A Common Problem

    A little while back, I went to my first District Chorus audition.  It meant a lot to me, because I have never been able or permitted to audition beforehand due to the discriminating tastes for voice possessed by some persons with control over the matter.  I obtained the music for the audition about four weeks before the audition date and immediately began to study, practice, and improve.  My first measure was to wake up a half an hour earlier each school morning in order to have time to practice.  By the end of the week, I had lost two and a half hours of sleep, which I discerned was innocuous for a 16-year-old such as myself.  I spent each Saturday with my voice teacher fastidiously practicing it, except for the second week, on which day my attendance at a wedding was compulsory.  The next week, I made up for the time with my voice teacher by spending twice the amount of time as a normal lesson for which her time schedule allowed.  I also worked with my school choral director.  I visited her by leaving home early in order to arrive at school.  We practiced in the mornings of the second week until she punctiliously decided that it would be much fairer to host, instead, one weekly practice for the third and fourth week before the audition for every person who desired to practice.  Practicing with her was not compulsory, and in class none that were participating could practice; all of us essentially had to practice on our own devices and will.  I found few who actually were attending the practices they scheduled, and I found her pleading for people to attend these practices so she may check on their progress with the music quite portentous.  I worked assiduously on each provision for improvement; I was never cavalier in regard to advice from my more knowledgeable teacher.  
    However, the advice she provided me regarded diminutive aspects of singing, which I learned later were hardly necessary for the audition, and my expectations of myself rose superfluously.  I would experience capricious bouts of frustration at some of the most diminutive weaknesses.  For example, if I were to notice a tendency to create a dark tone for bright piece, a slight deviation from the correct pitch, seemingly unwarranted but boiling rancor for the difficult phrasing, and any struggle to have enough air despite my solid breathing technique might send me into a mercurial, violent state of mind in which I yelled cacophonously and slammed my fists on inanimate objects.  The yelling, I quickly learned, was quite pernicious to my vocal chords.  I additionally learned that frustration is an emotion I do not handle well.  
    With my typical bass voice, I learned many things regarding music.  The best music is often not vocally challenging although this matter is contentious.  Classical composers, such as Mozart, and modern composers, such as Stephen Sondheim and Eric Whitacre, are alike in their truculence toward bass voices, giving them few real opportunities for success.  It should be known to all that “baritone” and “bass” are not synonymous, for it is nearly impossible for any typical bass to sing for the Phantom in the musical Phantom of the Opera, but a baritone does have that range.  Words that contend that lowering the key of a classic piece of music automatically makes the performance insipid or conveys a tacit indication that the vocalist is some dilettante are a testament to the speaker’s own superciliousness and nothing more.
    The audition day eventually realized itself on a glamorously shining but bleak and dry Saturday in January of 2009.  I asked my grandfather to wake me at the regular school morning time in order to have extra time to practice and psych myself for the occasion.  My alacrity and confidence that morning, I felt, were commensurate with Yuri Gagarin’s the morning of his first space flight.  I knew I would do well, for I was reassured by everyone who heard me, and those who deprecated my singing I dismissed with little acrimony, for I was quite sanguine.  After I arrived at about nine, I sang a couple times in the morning in order to check myself, and I was doing as well as I ever would.  I spent the rest of my morning working on some school work in advance, for most of it was done.  I arrived quite early to the spot designated for everyone, who was going, to congregate while waiting for the bus to arrive.  I realized soon afterward my voice teacher had prescribed some lemon juice in water to remedy my issues with mucous.  My incorrigible habit of forgetting novel but paramount advice had struck me again.  When I sing notes toward the bottom of my range, the sound can be grossly affected by residual mucous which is cleared by slightly acidic water.  Fellow singers arrived shortly after me, and we were festively anxious to head to auditions.  I made an impression on my fellow audition attendees by singing a rap song, which was uncommon for me at the time, about McDonalds.  I brought money in case I would need it for lunch, but this was a blatantly misconceived idea, for most people going brought mounds of food.
