So I’ve had my audition. This choir uses a system I hadn’t encountered before: you are marked by the musical director in various categories and this is distilled into a single score out of 10, which you are told. I won’t reveal what mine was, but it was enough to get me into the choir. (I’m not sure what difference it made that my sight-singing wasn’t actually tested – I’m confident it would not have let me down if it had been.)
Now while it seems rather reductive to have one’s entire vocal abilities and musicianship reduced to a single digit, there is an advantage to doing auditions this way. It at least gives an objective basis for reducing the choir, should smaller numbers be required, rather than the arbitrary methods that are often used.