hears music and her daughter playing, all I hear is what I could have done better. I don't like my sound quality in one, I wasn't even enough in another. It's driving me nuts, and it's so embarrassing hearing them talk about it!

The title of this post is Waiting to Hear because we sent in the audition. They're supposed to email me with my acceptance or rejection, or whatever. And I'm so excited and nervous. I'm checking my email every five minutes.

Okay. I'm all written out now. I will say one more thing. IF I DON'T GET INTO THIS CAMP I'LL BE FURIOUS! I WORKED TOO HARD TO BE REJECTED.