How many bassoon players

Netherlands bassoonist Simon Van Holen started playing the bassoon when he was 8. Today he is Solo-Contrabassoon of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and a highly sought after masterclass instructor. Taiwan-born American bassoonist Catherine Chen started playing the bassoon when she was 14, after many years of playing the piano and cello. Italian bassoonist Andrea Cellacchi started playing the bassoon when he was Canadian bassoonist Nadina Mackie Jackson first started playing the bassoon when she was 14, and formally with a bassoon instructor at She went on to win her first first job with the Montreal Symphony at the age of Today she is the most widely recorded Canadian bassoonist in history with 13 solo albums and 8 chamber music recordings.

If you'd like to see even more in-depth profiles and backgrounds for famous bassoonists around the world, please navigate to the Famous Bassoonists section on this website. To see stories of young aspiring bassoonists and how playing the bassoon changed their lives, feel free to check out the Supporter Spotlight section on the homepage. If you are curious in learning more about the bassoon, please navigate the tabs at the top of the B.

There you'll find bassoon videos, in-depth profiles of famous bassoonists, suggestions on where to buy bassoon supplies, blogs and articles about the bassoon, profiles for bassoon teachers and professors, educational materials, info on worldwide organizations that support bassoonists, online tutorials, and so much more.

All of the information available on B. He sifts through numerous reeds, separating them according to the Baroque, Classical and modern periods. Well, if you seek a certain frequency, it provides that. Photographer Gordon Parks inspired a new generation of artists. Here are some of their stories.

All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. See below…. This famous English composer best known for his Pomp and Circumstance and his orchestral work Enigma Variations also wrote Romance for Bassoon , a fine solo piece for bassoon and orchestra and sounds good with piano, too. He started playing bassoon in a woodwind quintet and wrote pieces for his group. But this work is no throwback to the wind quintet days. The lazy, rather meandering melody of the Romance is in marked contrast to the lively, rather agitated style of many of the pieces for wind quintet and the formality of the slower movements.

What caused Elgar to write this unusual work? The dedication is to Edwin F. That the work results from a lingering attachment to his youthful days in the quintet is supported by the fact that the second work from this period, Cantique, is indeed an arrangement for small orchestra of the second Intermezzo of The composer famous for his theme from the movie Rocky and many other TV themes and movie scores, Bill played bassoon and won a scholarship to college on the instrument.

As he put it in a conversation with Brother Bob, he had a choice of going up against a bunch of more talented pianists or go for the bassoon scholarship. At the age of 15, he organized a band and began to play for high school dances in Miami, Florida. Conti received a bassoon scholarship from Louisiana State University where he majored in composition and played jazz piano at many of the local night spots to help defray the costs of his education. Fellow bassoonist and composer Peter Schickele is a mentor for the Bassoon Brothers.

But when I got to Juilliard, there were real bassoonists around. They knew how to make reeds and everything! So, I gave it up. I had never even owned an instrument. I had never intended to be a bassoonist. I just wanted to play in an orchestra. We commissioned a work called Blue Set No. The very challenging work for quartet appears on our Wanted CD and is available in sheet music form as well.

His Concerto for Bassoon vs. Orchestra had an unusual twist to it when he performed it in Portland with the Oregon Symphony in the s. A button was lodged in the low F tonehole! During rehearsal one of the keys fell off too.

So we fixed him up with a replacement instrument. Peter performed his Abassoonata several years later in Portland and was such a hoot. Sheet music is available for this piece which calls for the bassoonist to play the bassoon AND piano, because the piano player has failed to show up on time. Peter has written another more serious concerto for bassoon and chamber orchestra, and the bassoon is prominently featured in a number of his chamber works.

We hope to commission another work if he is up to it. The tromboon is played with a bassoon reed and bocal attached to a trombone. Mark has performed this work twice with Peter in Portland. Chip went from playing the bundle of sticks to playing with drumsticks.

The alias of composer Chip Davis, Mannheim Steamroller, was among the pioneers of neo-classical electronic music, emerging as one of the driving forces behind the New Age phenomenon. His grandmother was his first music teacher, giving the child his initial piano lessons at the age of four; two years later, Davis composed his first piece, a four-part chorale written in honor of his dog.