    We left on our merry way an hour later than expected, for the bus services were dilatory in sending us our designated bus.  The bus came at about 11.  I listened to music on the bus ride to the audition venue, building myself up for a glorious audition with the inspirational song “This Is the Moment” which I have found on many occasions to jinx me.  
    Our arrival at the audition-hosting school was somewhat ignominious, for these gatherings usually feature a single group that arrives late, and our school was the one this time.  It was required of all of us there to sign into a booklet with all the names of the participants in the audition for each school.  To the majority of my group’s astonishment, my name was not present in this booklet, and I thus had no audition number.  I expressed the issue and concern immediately to my director, and she said she would get it sorted out.  I had little doubt in her, for she seemed less than worried and was hasty in setting out to find some people in charge.  
    We participants were directed to the nearby auditorium where a copious number of high school members from the region were stationed.  It was quite spacious, and its walls were lined with vertically prodigious rectangular protrusions, which had something to do with facilitating the sound, covered with a talc-shaded material similar in texture to new but cheap carpet.  All the walls in the school were painted a khaki color I speculate to provide a sense of warmth that was absent in plain white.  The linoleum floors that paved the hallways and classrooms of the building were constituted by lunar white squares surrounded by licorice ones with specks of sea green material scattered within.  One would think the program would get underway soon once the last school had arrived, but this was not the case.  I was fixated on my predicament and responded to the beguilements of gregarious others with terse remarks.  Being abstemious from my own garrulity, I feigned airs of wisdom by observing the multitude of adolescents in the auditorium, separating myself from their vacuousness.  I was surprised that within half an hour my choral director had not arrived in the auditorium.  As I began hoping for her efforts to go more expeditiously, the orchestrators of this event entered the auditorium.  All participants in the auditorium were directed to sit with their corresponding voice parts.  I placed myself in the bass 2 section, so I sat in the back of the auditorium’s right wing.  All participants were then directed to fill out a distributed card in order to tell who we were and whether we wished to participate.  I filled it out completely once I borrowed a stranger’s pencil, but I was concerned as to whether I should fill out anything since I might not be able to audition.  We were then briefed on the audition process, of which most were already aware but with which I was hardly familiar.  The session concluded with questions from the participants.  Mine, regarding the sign-in issue, was the final one they addressed.  The director that answered it had been made aware of my situation apparently, but he failed to give me a definite response other than the rules were being checked on how the matter was supposed to be resolved.
    I went to the bathroom because I had been drinking too much water in my anxiety, and I could no longer tolerate the auditorium’s aridity from activity.  The lavatory featured pallid tile on the walls and a floor with a color scheme as monochrome as a typical mature husky.  I stared at my reflection in the mirror and tried not to psych myself out.  My sparse, blond hair was a sharp genetic contrast to my mahogany eyes which I made a steely grey with my blue contacts.  I kept a nice form, reasonably thin although I am told that I could get more room for my diaphragm to expand if I were stouter.  I was 4’ 3”, but I do not have a Napoleon complex.  I take this in stride.  I wore sable aviator glasses without their lenses to call attention to my eyes, but the nerdy brightness of voice that typically accompanies individuals who wear them was absent in my voice, for it was dark ebony just like the leather pants I love to wear to special occasions like this.
    We did not proceed to our appropriate audition areas immediately afterward.  As most of the participants waited tiredly, I sat anxiously.  Suddenly, one of the directors, accompanied by my choral director, was beckoning me over to him.
