Here’s a new minor release of the Fingering Diagram Builder with a few small improvements:
Enjoy!
Bret Pimentel, woodwinds
Kumiko Shimizu, piano
Faculty Recital
Delta State University Department of Music
Recital Hall, Bologna Performing Arts Center
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
7:30 PM
Divertissement for multiple woodwinds and piano
Sy Brandon (b. 1945)
World premiere
Caprice en forme de valse for alto saxophone
Paul Bonneau (1918 – 1995)
Sonata for oboe and piano
Francis Poulenc (1899 – 1963)
Sonata for clarinet and piano
Francis Poulenc
Ode to a Toad
Ray Pizzi (b. 1943)
Read More “Faculty woodwinds recital, Aug. 30, 2011”
A little over a year ago I made the Random Note Picker, a small web app for generating groups of random pitches. I mostly use it to quiz students on their scales. It otherwise hasn’t gotten much use, but if anyone is interested there is now a slightly improved version. Check it out.
Composer Sy Brandon has posted his work on the second of six movements of Divertissement, the new work for multiple woodwinds soloist. The movement, “Nocturne,” is for alto saxophone and piano. You can check out a synthesized recording and preview the score (using the Sibelius Scorch browser plugin). Go check it out and leave your comments.
I decided to leave a space in the survey for general comments, and many of you took the time to remark on a variety of subjects. Many of them were directed to me personally or seemed otherwise non-public in nature, so I’m not going to list them all, but I’ll share a few and summarize the rest.
Some of you politely made suggestions on how the survey could be better:
- There’s a big gap between “casual dabbler” and “semi-pro”. I suggest an additional category: “serious amateur” or something like that.
- It would be good to have a skill level between casual dabbler and music major (something along the lines of “good amateur”). As the poll currently is, it suggests that I play recorder to the same standard as sax. I would consider my recorder and flute playing better than “not at all” but my sax and clarinet playing not to be at the level of “music major”, hence they all closest to “casual dabbler”. I guess it’s too late to change the poll now, but I thought I’d offer my opinion anyway :).
- maybe ask music arranging abilities. Small ensemble writing for different woodwinds is necessary in my working fields.
- Not sure what your intent is with this data, but I do think that there are some fields that would be nice to have/know of (of course maybe for the next time you do this)… For example,
-“what do you consider your strongest/primary instrument”,
-consider having three columns in the instruments section like: own/play/don’t own- Didn’t know how to answer some of the questions because I’m still a high school student
I think these are all good suggestions, and ones that I would probably take if I could do the survey over. (At this point I have no specific plan for future surveys, but haven’t ruled the idea out, either.) Read More “Woodwind Doubler Census results, part 8: final comments”
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Here are some highlights from the blog in 2017.
And, of course, I was pleased to release my book, Woodwind Basics: Core concepts for playing and teaching flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone, which really is a distillation of lots of ideas I’ve explored and refined right here on the blog. I have been thrilled with the response, including teachers of university woodwind methods courses adopting it as their textbook. Get your copy in PDF format or in paperback from Amazon.Thanks for reading, commenting, sharing, and otherwise connecting in 2017. See you next year!
At this year’s NFA conference, I had the very cool opportunity to be part of a discussion panel about woodwind doubling. The panel was organized by Florida flutist and doubler Tereasa Payne, and moderated by my Delta State colleague Shelley Collins. The panel consisted of me, Tereasa, Hollywood studio great Jim Walker, and David Weiss, who is the ethnic flutes soloist for Broadway’s The Lion King. It was an honor to be included in a group of such stature!
We spoke to a surprisingly large and enthusiastic crowd. At one point Shelley asked for a show of hands by the doublers in the audience, and we were blown away by all the hands that shot up. The audience asked great questions, and many stayed afterward to talk some more. I was delighted to meet several of you personally who read this blog or who have communicated with me by email or on Twitter.
In advance of the panel, Tereasa had prepared some questions for the panelists to think over. I took some notes to organize my thoughts, and I’m providing them here in an edited version. This isn’t a transcript of the live panel, but it should give you an idea of what was talked about, and of my thoughts about some of those topics. Read More “NFA 2011: Woodwind doublers roundtable discussion”
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Thanks for this brilliant resource, it has made online teaching at this time so much easier and completely eliminates the time spent describing fingerings to pupils.