[Music: Hummel Bassoon Concerto. Performers Peter Amstutz,
fortepiano and Terry B. Ewell, bassoon.]
Welcome, I am Terry Ewell and you are viewing the 300th
video in the Bassoon Digital Professor series. I am going to take a few moments
here to reflect on what has happened, where I am right now, and my projects in
the future for the Bassoon Digital Professor. It seems very apt to do this. It
is December 30th of 2020, the year is drawing to a close and I am
also timing this with the last video of this third century (if you will) of
these videos. So, let’s get started.
I mention that this is the 300th video in the Bassoon Digital Professor series. These videos are numbered similar to an opus number in music. The first English video, number 1, started in 2007 when I began the 2reed.net website and also started working on the digital videos on YouTube and other places. This is a listing of where we are up to this date. So, although this is the 300th video, this does not include a couple of videos that were originally in Chinese. So, I have had 298 in English, plus one Chinese video—this is one I spoke in Mandarin and added English subtitles. There was one video I think on circular breathing [in Mandarin] that was a repackaging of many other materials that you find in my other videos.
|
Language |
Starting
Date |
Number |
|
English |
2007 |
298 (plus 1
with subtitles) |
|
Chinese
(Mandarin)
中 文 |
2012 |
77 |
|
Korean 한
국의 |
2012 |
17 |
|
Spanish
Español |
2016 |
122 |
|
Farsi فارسی |
2017 |
26 |
|
Russian Русский |
2018 |
63 |
|
German |
2020 |
2 |
|
Latin |
2020 |
1 |
I want you to be aware that completing 300 videos is quite
an accomplishment. It takes me one to two hours of work for each minute of a
new video that I produce. Time is spent developing and researching materials,
creating graphics and text, recording audio and video portions, editing and
synchronizing audio and video, and other post-production work. Then most videos
are presented in three formats on 2reed.net and loaded on YouTube with
transcripts. Derivative videos—those in additional languages—are translated by
my talented team and then edited by me for their final production. Each of those
is the result of several hours of work. So, 300 videos: you are looking at thousands
of hours that I have devoted to this.
Well, let me talk a bit here about what Bassoon Digital
Professor means to me. Bassoon is my expertise, my primary area of
expertise. However, I do draw upon my education, a PhD in music theory as well.
This has given me great insights into the academic discipline. It is Digital,
not online, not correspondence. I distinguish between correspondence, online,
and digital instruction. I am not an online professor, rather I choose the word
digital because it encompasses more than just online delivery.
Let me give you a quotation from an essay I wrote, “Becoming
Digital Professors,” which explains some of the aspects of digital for my
teaching. For the sake of time, I am not going to read the statement here. You
can pause the video and read it if you wish.
I teach courses at Towson University not only in bassoon but
in ethics, music composition, and digital instruction.
Last of all I am a Professor. That is a term that I
take not only in rank—I am a full professor at Towson University—but also in
advocacy. I have been a professor for a long time, well before I even entered
the academic realm. I profess what I learn about the bassoon, about
performance, about practicing, about life as a musician, and also life as a Christian.
These experiences I share are influenced by my education in various aspects as
a bassoonist, music theorist, and a religious believer.
Let’s go on to my mission statement. I don’t know that many
people pay much attention to it, but you will find it on the BDP home page. It
is “presenting a well-reasoned pedagogy for bassoon practice and performance.”
Let me break this down for you. First, notice the “Ps” in there. There are 4 Ps
in this.
First, Presenting. I have given a lot of thought to
the BDP videos and the websites that I manage. I am greatly in debt to the time
I spent in mainland China starting in the summer of 2012 and my study of the
Chinese language. I learned that in order to better communicate with those from
different cultures and languages I had to radically change my delivery of
materials. Now I try to be more concise, eliminate USA slang, incorporate more
graphics and on-screen text, and demonstrate items as much as possible. All of
this is part of the first “P,” presenting.
Next is Well-reasoned. Sorry, I couldn’t come up with
any “Ps” here! But I carefully research what I present to you in order to hold
to the highest academic standards of USA universities. I fail in that
aspiration many times, but it is still my goal to present informed teachings that
acknowledge the great work of others in the field. What you will see on
2reed.net is over four decades of materials that I have gathered or created
myself.
Pedagogy. I
have a life-long interest in studying how best to deliver information and
skills to students. I am still learning new ways to be a more effective instructor.
