Our month-long cross-country search for next season's singers has drawn to a close. There were plenty of nervous auditionees, ten thousand miles on planes and trains, a dodged hurricane, many memorable people and much great music.

Thinking of those dreaded auditions, I thought I might share some tales from the trade. It also might encourage those who may feel rejected or that they didn't do so well well, since I still was able to make a great career in spite of myself.

We're halfway through our 8-city audition tour, and both posts feature answers that the singers in our waiting rooms submitted via anonymous surveys.

We're auditioning 500 singers, looking for a couple dozen for next year's company. And meanwhile, we're trying to find out what makes these aspiring professional musicians tick.

You buzz your lips like you're making tugboat noises to your favorite (only) baby nephew. Maybe you sing a snippet of something to calm your nerves. The crazy thing? You are totally not the only person singing in a stall in this particular restroom.

Too often, people who work exclusively with young professionals lose sight of the ultimate goal and think that excelling in our training environments is the same as possessing the goods to win in the world at large. Fatal mistake.

As a singer, vocal competitions are a necessary way of gaining notoriety and funding. I was never really a competition winner. Even still, I had a twenty-year career at the Met.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to the asteroids, opera, dinosaurs, and lava-spewing volcanoes that pepper long stretches of Terrence Ma...

Since 2004, Sherri Sanders has taught performers at Pace University, Syracuse University and the Paper Mill Playhouse to treat the rock musical audition with the same care as legitimate musical theater.

The Rhythm Road facilitates not only cross-cultural discourse but also provides an extraordinary platform for artists to emerge from their own localism and share what they do, face-to-face, with the unknown.