How Often Do A Cappella Groups Hold Auditions?

In the fall of 2010, The A Cappella Blog invited every collegiate a cappella group we could find to participate in a survey. Our objective was to develop a better understanding of current trends in a cappella—what groups are or are not doing and to what degree.

Over 300 groups from across the US and abroad responded to the survey. Throughout our 2010 publication season, we will review results from this survey and talk about what our findings mean. We welcome and encourage groups to look over the information to learn, to benchmark and to satisfy their own curiosity.

This edition’s question: How often does your group hold auditions?

Of the groups surveyed, over 96 percent hold auditions once or twice a year—55 percent of groups do it every semester, 41 percent do it just once per year.

As we discussed in the survey responses to our question about how many new members groups take each year, a cappella groups inevitably have a fair amount of turn over each year, and so most groups find a need to welcome one to six new members per year. And so, it naturally follows that these groups would hold regular auditions.

In holding auditions just once per semester, or just once per year, groups demonstrate a respect and understanding for one of the cardinal rules of a collegiate performance group—it takes time to develop cohesion work out dynamics and take care of fundamentals such as learning music as a unit. And so, holding auditions any more than once per semester opens the door to disruption—introducing new personalities, talents and schedules, besides the time investment involved in the audition process itself.

Nonetheless, a small percentage of groups operate on one extreme or the other—holding auditions fewer than one times each year, or holding multiple audition sessions per semester. Based on the stats, we imagine this is a symptom of unique group circumstances—for example, a group with no graduating seniors from the year before that can’t take new recruits, or an upstart group that needs to build membership, and so will continue to hold auditions until it fills out its roster.