Texas Clarinet Colloquium 2012

It’s been a extremely busy last few days. Today, I traveled out to Commerce, Texas for Texas Clarinet Colloquium. This free event offers lots of master classes, recitals, lectures, and an exhibit hall to try out all of the clarinet toys. There’s no way that I can tell you everything that we talked about or saw but here are the highlights.

I kicked off the morning by going to Michael Webster’s orchestra audition masterclass.


Next, was Michael Lowenstern’s recital. Check out this setup: bass clarinet, computer, wind synthesizers…you know, the works when it comes to new music. This is not normally my type of thing when it comes to music but I thought it was excellent and very entertaining. I bought one of his CDs afterwards.


 After grabbing a quick lunch, we came back for Nathan Beaty’s clarinet mouthpiece design demonstration. Very informative, pretty much everything that you’d ever want to know when it comes to mouthpiece tip openings, facings, and materials.




We also went to Mitchell Estrin’s masterclass which had some wonderful performances! Another great thing about this conference is that it has a lot of lectures and competitions that are aimed specifically at middle and high school students. I went to the clarinet intonation tip class led by Sharon Deuby and since the majority of that audience was made up of middle and high school students, she tailored her talk specifically to them asking the audience for things that they particularly had issues with and having one student volunteer to demonstrate.

And of course, we had time to play with clarinets.





There were lots of events that I did not make it to, I know that Clarinet Cache also tweeted from the event if you would like to see more pictures and events!

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