Back to school

I'm about to head to school for the first time this year on OFFICIAL schoolish activities. Today are my ensemble auditions. These auditions are a bit of an oddity. My piano audition serves a few little functions:
1) It is supposed to get you to make sure that you have started practicing enough at the tail end of summer in order to whip together one piece thatyou play well enough that you don't want to crawl into a hole and die. Ultimately the professors' expectations are still high enough that you won't play well enough for them... and they will wish you to crawl into said hole. Ideally, you should have been practicing throughout the summer, which I did...ish.
2) The audition is used for placement in the piano-related ensembles. This year I am going into Chamber Music, so this audition will decide who I am going to be placed with for the ensemble... I have no idea how they decide this, I could be in anything really: a piano duet, playing with a cellist, a violinist, maybe a string quartet or piano trio.... who knows. They tend to put better pianists with better instrumentalists...at least thats what I think.

The other audition I am doing is for the voice department. I need to participate in a large ensemble, and there are not many 30-pianos playing together at the same time emsembles, so I sing. For the women, this can be a stressful one, so many really good singers and the competition is high. For the men, there are less of us, so ya, not so stressful. Also, as I am not a voice major, I'm not particularly bothered either way with what the voice department thinks of me. Similarly to the piano ones, these auditions serve a few purposes.
1) They serve as a guage to how well or badly you do from ground zero because NONE WHATSOEVER of the singers in the school have been practicing over the summer! As usual this gives the singers the oportunity to talk badly about themselves in front of other singers as a handout waiting for the compliments coming back from the other side (really, all musicians do this though).
2)Placement. The main ensemble that the majority of people are auditioning for is University Singers, which is auditioned and elitist. Further elitist (described as an ensemble for 'advanced singers') is the Canata ensemble. As far as I can tell, at least for me, the main draw to this one is that it is MUCH less time committment than most, especially Univ. Singers.
As I'm not particularly worried about either of these aspects, I am going to use this audition as an opportunity to entertain the audition panel. I have chosen a very humourous song by P.D.Q. Bach. I really think he is the cat's pyjamas and I want everyone to be exposed to him, so I will start with this audition. The song is set in the serious style of the real Bach, but the lyrics are that of a "singing commercial" for PDQ dish soap. It tells the sad tale of Poor Jane whose lover asks for her hand in marriage, but alas it is wrinkled and raw from the dishpan.... if only she usee PDQ..... she could have the skin she's always wished for. As you can tell, Im excited about this ditty, and I will post later to tell you all how it went!
This is going to be an exciting year coming up, and Im glad to be getting back to school. That is why Im excited about this first official school activity. There's just something so exciting about this time of year with all the things starting afresh, all the change, the emininance of my birthing.... I love all of it!