Practice. I broadly interpret this word. It not only
refers to what we need to be do master the bassoon, music, fingerings, breath
control, etc. but also the best practices for physically, intellectually,
emotionally, and spiritually presenting music and participating in musical
experiences. For instance, with practice I emphasize three Ts: in tune, in
time, with a good tone. So, one of pedagogies, one of the ways in which present
to students is that they should not just play alone, but they need to play with
others. I wrote an article in the Double Reed News called “Two are
Better than One: New Ideas for Duets in the Bassoon Studio.” My goal is to make
sure that students, in every lesson with me, they play not only with drones but
they play with accompaniments or each other. Ideally, when we are meeting
face-to-face, I overlap lessons so that the students play duets with each other
and do some sight reading and we even talk about repertory in those instances.
I think that the idea of playing duets is fabulous. There are many great
bassoon pedagogues who has done this. For instance, Étienne Ozi the great
bassoon pedagogue has written many duets. You find that Weissenborn also has
duets in many of his studies. These pedagogues emphasize that. I have included
even more emphasis in this direction. You
will see later on my website that there are many accompaniments for bassoon
players either to play along with recordings of me playing bassoon or me
playing piano and creating harpsichord or other accompaniments.
Performance. I am not just an instructor, but I am an
active performer as well. My performances are on bassoon, as a videographer,
and as a webmaster. So, my pedagogy is delivered not only with explanations,
but also with examples. I think that is important.
Most of you viewing this video are familiar with my YouTube videos.
However, that is only a fraction of my pedagogy that is available. If all that
you are doing is watching my YouTube videos, you are missing a lot of materials
I have to help you as a bassoonist develop or as a teacher to help your
students.
These are free materials on my website. I do not charge for
them. You will notice that my YouTube videos are not for money [no
advertisements]. Except for a brief period at the end of 2018 when a few
friends helped me out with money for videos, all funding for the videos,
translations, websites have come from my earnings. With the exception of a few
materials available on Lulu, I earn no income from the items. It is just God’s
blessing in my life that I want to share with you.
So, let’s explore 2reed.net for some additional items that will
improve your bassoon practice and performance.
The Home page has been updated with some new items up
here at the top. This whole section down here is from my older page. The older website
was codified in 2009, and these links relate to the older page. Those are all
still current. I make sure that the links aren’t broken. We are now here on the
home page. Let’s go through a few of these items.
The Audio here, there are some very important and
rare items from Maurice Allard as well as a few of my audio performances. One
is from the International Double Reed Society. I was the winner in the first
Gillet Competition. Bassoon Digital Professor we will look at later. Colossians
3:16, this is brand new project. This is my COVID-19 project. Teaching and
admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. These are many
songs throughout the world that Christians have produced and I bring to you. In
fact, the first item in that series was from Mexico.
Drones, these are very important things to practice.
For Christian Artists—there is a website there supporting Christians. The
bassoon fingering companion, we will take a look at that in a moment.
Here we have the Graded Bassoon section. This is a
brand new feature on the site that I will be completing in my sabbatical in
Spring 2021. It presents an approach to the bassoon staring with Grade 1, the
easiest, and going all the way to Grade 6. These grades are based upon the
Maryland Music Educators Association rankings of solos. This was redone by Barry
Trent, Norma Hooks, and me. I think it provides a very nice and comprehensive
listing for bassoonists. On this listing I also include the Texas Music
Educators Association and the Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music. You
can see that their logos will appear in some of these. Let me go to Level 3
here. You will see the Texas flag there and yes, there are some of the
Associated Board items in there.
In addition, I should mention that I have my Graded
Excerpts. This is actual expert music lifted from the literature that I have
put in a series. The music is available on Lulu, but the accompaniments are
available here for free.
OK, moving onward. IDRS Items. The International
Double Reed Society has deleted or lost several of the items I donated to the
Society. Over 2,000 have been lost from their website upgrade. The Bassoon
Fingering Companion has missing graphics and updates. I have the more compete
version on my website. Conference programs have been deleted from their
website. I need to add the West Virginia one, but several of the programs have
been restored here thanks to the Wayback Machine. The International
Publications page is now gone from the IDRS but I link it here. The MIDI
collection on idrs.org is very small, on my site is it over double the size. It
is way bigger than that. Podcasts, IDRS deleted all of the IDRS podcasts. I
retain them here. The Reed Project, all of the photos of reeds, historic reeds,
as well as current practices were deleted. It is available here. The Who’s Who
database, which had 1595 entries, is no longer available. Unfortunately, I have
no way of recovering this. I have requested many times from IDRS to gain all of
the materials lost. I would be happy to support it myself and host it here, but
unfortunately nothing has come in my direction with that. This is a real loss
to the Society. The Who’s Who wasn’t just famous bassoonists or oboists,
anybody could have requested to be part of it. In fact, I added entries for
everybody who requested. But it gleaned from all of the IDRS conference
programs, all of the little biographies, all of the obituaries, all of the
other biographical materials in the IDRS journals and put little snippets
there, so it was easily searchable. It really was a wonderful resource for the
world that is unfortunately is gone now.
