Preparing for a
conservatoire audition.

Choose the piece that suits your voice now. It will serve you better than the impressive one that is supposed to be ready by audition day. Panels hear hundreds of ambitious choices sung at the edge of someone’s ability. A well-chosen programme sung freely is rarer, and it is the one they remember.

Read the requirements exactly: languages, periods, memorisation, timings, and anything that is not singing. Several UK conservatoires ask a singer for a spoken piece as well: the RNCM for a short passage of prose or poetry in English, Guildhall for a short monologue, poem or prose from memory. Recorded rounds often add a spoken introduction on top of that. Meet every one of them. Then build contrast into what is left. Choose different languages, different tempi, different characters, so that each piece shows something the others cannot.

Before either of those, remember that at seventeen the instrument may still be finishing. Studies of tissue from donated larynges find all three layers of the vocal fold present by about seven, but not clearly told apart by fibre composition until about thirteen; reviews of that work put the end of the fold’s development somewhere between twelve and seventeen. Where any one singer sits in that range, nobody can tell you from the outside. So the thing you are auditioning with may not be physically finished. What follows from that is teaching judgement rather than proven fact. It is worth saying which is which. No study has tested whether heavy repertoire damages a young voice; that experiment has not been done. What exists is next door to it. Surveys of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds find that the activities carrying heavy vocal demand (frequent singing, musical theatre) go with more reported voice problems. That tells you something about how much and how hard, and nothing about which pieces. The rest is the consistent experience of teachers. Heavy dramatic writing, long stretches sung high in the voice, and anything whose reputation is that it needs a big voice tend to be sung with strain at this age. And panels hear strain. Reaching past the standard early-audition repertoire is not rewarded for its ambition.

Two questions you can answer yourself, without a teacher in the room. Can you sing it twice through on an ordinary day (not your best day) without pushing? And does your opening need a good day? A panel may hear very little of a piece, but the opening is the part it always hears, and that opening has to survive a cold room, an unfamiliar piano and a body full of adrenaline. Judge that from how the piece behaves at the start of a normal lesson, once you are gently warmed up, rather than by testing it unwarmed again and again. (Teachers commonly warn that singing unwarmed is harmful. We could not find a study showing that it injures anyone; that part is convention rather than a demonstrated risk. What has been measured is the other side of it: a short warm-up leaves singers finding the voice easier, which is reason enough to do one, and the evidence section sets out how short. The reason to judge a piece warmed up is simpler still. A piece you are hammering at the edge of your range, unwarmed and anxious, tells you less than the same piece sung normally.)

Know every word you sing: not the gist, the words. A panel can tell within a phrase whether the language has been understood or learnt as sound.

And nothing you sing should hurt. Singing takes effort; it does not hurt. If it hurts, stop and say so: to your teacher, to your parents, and to a doctor if it does not settle. It is never something to push through.

Why “what you can sing today” is strategy, not modesty. This is Andreas’s own view, formed preparing singers for these rooms. In his view, a panel is deciding whether to teach you for several years, so it sorts what it hears into two piles. A small, unshowy voice that is free, in tune and musical is a teaching project, and a welcome one. A large, pressed, manufactured sound built to impress is a repair job, and everyone behind the table knows how long those take. Singers work hardest at being impressive, when audible ease is the thing being counted. In his experience, pressed singing is usually something a singer picked up rather than something they are, and it comes undone in lessons. One caution goes with that. Pressing is also how a voice compensates for something physical (a swelling, an infection, reflux), so if the effort will not come out in lessons, or the voice is hoarse with it, that is a doctor’s question and not a technique one. That is one more reason to audition with the freest thing you have rather than the biggest.

Whether a particular piece suits your voice is the question on this page that needs ears in the room, and if you would like it judged on the actual voice you can ask about a consultation.

Panels do not publish their mark sheets. Nobody outside the room can tell you what is on them. What follows is how these rooms have been described to Andreas by the singers he has prepared, and how he found them in his own auditions. It is offered as that, and not as an account of anyone’s scoring.

They are not looking for a finished artist. A conservatoire exists to finish you. They appear to be listening for potential, and that appears to mean three things. A healthy, free instrument with nothing forced about it. Secure musicianship: rhythm, tuning, and phrasing that means something. And some sign that you understand what you are singing about.

