Welcome!

Welcome to the 2023 website update. Since retiring from clarinet studio teaching at Rice University’s Shepherd School of music, I have been teaching one course each semester,  leaving more time for my two big projects: The Clarinet Book for Oxford University Press and Clarinet Adventures, a complete teaching method.  My first semester course is MUSI 501 – Enhanced Performance: Writing, Speaking, Playing for MM performance majors. The course helps students improve skill in communicating with an audience through words – spoken or written. The second semester course is MUSI 240 for undergraduate non-music majors. Entitled Unity and Variety in Music, the course investigates how composers structure their music so as to keep the listener engaged.

Covid 19 impacted my performance schedule drastically, cancelling a recital of Jewish music at Houston’s Holocaust Museum featuring Klezmer, Benny Goodman tunes, the Artie Shaw Concerto, and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonata.  Now I’m planning to revisit part of this program at the Shepherd School on April 24. 2023: No Weinberg - instead songs by Jewish composers like Bernstein, Arlen, Weill, and Previn with Susan Lorette Dunn and Leone Buyse in the Previn.

I continue as artistic director of Houston Youth Symphony, which has won multiple national awards during the last decade, including the The Foundation for Music Education’s Mark of Excellence  and The American Prize (website, blog).  

Both my wife, flutist Leone Buyse, and I have coached the Youth Orchestra of the Americas during the summers since 2005. Recently its name was changed from YOA to OA, reflecting a gradual increase in quality, age, and professionalism of its members (website). Now OA has established OAcademy, an online resource for musicians aged 18-30. Leone and I also teach at the Texas Music Festival at the University of Houston, which resumed after COVID in 2022 and continues in June, 2023. We have also begun to teach at Atlantic Music Festival at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.  I encourage all clarinetists to join ICA and follow my articles on teaching in The Clarinet magazine, dating back to 1998. My 85th article will appear in the June, 2023 issue, after which I’ll retire from writing them. They are all available in the James Gillespie Library at clarinet.org.