On July 13, 2025, sculptor and painter David Adickes died at the age of 98. He was best known for gigantic sculptures, like Sam Houston off I-45, busts of all the US presidents, the Beatles, and a whimsical cellist outside the Wortham Center in downtown Houston. He was also an amateur clarinetist who created this imaginative clarinet in 1953 and gave me permission to use it here. Thank you, David!
Welcome!
Since retiring from clarinet studio teaching at Rice University’s Shepherd School of music, I have had more time for my two big projects: The Clarinet Book for Oxford University Press and Clarinet Adventures, a complete teaching method. Both are progressing, perhaps slower than I would like, but progressing nonetheless, while I spend more time and energy with Houston Youth Symphony.
I am starting my 28th year 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). Most recently we have received unique awards from the American Prize, youth orchestra division. In June 2024, we performed Jessie Montgomery’s Soul Force and Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá for an enthusiastic audience of 1000 at the League of American Orchestra’s convention. Then, on July 4, we were named Honored Artists of The American Prize, “a category of recognition limited to a very few who have proved to be individuals (or organizations) of ’sustained excellence’ in their chosen area of artistic endeavor.” In November 2025, history repeated itself and our performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring garnered a second consecutive award for “Sustained Excellence,” this time being the only youth orchestra named for any prize.
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. Later, I repeated part of this program at the Shepherd School with Susan Dunn Rachleff. No Weinberg - instead songs by Jewish composers like Bernstein, Arlen, Weill, and Previn. I’ll continue to do this kind of playing while keeping up my chops primarily for teaching as I approach my 81st birthday in December.
Both my wife, flutist Leone Buyse, and I have coached the Youth Orchestra of the Americas during the summers since 2005. A few years ago 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, 2026. We have also begun to teach at Atlantic Music Festival at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. (AMF is taking a year off in 2026 )
I encourage all clarinetists to join ICA and follow my articles on teaching in The Clarinet magazine, dating back to 1998. I retired from writing for The Clarinet after my 85th article appeared in the June 2023 issue. They are all available in the James Gillespie Library at clarinet.org. With the encouragement of Jessica Harrie and Julianne Kirk Doyle, I am starting a new project of revisiting several of the articles and creating explanatory videos, clarinet in hand. Keep posted for the first one soon!
For more detail, I invite you to click above on Clarinetist, Conductor, Arranger/Composer, Educator.