How you work seems to count too: the way you recover from a slip, the way you take the room, whether you listen to the pianist. None of that is perfectionism. All of it is evidence that you can be taught.

And they do say yes to seventeen-year-olds. Not to finished ones, but to singers who sound easy, musical and teachable. Most young singers are closer to that description than they think.

Beauty of tone at seventeen counts for less than you would expect, because it is precisely the thing a conservatoire expects to change. On Andreas’s reading of these rooms, many candidates spend a year on the quality least likely to decide the audition.

The people behind the table want you to succeed. Nobody gives up a day to hear singers fail.

Students ask some version of that question most weeks: usually a fortnight before the audition, and usually at the end of a lesson, when it costs least to ask. Here are the honest answers, with what is actually known underneath them. Every study named is listed at the foot of this section, and this site publishes how its claims are checked.

“I get so nervous I think something is wrong with me.”

Nothing is wrong with you. Nerves are not evidence that you have chosen the wrong life. They are what a room full of people who chose it report: in a review of 43 studies, about a third of musicians described performance anxiety as a severe problem, and among 74 pupils aged 15 to 19 at a German specialist music school, about a third said it distinctly got in their way.

“Do they really listen, or do they decide by looking?”

They do listen, as far as the one experiment closest to your situation tested it. Where the gap in standard was a real one, listeners judged it most accurately with sound, at 68.4% against a 50% chance level, and on silent video they were at chance.

So do not hide. Across 15 studies, seeing a performer raised ratings of liking, expressiveness and overall quality by about half a standard deviation compared with hearing alone. Those studies compared watching with listening, and none measured what a visible tremor costs, so nobody can tell you that. What they do suggest is that being in the room is not a tax on the singing. Sing to the panel rather than past them.

The experiments behind this

That experiment set competition winners against performers eliminated in the first round, which is the gap a first round exists to sort out. On silent video the same listeners scored 45.2%, which is chance.

“How do I stop being frightened?”

You probably will not, and you may not need to. Before you go in, say out loud that you are excited. What moved in the experiment behind the idea was how excited the students said they felt; their fear and their heart rate did not shift at all. Pooled across 35 randomised trials covering 5,638 people, the effect on performance is small, and publication bias roughly halves it, though it stays statistically significant. Its authors call these techniques no silver bullet, but cheap enough to be worth trying.

That is about the right weight for it. Fear is not the thing you need to remove.

The experiment and the meta-analysis

In the experiment behind the idea, students singing to a scoring game reached 80.5% after saying it, against 69.3%. The pooled effect on performance is 0.23, and 0.34 on tasks that involve performing in public, which is your case. Publication bias takes the overall figure to 0.14.

“Have I left it too late?”

For the words, start now. For the notes, do the work you were going to do anyway. That learning spread over weeks beats the same hours crammed is one of psychology’s best-established findings. Almost all of that, though, concerns verbal memory. That is your text and your translation, and it is good news for exactly the part most likely to desert you under lights; where the notes are concerned, spacing has shown no clear benefit. The longer you need to hold something, the longer the gaps should be. An audition in April is not a test on Friday.

The studies behind this

The spacing effect in verbal recall rests on 317 experiments. In a study of mostly second-year music majors, spacing strongly improved recall of a song’s words three weeks later, and showed no clear benefit for the notes.

“How long should I warm up on the day?”

Less than you think. Measured on straw work against the clock, the best of it falls at three to five minutes in women and five to seven in men. By seven minutes in the women and ten in the men it had turned the other way, with more effort and more throat discomfort. A second study, in nine classical performance majors, found five to ten minutes the easiest, so the two do not agree at the edges. Either way, more is not more. Warm up, and then stop; singers reliably report feeling better for it, which on the day is reason enough.

The two warm-up studies

The first study measured sixty-nine adults at one, three, five, seven and ten minutes. In the second, after five and ten minutes the women could reach a higher top note.

“What about water, and sleep?”

Take the water. A dry mouth is miserable, though not for the reason usually given, since swallowed water goes down the oesophagus rather than over your folds. The research on being hydrated leans towards benefit without reaching significance: a reason to shrug rather than to worry.

Protect the sleep, for plainer reasons than the ones usually offered. The night will not practise for you: the evidence that sleep consolidates motor learning does not survive a careful accounting of how it was measured. Sleep because a long, strange, nervous day costs you attention, mood, and the ability to recover from a slip in the middle of a phrase. That much is not in dispute.

