Music audition; 3x interviews.
Analysis of texts, scores, and audio, explaining thought process and judgements.
Further reading on an area of interest and in areas they were less secure on; prepared for music analysis.
Be confident in yourself!
Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.
Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.
Test taken: Music audition
Number of interviews: 3
Time between interviews: 24 hours
Length of interviews: The shortest was 30 mins including pre reading, the longest was at Somerville, and was 2 hours including pre reading
Online interview: No
I was given a text and I had to explain what I understood from it and any thoughts about it. In another I had to analyse scores and in others I had to listen to music and then analyse it. I felt relaxed and I just said my thought process behind each question out loud and explained how I arrived at any judgements I came to to justify my thoughts and reasoning. Try to relax as they are not expecting you to know the answer to every question and most don’t even have a correct answer. It’s more about how you think not what you think.
Found a specific area of music that I liked and read around it as much as possible so that I always had something to talk about and show a real interest in. Also I did some reading around areas that I felt least confident in to get a basic understanding in case I was asked. I didn’t stress too much about preparation because a lot of the topics discussed in the interview were new to me and it was about applying my knowledge. Musical analysis is the one thing that you can prepare for e.g identifying chords and cadences and learning about characteristics of style and period.
Practicing and perfecting my piece
Interviewers are looking for how you think and arrive at conclusions. Be confident in the answers that you give regardless of whether you think it is right or not as long as you have a good thought process behind it.