Audition Success: An Olympic Sports Psychologist Teaches Performing Artists How to Win

Rating:
Summary: No nonsense - simply sound advice - a holistic approach
Review: 'Audition Success' by Don Greene is probably the best book I have read regarding audition preparation. It consists largely of transcribed interviews with two of Greene's clients. Using their experiences, the reader can craft his or her own audition preparation plan. It covers everything from methods to practice orchestral excerpts through to word association techniques which help performers settle in to the right mood the moment before they perform.

I am usually very skeptical about these sorts of books as there are many out there that are simply too wishy-washy. 'Audition Success' is a no nonsense approach that if read, understood, and applied, can be very helpful in making performers more successful in audition and other performing situations. A must read (and must do!) for all musicians taking auditions.

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Summary: Does not take a doctorate to come up with this stuff
Review: i had to read this book for a class and I found it to be one of the most superficial books I have ever read. By talking to the young singer and the horn player, they tell him everything, and he just restates everything they just said in a more positive light. He turns Brian, the horn player, into a paranoid schizophrenic, making him give names (ethel and fred and bob) to his pre-audition problems. I gleaned nothing from this book and I would not reccomend it to anyone. The book is simply a transcript of a whole bunch of conversations. . . Greene could have at least put a LITTLE effort into it. I'll sum the book up in a sentance or two . . . if your nervous, put it all in perspective, you'll move on if you don't get the part. You have ups and downs, sometimes are better than others. So when your nervous just take a deep breath and look at reality, not this junk about rating your talent and nervousness on a profile of 1 to 100. You can't measure that kind of thing on a scale. All in all, DON'T BUY THIS BOOK, you are wasting your time.

Rating:
Summary: Concise, helpful and fun to read.
Review: I often teach seminars in overcoming performance anxiety, so I am quite current on the literature. This one is a gem! There is a lot of information, several ideas and approaches, yet easily "digested" because the book is written in a conversational manner. It's been criticized as "only" being the transcription of phone conversations, yet I find what did and didn't work for the two individuals involved to be much easier to learn from and glean what I want to use than books that lecture and pontificate and give endless lists of things to do.

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Summary: Audition success generally helpful
Review: I studied this book while preparing for a recent audition and performed better than ever at the audition. I don't know if it was just coincidence, but there were some good things to think about that I gleaned from the text. I got a lot out of the chapters with the singer as well as the chapters with the other horn player.

Rating:
Summary: Not just for muscians!
Review: The book is conversations of the author with two muscians. I really enjoyed that format and found the twist and turns insightful because it wasn't presented as do these six steps and you will be successful. I found the key ideas of a structured approach to training such as training under stress conditions, in mixed order, and multiple environments, and tapering applicable to anyone who must use skills to produce results--either singing on a stage or a presentation in a group. The one reviewer was right about the conversation, and maybe each chapter could have used a short summary of the techniques in that chapter. But if you read and label the technique when it is applied and then incorporate it into your skill training, I think you will find the book very helpful.

Rating:
Summary: Not just for muscians!
Review: The book is conversations of the author with two muscians. I really enjoyed that format and found the twist and turns insightful because it wasn't presented as do these six steps and you will be successful. I found the key ideas of a structured approach to training such as training under stress conditions, in mixed order, and multiple environments, and tapering applicable to anyone who must use skills to produce results--either singing on a stage or a presentation in a group. The one reviewer was right about the conversation, and maybe each chapter could have used a short summary of the techniques in that chapter. But if you read and label the technique when it is applied and then incorporate it into your skill training, I think you will find the book very helpful.

Rating:
Summary: good information, boring format
Review: The information Don Greene presents is good and very helpful for performers wanting to be better auditioners. However, the format - transcriptions of telephone conversations with a french horn player and a mezzo soprano - was boring and did not hold the reader's interest. The book could use an editor's help. Compared with Emmons and Thomas' "Power Performance for Singers", it was lacking in concrete, substantive how-to's. An index of skills or techniques mentioned would have been helpful, as it was annoying to have to keep flipping through the book.

Rating:
Summary: A reaffirmation of things I learned years ago.
Review: There is valuable information in this which I've used for my students auditioning for scholarships. It helped them immeasurably, and their auditions - for the most part - were instrumental in gaining for them the scholarships they sought.