The sleep evidence in detail

The evidence that sleep consolidates motor learning disappears once four measurement confounds are accounted for, across 34 studies and 1,296 people.

Two more things, and what is not here. At seventeen the vocal fold may still be assembling its layered structure; reviews put the end of that development somewhere between twelve and seventeen. Some of what you cannot do yet is not a fault; it is a date. And the single most useful preparation Andreas knows, which is singing the whole programme to strangers before the day, has been studied in sport and in police training, never in singers. It is a teacher’s judgement, not a finding. Whether panels weigh eyes against ears is genuinely unresolved, nobody has studied a conservatoire panel, and nobody has compared months of steady work with an intense final fortnight. None of this is medical advice, and none of it should displace the person who hears you every week.

The papers this page refers to

• Ishii, K., Akita, M., Yamashita, K., & Hirose, H. (2000). Age-related development of the arrangement of connective tissue fibers in the lamina propria of the human vocal fold. Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, 109(11), 1055–1064. doi:10.1177/000348940010901112
• Hartnick, C. J., Rehbar, R., & Prasad, V. (2005). Development and maturation of the pediatric human vocal fold lamina propria. The Laryngoscope, 115(1), 4–15. doi:10.1097/01.mlg.0000150685.54893.e9
• Fujiki, R. B., Venkatraman, A., & Heller Murray, E. S. (2025). The pediatric vocal mechanism: structure and function. Journal of Voice. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2025.03.025
• Tsay, C-J. (2013). Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance. PNAS, 110(36), 14580–14585. doi:10.1073/pnas.1221454110
• Tsay, C-J. (2014). The vision heuristic: judging music ensembles by sight alone. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 124(1), 24–33. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.10.003
• Mehr, S. A., Scannell, D. A., & Winner, E. (2018). Sight-over-sound judgments of music performances are replicable effects with limited interpretability. PLOS ONE, 13(9), e0202075. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202075
• Wilbiks, J. M. P., & Yi, S. M. (2022). Musical novices are unable to judge musical quality from brief video clips: a failed replication of Tsay (2014). Vision, 6(4), 65. doi:10.3390/vision6040065
• Vogt, K., Gutzmann, G., & Kopiez, R. (2026). When eyes outvote ears: revisiting Tsay’s sight-over-sound effect in music performance evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1767475. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1767475
• Platz, F., & Kopiez, R. (2012). When the eye listens: A meta-analysis of how audio-visual presentation enhances the appreciation of music performance. Music Perception, 30(1), 71–83. doi:10.1525/mp.2012.30.1.71
• Fernholz, I., et al. (2019). Performance anxiety in professional musicians: a systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 49(14), 2287–2306. doi:10.1017/S0033291719001910
• Fehm, L., & Schmidt, K. (2006). Performance anxiety in gifted adolescent musicians. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 20(1), 98–109. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2004.11.011
• Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. doi:10.1037/a0035325
• Poynter, M., & Smith Pasqualini, M. (2025). Getting excited about public speaking: a replication. Psychology of Language and Communication, 29(1), 254–265. doi:10.58734/plc-2025-0011
• Bosshard, M., & Gomez, P. (2024). Effectiveness of stress arousal reappraisal and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions on task performance outcomes: a meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 14(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-58408-w
• Pozzali, I., Pizzorni, N., Ruggeri, A., Schindler, A., & Dal Farra, F. (2024). Effectiveness of semi-occluded vocal tract exercises (SOVTEs) in patients with dysphonia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Voice, 38(1), 245.e17–245.e35. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2021.06.009
• Portillo, M. P., Rojas, S., Guzman, M., & Quezada, C. (2018). Comparison of effects produced by physiological versus traditional vocal warm-up in contemporary commercial music singers. Journal of Voice, 32(2), 200–208. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2017.03.022
• Tetik-Hacıtahiroğlu, K., & Düzenli-Öztürk, S. (2025). Evaluation of immediate effects of straw phonation exercise and determination of the ideal performance duration. Journal of Voice, 39(6), 1697.e11–1697.e22. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2023.06.005
• Ragsdale, F. W., et al. (2022). Quantifying subjective and objective measures of singing after different warm-up durations. Journal of Voice, 36(5), 661–667. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2020.08.005
• Leydon, C., Wroblewski, M., Eichorn, N., & Sivasankar, M. (2010). A meta-analysis of outcomes of hydration intervention on phonation threshold pressure. Journal of Voice, 24(6), 637–643. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2009.06.001
• Verdolini, K., Titze, I. R., & Fennell, A. (1994). Dependence of phonatory effort on hydration level. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 37(5), 1001–1007. doi:10.1044/jshr.3705.1001
• Pan, S. C., & Rickard, T. C. (2015). Sleep and motor learning: is there room for consolidation? Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 812–834. doi:10.1037/bul0000009
• Simmons, A. L., & Duke, R. A. (2006). Effects of sleep on performance of a keyboard melody. Journal of Research in Music Education, 54(3), 257–269. doi:10.1177/002242940605400308
• Icht, M., Zukerman, G., Hershkovich, S., et al. (2020). The “morning voice”: the effect of 24 hours of sleep deprivation on vocal parameters of young adults. Journal of Voice, 34(3), 489.e1–489.e9. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2018.11.010
• Bagnall, A. D., Dorrian, J., & Fletcher, A. (2011). Some vocal consequences of sleep deprivation and the possibility of fatigue proofing the voice with Voicecraft voice training. Journal of Voice, 25(4), 447–461. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2010.10.020
• Cepeda, N. J., et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
• Donovan, J. J., & Radosevich, D. J. (1999). A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(5), 795–805. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.84.5.795
• Katz, J. J., Ando, M., & Wiseheart, M. (2021). Optimizing song retention through the spacing effect. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 6, 79. doi:10.1186/s41235-021-00345-7
• Wiseheart, M., D’Souza, A. A., & Chae, J. (2017). Lack of spacing effects during piano learning. PLOS ONE, 12(8), e0182986. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0182986