    My choral director uttered three words, and my boat was sunk, “Bad news, Derek.”  The other director stated that my registration for the audition had been lost to something within the registration process.  He stated that, in order to prevent any random person from entering the participants’ ranks, measures were established, so that no one could audition without being registered.  He got to the bottom line a little early by saying that I needed to try out on a different voice part in the music.  I could, however, audition under the name of someone from my school who could not attend the event due to misdemeanors he had garnered.  I asked him to repeat what he had said out of confusion as well as disbelief.  By his tone I thought in asking for him to repeat himself I may have unwittingly tested his patience, but it soon became clear that his patience was inexorable.  At the conclusion of his elucidating restatement, I asked which part I had to sing, and my choral director replied that I would be singing tenor 2.  In class she preferred singers with this voice part.  In order to give a proper audition, I would have to learn in thirty minutes the notes to an uncomfortable and altogether different sequence of notes than I had learned to sing properly for the past month.  They attempted to mitigate my devastation by reassuring the fact that it was not my personal blunder and that I, at least, had the opportunity to audition.  They did not need to assure me, for I was sure I was grateful, but my expression was apparently more plaintive.
    Alas, the span of opportunity to learn my new part was more transient than promised, for I could only hear the actual part twice from the other tenor 2 singer from my school before relocating to a room where we were required to remain tranquil.  I faced the ultimatum of learning my part solely by reading mute notes on a page; something that usually only college-level singers are expected to be capable of doing without tenuous results; or adamantly attempting to sing the wrong part in front of my judges as impressively as possible.  In my mind forfeiting can never be an option.  I decided it was no use attempting to learn the new part on such short notice.  The fellow people of the holding room were largely aloof to my plight.  They were recalcitrant and maintained an uproarious environment.  In all due candor, my fellow tenor found himself a friend in order to ignore my misery, and I entertained a geek.  He was quite persistent in trying to interact with me, but he was eventually defeated by reluctance to speak at all.  My reluctance was due to my acrimonious contempt for his ebullience, but I refrained from giving him any undue, scathing pejoratives.  He hardly deserved to anguish for something neither he nor I could control.  The people in the room diverted themselves with a game of hangman on a pallid whiteboard.  The progressing game’s base on the premise of the truncation of a life bore a morbid and portentous resemblance to the progressing truncation of my musical aspirations.
    I always had contempt for the practice of calling people by alphabetical order by their last names.  I had also had a deep-seated distrust of those who had last names starting at the beginning of the alphabet, for they always had the privilege of going first.  That is when everything is available at a gift shop on a school field trip, when everyone is actually paying attention at graduation, when everyone in the class is most impressionable toward one’s side of a debate, when a performer at a talent show can set the bar for the other performers, and when one can get speeches and auditions over with and move onward.  Even with my last name Riddleman, I had no idea when I would be called for my audition due to my circumstances of being added in at the last minute to the list of people auditioning, so I was somewhat relieved to be called to go and wait a few minutes in a corridor before entering the audition room.  The horrible anticipation of these few minutes was deleterious to my mindset.  I thought only of how relieved I would be to truncate my ignominy in attempting this audition with such inauspicious odds, and that I could easily rescind my audition rights and no more foul up the system in doing that than by auditioning in these circumstances in the first place.  I needed to make do with what I could, so I tried psyching myself up again before I was told to enter the audition room.
    I gave the best I could do in there with the circumstances, for I heard the fear in my trembling voice, but I felt it would have been a fairly decent bass 2 audition anyway.  The judges told me to wait outside, which was against directions I had already been given, so I told what I had been told to a mediator in the hallway.  I thought this might have been regarding the matter of my singing the wrong part for the audition.  After about ten minutes of beating myself up while waiting for a verdict on the matter, I found what I was told to be a purely incorrectly phrased direction, and that I should follow my original direction to head to the basement cafeteria.  Bass is the lowest voice part; thus our auditions were in the basement, so the journey there was no arduous gauntlet to negotiate.  
    I did not receive the message that we were not going to have a real lunch, but in the cafeteria was a satisfactorily prodigious aggregation of inexpensive junk food a teenager, made ravenous from temporary loathing and anxiety, could possibly desire.  I was apparently the first one to alacritously capitalize on it, for my purchase of about nine dollars’ worth of bottled water, candy bars, Skittles, and an eclectic selection of small bags of chips lacked parsimony and was received with dubious looks as to whether I could finish them.  I disproved them expeditiously.  A friend tried to console me by introducing me to a few strangers he thought I would like.  I did like them, but their attention spans were small, and the efficacy of my efforts to divert myself with focused conversation was waning in the wake of their copious, mercurial topics.
