Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Well, it took me two years, but I did it!

I made a promise to some audience members in 2012 that I'd put the presentation I did at the Nebraska ClarinetFest online, and I finally got it done. I'll be at ClarinetFest 2014 in Baton Rouge this week, and I wanted to make sure I'd kept my promise before I saw anyone. There's nothing like a deadline to help motivate you!
The title of the lecture was "The Signature Sound of Daniel Bonade and his Students: Its Evolution and Attainment," which fit right in with my doctoral treatise research from 1998 and the Daniel Bonade and Robert Marcellus theme of ClarinetFest 2012. I gave this talk a few times at different universities after the conference, but, for the most part, there's very little change in this online presentation from what I presented in Nebraska. I corrected a few errors, but there isn't any new research included.
Narrating all the slides and getting the sound levels to an acceptable level has proven to be quite a lot of work, and I learned a lot by going through the process. I'm glad I did it, but next time, I think I'd rather film myself doing a lecture in front of real people. This movie shows you the keynote slides better, but it's missing the presence of an audience.
I improved the sound quality of the videos of Robert Marcellus in a 1982 masterclass as much as I could. I actually don't know who filmed this or how I ended up with a copy, but I think they took place at Baylor University. 
Please let me know if you have any trouble viewing this or have any questions, corrections, or more information. This is an exciting topic for me! 



If you are interested in hearing more of Daniel Bonade's great playing, I'd recommend Larry Guy's CD Compilation of excerpts featuring Bonade on the Boston Records Label. Any recording by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell should feature Robert Marcellus on principal clarinet, so there's a lot of great stuff out there. I always do a szell cleveland search on iTunes or Amazon when I'm looking for a recording of an orchestra piece I'm about to play that I don't know. There's also a lot of great vintage recordings of clarinetists at Clarinet Central. Finally, you can listen to your heart's content to a big audio collection of clarinet master classes conducted by Robert Marcellus from 1977-1990 which is offered online by Northwestern University.