A shape to argue with, not a standard to fail. Start wherever you are. If your date is closer than this assumes, do not squeeze the plan. Do the last stages properly instead. One warning before you use it: the application deadline is the single item here you cannot count backwards to. It is a fixed date set by the system, and it usually falls much earlier than the arithmetic suggests. UK conservatoire music courses close on 1 October through UCAS Conservatoires, with auditions from November onwards. German and Austrian Hochschulen take applications through late winter and spring for entrance exams in May and June. US prescreening recordings are generally due in November or December for auditions the following February or March. Find the three or four dates that actually apply to you, put them on a single sheet first, and hang everything else off them.

1. 12 monthsChoose the schools, and start a second, non-conservatoire application alongside them. Read the requirements, not the prospectuses. The requirements decide the repertoire.
2. 9 monthsProgramme chosen and, where the requirements allow, fixed. Buy the scores.
3. 6 monthsEverything memorised and sung in sequence. Badly is fine; in sequence is not optional.
4. 4 monthsThe recorded round, where a school asks for one. Personal statement, transcripts, passport. Check them against the fixed deadlines above rather than against your audition date.
5. 3 monthsFirst mock in front of strangers; first run with a pianist who is not your teacher.
6. 8 weeksLast chance to change a piece, and only for schools that have not already heard you. Where you have sent a recording, what carries over is usually the list of requirements rather than the exact pieces: several schools allow a substitution if you ask, and at least one asks for the reverse, requiring that a live selection differ from what you sent. Read that school’s wording before you change anything.
7. 6 weeksTravel and accommodation booked, earlier for a long flight, since fares usually climb as the date approaches. Every deadline met.
8. 2 weeksNothing new. Maintenance, sleep, one full run every few days.
9. 1 weekThe day planned backwards from the slot. Clothes chosen, and worn once before the day.
10. 48 hoursSleep, not practice. Not because the night will rehearse for you, but because the day ahead will cost you attention.
11. The dayYour ordinary warm-up, kept short. Nothing you have not done before.

Between the milestones, these are the habits that do the most. Record one run-through every week or two, and listen to it once, critically, with a notebook. Then stop. Playing it again to check whether it was really that bad is not practice; it is worrying with headphones on. Arrange mock auditions too, in front of people who don’t usually hear you. It is the thing Andreas rates most highly on this page. As the evidence section says, it has been studied in sport and police training rather than in singers, so treat it as a teacher’s judgement rather than a proven result. Write your personal statement yourself, in your own voice. Name specific things you have done and want to learn, not superlatives.