MIDI and mp3 collections—these are very large.
Let me show you the mp3s here. It is so large I had to break it out into
different indices. Here is A-D. I think
that includes about 200 different entries in there. You can see that different
tempos are given.
As I mentioned before this is a very important part of my
pedagogy: that people be able to play along with MIDI files and mp3 files. Here
you have the largest number of files in the world here on 2reed.net. This is a
chance for people to practice…Not all of these are as large. Most of these have
100 plus entries. You can see that I have about 1,000 files for mp3 and I am
continuing to add to those. That will be part of my Sabbatical project as well.
You have some of the other items here.
The Play Along! Series. That is the Rubank studies
and also A Tune a Day.
Let’s take a look now at Bassoon Digital Professor. The
majority of the Bassoon Digital Professor videos are on YouTube. However, you
are missing a lot of items I can’t possibly host on YouTube. For instance, I do
have a recommended course of study, that will take you to that Graded Bassoon
Solos page that I showed you earlier.
Here is the sequence of videos: when they were posted and
developed. They are in different languages. Here is Farsi, Spanish for video
89. Here is Chinese. You have all of the videos listed there in sequence.
There is also a topical listing that allows for you to find
videos that might be of interest. Then there are links to other pages as well.
There are hundreds of references here. One thing that you will not find on
YouTube is extra links to webpages. This is on ornamentation. I even have a
webpage that provides different practice examples. I have practice examples for
ornaments and the solo music to Vivaldi’s La Notte concerto and videos
below. There are a lot of extra materials that are available on 2reed.net with
this BDP site here that you don’t find on YouTube.
Last of all, let’s take a look at the Fingerings. I
have updated fingerings on this site. IDRS has completed an update of their
fingerings. Unfortunately, it is lacking in several different ways. Let me give
you an example of how it lacks comprehensiveness, how it lacks citations, and how
it lacks context. Here is the bassoon fingering database on IDRS for E5, high
E. We have five fingerings given here for the German system bassoon. You can
see that there are no references given here and it doesn’t give the context.
Context being, for instance, sometimes you want a high E fingering that you
slur to from D#. Other times you might need a fingering that works in a quick
turn-around. Sometimes you need a fingering that you can do a leap of an octave
or more up to high E. Sometimes you want a fingering that is quieter. Sometimes
you want a fingering for a shake or something like that. So, you can see that
there are a lot of things lacking here.
If we go to the original Bassoon Fingering database we have
dozens of fingerings. I provide the context: Gerald Corey, again I give
person’s name. So, I acknowledge the contribution of someone else. This is
important because these are often discoveries. He gives a context here “useful
for running passages.” So, you get an idea of where the fingering would work.
If you wanted to look up the reference, you could do that as well. For
instance, in the Ronald Klimko book Bassoon Performance Practice… there
is a reference for it there.
The one author I didn’t put in was me! I think when I was
creating this fingering database, we were including just published fingerings
when I was creating this with Lisa Hoyt. We had to hand enter all of the
fingerings, it had to be in ASCII code. The fingerings themselves had to be in
a different font. All of this was in the middle 1990s with very slow modems. At
that time, of course I couldn’t have a pdf document. If you are interested in
one of my fine solutions for a high E fingering, you can scroll down and find
my E5. Where did it go? There it is. This is a particularly fine one I continue
to use even now although I have a high E key. It is very good for a quick slur
over large distances.
Unfortunately, the IDRS fingering database fails in all
three aspects. Perhaps in the future if I have a lot of extra time, I can
convert the Bassoon Fingering Database Companion and include also the pictorial
fingerings. Oh, by the way I have done something. This would be an example of
what it would look like. These are fingerings for difficult passages. Let’s
pick my solo piece here, Gethsemane. Here you have the old entries. Then
you have the pictorial fingerings that are given here that help you to see this
as well. This is what I was hoping that the IDRS would create when they did
their database of fingerings.
One last feature I wanted to show you is the search
function. Obviously, you can search by item here, use the Google search. I am
really pleased here that Vincent Igusa has given me a search function for the
BDP videos. Let’s just say we wanted to find every comment I had about E5 in
the videos that I produced. Well, there you go! Weissenborn Study #50. I
mentioned E5 several times. You click on the link and it will bring you right
to the area [in the video] where the E5 fingering is entered.
Well, you have watched this video to the end. Thank you for
giving me the honor of seeing all of this. I pray that God will grant you
insights to know His will, that your ways will be pleasing to Him, that you
will have the strength to continue in doing what is right, in all things being
thankful. God bless you in all you do!
[Music: Hummel
Bassoon Concerto. Performers Peter Amstutz, fortepiano and Terry B. Ewell,
bassoon.]