All I see when I walk into the gym is instruments and people everywhere. There is a group of saxophones tuning their horns in the balcony seating. A trombone player is practicing his solo piece, then abruptly leaves, presumably for his audition. A contrabass clarinet is struggling to get onto her seat to practice. A group of tuba players is sitting in the middle of the gym in a circle playing random songs that they memorized. There are schools everywhere, and all the schools had their groups of students sitting around talking or playing with their phones. There are the few brave souls that played games like ninja in the gym as they waited for their peers to finish their auditions. The percussionist lined all the walls with their instruments: marimbas, xylophones, timpanis, snare drums, bass drums, and many more kinds of drums that I didn’t recognize. It was a packed room, so finding a place to practice and put all your stuff was like the Oklahoma land rush.
After wandering around for awhile I found a place over in the corner of the gym where I could put my stuff and practice for my audition. I finally sit down and get my instrument out to practice. I start to warm up, and I periodically check the time to make sure I am not late to my audition. I start to do some more work on my chromatic scale, to get ready for my audition and make sure that I don’t overexert my embouchure. I work some more on my solo and check the time again and realize that the time for practicing is coming to an end. I have to head to my audition and make sure I am not late.
I head off towards the audition room and it is a long, arduous trip over there. It is across the whole school and I have to fight the constant flow of people moving around in the hallways heading to and from auditions. It’s like trying to walk through the freshman hallway during a passing period, except with an instrument. There is a constant flurry of sound coming from all the rooms with all the solos, chromatic scales, and major scales being played. I feel the nervousness start to set in. My palms start to get sweaty, I feel my heart start to pump faster, and the butterflies start to fly around in my stomach. I start to convince myself that I can do this, but it doesn’t make the feeling go away.
I finally arrive at the room and check the scale one more time to make sure that it hasn’t changed from the Gb scale. I have a short wait time, the person before me is just finishing up their major scale. They finish and it is time for my audition. I walk into the room and look around. I see a white piece of paper strung up to hide me from the judges. I look at the piece of paper that tells me the order of music I am to play today. I have to start with my chromatic scale, then my solo, the scale of the day and finally the sight reading.
I start my chromatic scale and I effortlessly go through it, until I get distracted by the room monitor who walks by outside the door, and miss one of my notes. I feel frustrated for messing up, but I keep on going, if I stopped, then I would lose more points than if I missed a note. I finish my chromatic scale and then move straight into my solo piece. I start the solo and make sure to turn away from the window on the door to not get distracted this time. Everything in my solo goes well and I start my scale of the day. They picked a difficult scale, the Gb scale, with lots of weird fingerings, but I make sure that I do well with it. Finally, I have to do the dreaded sight reading. I look at the paper and the sight reading isn’t that difficult. It has three flats in the key signature and three-four time. The notes aren't that difficult, but the rhythms are syncopated. I check through the music one more time and then I start to play. I feel lost during the random song, but try to keep the same tempo the whole time. I finish the sight reading and I am finally done with my audition.
I walk out of the room and work my way back to the gym. I think about my audition the whole way back and don’t realize that I’m back in the gym until the sudden rush of noise around me and almost run into a group of students. I then go back to my cozy little corner of the gym and put my stuff away and await the results. The wait for my results feels even longer than a road trip to my grandparents’ house in Nebraska.
The results finally arrive over an hour later. They are posted down the hallway from the gym. There seems like there are hundreds of papers on the wall before I finally find my name on one of the papers. I grimly look at the paper and prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. I look everywhere on the paper, other than my results. I see the kid after I didn’t make the cut, and the kid before that was finishing up made it into the band. I finally take the leap and look at my results. I slowly look across and see that I made the band and I feel a sudden relief in my stomach leave. I feel the sudden rush of joy through my body and feel great about all the work I put into this audition. It made me think of a great work motto, “YOGOWYPI. You only get out what you put in.” That’s how everything in life should be.