If a school asks for a recording, find out which of two things it is, because they share a name. A pre-screening recording is a first cut: pass it and you are invited to sing in person. A video audition is the audition, and the decision is made on the file, with no live round afterwards. The RCM runs both, and uses your pre-screening video as your video audition if you cannot travel to the live one. Some schools ask for neither: the RNCM invites every applicant to a live audition and asks for a recording only from those who cannot travel to one. From here that distinction is money, not pedantry: for one school the recorded route replaces the flight, and for another it only buys you the right to take it. Read that school’s specification before you record anything. Follow it to the letter: how many pieces, in what order, whether you announce yourself to camera, one continuous take or several, format, deadline and time zone. The rest of this holds almost everywhere.

• One take per piece, unedited, picture and sound together. No splice between verses, no sound recorded separately, no reverb added afterwards. Most specifications forbid editing outright.
• Film from the front, landscape unless told otherwise. Put the camera around chest height, with your face and mouth clearly visible. Not a white shirt against a white wall.
• A real piano and a real pianist, if you can. A live accompanist is what most specifications prefer and what a panel is used to hearing. But this is one of the rules that genuinely differs by school: Trinity Laban says plainly that it accepts pre-recorded backing tracks and unaccompanied recordings, while other schools require live accompaniment outright. Read that school’s line on accompaniment before you book anyone, and if its specification is silent, write and ask before you record, not after.
• A room with some resonance, not much. A bathroom flatters and a church swallows: a generous acoustic hides the very thing being assessed.
• If the piano is louder than you, move the camera, not the pianist.
• A phone two metres away in a decent room beats an expensive microphone placed too close.
• Name the files exactly as asked, and announce yourself exactly as instructed.
• Record it three weeks before the deadline, at the hour of day you have found your voice does its best work. Upload portals fail on the last night, every year.

This section describes the competitive audition abroad: British conservatoires, German and Austrian Hochschulen, American schools. Entry to most Greek conservatoires does not work this way. Enrolment in singing is broadly open, and the audition, where there is one, places you rather than selects you. The competitive route in Greece is the university music departments, through the Panhellenic examinations, with their own music subjects and their own calendar.

Almost nothing about the audition itself is secret, and almost nobody is told. Details vary, and the school’s own instructions always win. But most first rounds run close to this.

1. You wait, and the schedule slips. Be ready to be called twenty minutes late, and ready to be called ten minutes early.
2. You meet the pianist, or you don’t. At several UK conservatoires a short rehearsal immediately before you sing is published policy: the Royal Academy allocates one, and Trinity Laban gives about ten minutes. At other schools your score reaches a staff pianist who first sees it as you walk in. And at some overseas venues the school provides no pianist at all. The RCM says outright that it does not at most of its Asian venues, and you bring your own. Find out which of the three you are getting, and prepare so the worst of them is survivable.
3. You are called in and asked your name. Say it slowly. A panel that has heard forty names today will not catch a Greek one at speed, and you say it once. Then take the two seconds of silence before anything begins. They belong to you, and most candidates give them away.
4. You are usually asked what you would like to start with. Have the answer ready. Choose the piece that is most reliable on an ordinary day, in a cold room, on an unfamiliar piano, with adrenaline running. Not the biggest one.
5. You sing, and they write while you sing. Heads down is note-taking, not a verdict.
6. They may stop you partway. They may ask for a second piece, or part of one, or none at all.
7. There may be a conversation. At some schools it is two or three courteous questions. At others, and UK conservatoires especially, it is a real interview, sometimes with a separate panel. Why this school, what you have been listening to, what you know you need to work on. Find out which you are getting, and have answers to those three either way.
8. There may be sight-singing, aural tests or scales, if the school said there would be. Read those instructions again the week before. They are the most commonly skipped part of the preparation.
9. You are thanked, and you go. Thank the pianist on the way out, out loud, looking at them.

Your slot covers all of that, not that much singing. Check what each school allots, and assume the singing is a fraction of it. You may well be heard on one piece, or part of one. So prepare so that any of them could be the one they hear. And “thank you, that’s lovely” is what panels say. It is courtesy, not a result; read nothing into it either way.

Something goes wrong in a great many auditions, including the ones that go well. You cannot control whether it happens. You can control what you do in the four bars afterwards.