    I vacated the active area via a stairwell and sulked at the top of it, leaning against a concrete pillar that ran up through the entire stairwell.  After I had just enough entertainment glaring into the backs of people exiting the stairwell, an adult informed me I could not simply loiter in the area despite there being no harm coming from it.  He was obviously oblivious to my despondency.  Although most of my courage remained in the audition room, I was recalcitrant enough to relocate my loitering to the next corridor, nearly completely void of people for its lack of doors and heaters.  I found gazing out the windows to be fun enough to worth bearing the chilliness of the hallway.
    I grew tired of this diversion and moved to the auditorium where I found most of my companions still sanguine.  A senior among our group, however, was dejected because she had been signed up for the wrong voice part; she was an alto 1 who was supposed to sing alto 2.  My self-pity channeled itself to her, for she had moved to our school and would not get a second chance next year.  I loathed myself for being so sorry for participating when I realized that she was taking her defeat much better than I could, and she perspicaciously noticed this and reassured me that there was not as dramatic a difference in her voice parts as mine was, but I remained ashamed.  I isolated myself once again the auditorium and began listening to the most cathartic, intense songs in my digital music library: from the most euphoric music moving on to the most ardent music and then going to the cold pole of the most plaintive music.  One time a recording I had used to practice for the audition played, and I nearly lost my grip, but I quickly moved to a different song.  I noticed a girl wearing a shirt that promoted the anime Black Butler, and I persuaded her to talk some about it, but the discussion was killed after a while when she said she had not watched most of it yet.
    As auditions began to conclude, we were instructed to turn in our music, and I could not have been happier to part with it.  It was a beautiful piece, “I Carry Your Heart with Me,” but it would still connote negatively in my mind.  I paced around the auditorium, paced in a lobby area just outside the auditorium, and paced in and out of the bathroom until we left about an hour after our music was collected.  We were the last school to arrive and to leave.
    On the bus ride back to the school, we stopped at a Sheetz store where most of our group had supper.  I did not feel particularly hungry despite the famishment that usually accompanies lassitude after my horrible experience and disgustingly unhealthful lunch, so I purchased an exorbitant “Neuro” drink that promised to ameliorate my spirits with its carbonation and enigmatic additives.  My music director seemed concerned for the fact I did not eat anything, but I dismissed her concerns with a candid account of my lunch.  She verbally noted my disappointment, warranted by my diligent work, with lugubriousness and promised me that she would remember my assiduousness and my overall capacity to improve.  I took this with a grain of salt and asked for the end of the conversation in order to avoid dwelling upon this inauspicious matter.  My laments were epitomized with the song “O Fortuna” as we arrived home.  This song eventually turned out to be the choice song for the All-State Chorus festival.
    There was a beautiful sunset as I was driven home, but I broke precedent by not taking a picture of it; I absolutely had no desire to remember the day as being in any way spectacular.  The next day was replete with free time, since I had finished my homework, so I spent some of it ruminating on what I could learn from the experience, but I mostly played video games in a vain attempt to purge my mind of it.  Not desiring the verdict, I arrived in school the next day and did not see my music director early and waited instead until I reached my class period for chorus.  I was received there with sunny, ebullient smiles, and my remorse sublimed like dry ice.  I had succeeded in singing my part so well for the audition that I was given a place among the bass 2s anyway, and I scored so well that, even if I were judged as a tenor 2, I would have still succeeded.  The other hopeful did exceedingly well although there were rumors that scores for that particular voice part were accidentally shuffled because some immaculate singers did not make it.  Some speculated that something clandestine was going on with those from my school since we were the only ones who had issues, but this does not matter to me.  Those, who were duped, had to make do with what they had.