Change your clocks this weekend! Or maybe not, if you’re playing Wagner.

While I was a bassoon student at Indiana University in 1969-72, I also played in the Louisville (Kentucky) Orchestra. On occasion I was lucky, and honored, to be offered a ride by Murray Grodner, who taught double bass at IU, and who also played sometimes in Louisville. One memorable journey took an unintended detour.

Lessons from a (gasp!) flutist

Marcel Moyse and Bart Kuijken, two eminent flutists, lead wonderful recent recordings of Mozart’s Gran Partita. In a 1945 performance, the New York Philharmonic musicians were apparently gasping for air.

On this day in 1956, the United States government exploded the world’s first three-stage thermonuclear bomb, code-named “Bassoon.”

In 1819, James Frazier stole a box of 6 bassoon reeds, along with a vest, a pair of trousers, and a pair of socks, from a fellow-lodger at the Goat pub. He was sentenced to 2 months’ prison time and whipped.

Don Christlieb was bassoonist to Disney and Hollywood, but also to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stockhausen, Boulez, and Frank Zappa.

As a teenager living on the edge of the Florida everglades, Sir Edward Elgar was news to me.