You crack, or the note doesn’t come

Keep singing. One cracked note counts for very little next to what you do after it. That is Andreas’s experience of these rooms, not a reading of anyone’s mark sheet. Stopping, apologising, or letting the next phrase go small because you are still thinking about the note costs far more than the note did.

You forget the words

Do not stop. Sing the line on a vowel or a hum, and rejoin at the next phrase you know. The pianist will keep playing, and half the room will not be certain what happened.

The start is wrong: your entry, or the tempo

Stop cleanly, look up, and ask: “May I start again, please?” In Andreas’s experience of these rooms the answer is almost always yes. Nobody outside the room can promise it, but asking costs nothing you have not already spent. A restart is a far smaller thing than the start you would otherwise have to live with. Make the second start the one you meant.

The pianist plays it differently

Stay with them if you possibly can. If it cannot be saved, stop and say what you need in one sentence: “Could we take it from the top, a little slower?” Whatever the panel makes of it, the calm is mostly for you. It is what lets the next phrase come out normally.

You start to shake, or you cannot get a breath

You are in ordinary company; a great many singers in that building know the feeling. Take the time before the phrase, not in the middle of it. An extra second before you start costs little. A phrase begun without air costs you the phrase.

You cough, or the throat closes

Ask for water, and carry your own; it is on the bag list below. Water you swallow goes down the oesophagus rather than over your vocal folds; see the evidence section. Even so, being hydrated across the day does lean towards helping, a dry mouth is unpleasant, and the pause while you drink is worth as much as the water. Asking is entirely normal; assuming the room will have water for you is not always safe.

You are unwell on the day

Being below par is a judgement call. Being hoarse is not. Hoarseness is a sign that something in the voice is not working normally, and swollen, irritated folds are the commonest reason for it. Singing hard on folds in that state is the situation laryngologists warn about, because that is when the small blood vessels in them can bleed. So it is a doctor’s decision, not a brave one. Otherwise, whether to sing is for you, your teacher and your parents together, never alone in a corridor. Ask the school what happens if a candidate falls ill. Some publish an answer and some do not, and where they publish it, it is usually a version of the RCM’s: tell Admissions immediately, and they will try to find another slot but cannot guarantee one. So write the day you know, and if that day is the morning itself, write that morning. Immediately is what they ask for. Some will want a doctor’s note, so get one while you are being seen. If you do sing, say it once, briefly, before you start. Then sing without mentioning it again.

Most audition guides are written in cities with five conservatoires on the tram line. They leave out the part you will feel here. From Cyprus, every audition is a flight. So every audition is a date locked in months early, a fare that usually climbs as it approaches, and a night before. The airlines will carry a seventeen-year-old alone; in Andreas’s experience most families here send an adult anyway, and if you do, it is two of everything.

Two travel permissions are worth starting before anything else, because one of them decides whether you audition at all. For the United Kingdom you need an Electronic Travel Authorisation before you board, and each traveller needs their own, so a singer travelling with a parent means two. For the United States you need a full visitor visa: Cyprus is not in the Visa Waiver Programme, so a Cypriot passport cannot use ESTA, and the visa means an online form, a fee and an interview appointment at the embassy. Look up the current appointment wait the week you choose your schools, and count backwards from that, not from the audition date.

You are also likely applying into more than one system at once: the United Kingdom, Germany or Austria, the United States. And Greece, which works differently, as the note in “The day, in order” explains. Each has its own calendar and its own deadlines. Each has its own idea of what a first round is. Several ask for a recorded round before any of it. Put every one of those dates on a single sheet, in one place, early. The costly mistakes in an audition year are rarely the singing. They are two trips booked separately that could have been one, and a deadline that passes while you are preparing for a different country.

Find out, per school, what language the audition and the conversation afterwards are held in. In the UK and the US it will be English. In Germany and Austria it may be German or it may be English for an international candidate, and the schools do not generally publish which, so ask rather than assume either way. The language of the exam and the language you need in order to enrol are two separate questions: many Hochschulen want a German-language certificate for admission or shortly after it, and the English-speaking schools have the mirror image of that, the RCM asking non-UK nationals for CEFR B2, about IELTS 5.5, with the proof due before the course starts rather than before the audition. Check all of it early, because a language qualification takes months, not weeks. Whichever language it is, rehearse out loud the handful of sentences you will actually need: what you are starting with, asking to begin again, asking for a tempo, saying thank you. The day of the audition is not when you want to be translating.

No numbers here. Costs change every year, and they differ by school. A figure printed on a website is a figure that will be wrong. What this page can do is make sure nothing on the list surprises you in March.

Per school: the application fee · the audition or assessment fee, which is charged per school and is the line people forget: in the UK one application fee covers all your choices through UCAS Conservatoires, and then each conservatoire charges its own audition fee on top, so that is the one that multiplies · a prescreening or upload fee, if it is charged separately · scores you have to buy · travel, per person, and two fares rather than one if an adult travels with the candidate · one night’s accommodation, per person, because auditions start early and the same-day flight is a false economy · the pianist’s fee on the day, if one is not provided · a rehearsal with that pianist, if it is offered. (UK conservatoires do waive assessment fees on low household income, but only for applicants who normally live in the UK, so that will not reach you from here.)

Once, for the year: extra lessons or coachings in the final months · making the recording · a passport, and the travel permissions that go with it: a UK Electronic Travel Authorisation, which every traveller needs individually, and, for the United States, a full B-1/B-2 visitor visa, because Cyprus is not in the Visa Waiver Programme and a Cypriot passport cannot use ESTA · an English-language test where one is required · translated or certified transcripts.

After a yes: a deposit to hold the place, often non-refundable, and it can fall due before the other schools have answered · tuition per year, which differs enormously by country: as an EU citizen you pay no tuition at a public German Hochschule and only a semester contribution, and a low semester fee in Austria, while the UK and the US charge in full · living costs in that city · and whether scholarship decisions arrive before or after that deposit deadline.

Each extra school multiplies almost every line in the first block. That, and not ambition, is the real limit on applying everywhere. Decide the number of schools from this list, not from a feeling.

Ask each school in writing when its deposit or its reply falls due. The answer turns on the system more than on the school. UK conservatoire offers are answered through UCAS Conservatoires, which gives you a personal reply deadline in your own account, and you cannot hold more than one confirmed place across UCAS Conservatoires and UCAS Undergraduate. US undergraduate schools generally do not ask you to accept or pay a deposit before 1 May. Everywhere else it is school by school. Nobody volunteers any of it, so ask, and get the answer in writing.

If the arithmetic stretches to fewer schools than you hoped, which ones to choose is a question about the voice as much as about the money, and you can ask about a consultation before you fix the list.

You do not need to read music to be the most useful person in this process. Almost everything that goes wrong in an audition year is logistics, money and sleep. Those are yours.

Take the calendar and the paperwork off them: deadlines, forms, transcripts, passports, flights, the single sheet with every date on it. In the last fortnight, guard the sleep more fiercely than the practice. Drive, wait, carry. Keep the journey there quiet; most singers would rather not talk on the way in.

Afterwards, ask “how did it feel?” before “how did it go?” Be ready for the answer to be neither. Resist the urge to talk it through in the car. It can wait until the evening, and it is usually better the next day.

Two things are worth knowing. Nothing your child sings should hurt. Singing is hard work, not painful. If it hurts, the singing stops. It is a question for the teacher first, and for a doctor if it comes back or does not settle. It is never something to push through. And no honest teacher will promise you a result; anyone who does is telling you something about themselves.

Most people reading this will be turned down by at least one school. Many will be turned down by all of them in a first year. It is worth saying plainly what that does and does not mean.

A no is sometimes arithmetic. Schools take a certain number of sopranos and a certain number of basses, and the number is not the same every year. More often it is about readiness. Readiness is a different thing from talent, and it is the one thing another year can change. Very few rejections are a verdict on whether you should sing. Which is why the next paragraph matters.

You may write and ask for feedback. Some schools give it, some do not. What comes back is usually short, but it is worth more than a year of guessing.

A conservatoire place is training. It is not a career, and no honest teacher will tell you otherwise. Singers arrive at this work by more routes than the one this page describes. They come later, or sideways, through a university degree, through a different country, through years of good private study. The audition year is one door, not the door.

And money already spent is never a reason to keep going. A family that changes its mind is not throwing away anything that matters, provided the other doors are still open. That is the argument for the second application in the twelve-month plan above. Keep one alive, and changing your mind costs a decision rather than a year.