Teaching
Are you interested in joining the West Texas A&M BuffBassoon studio?
We're an active, supportive group of bassoonists with a variety of backgrounds and musical goals. WT offers undergraduate music majors in education, performance, therapy, composition, and industry. We also have graduate degrees in performance, education, and composition. The bassoon studio welcomes all varieties of music major, as well as double majors, music minors, and even non-majors who just want to keep music as a part of their lives.
Use the contact form to get in touch with Dr. Bell if you want to learn more, or to arrange a free sample lesson!
In this section, I'm uploading a collection of documents that give a snapshot of my approach to teaching bassoon. Ultimately, I believe the lesson teacher has three primary roles: teaching students the fundamentals of their instrument so that they can harness its expressive potential without technical hindrances, synthesizing what the student learns in music history and theory courses in order to create well-informed musical interpretations, and most importantly, inspiring the student to achieve ever increasing levels of artistic performance and satisfaction. The documents here offer a few examples of how I approach these three roles in lessons. While many of these documents are aimed at college level bassoonists, I enjoy teaching all ages and use forms of these concepts with all of my students.
As a teacher, I strive to tailor instruction to meet each student's individual needs and goals. A performance major hoping to play professionally and teach a studio has different needs than an education major who plans to direct a band or orchestra. They both should be polished, confident performers and well-rounded musicians, but might focus on different aspects of their playing. I provide resources to help all of my students explore the repertoire and to choose pieces to perform that interest them so that they are invested in the music that they're learning. There are some things that all students work on: fundamentals and the daily routine!
This first set of documents is centered around the daily routine, a group of fundamental exercises to be performed in a key of the day. Rather than just a sheet of drills, this document has a lot of text explaining the motivations and goals for each exercise, as well as how to apply what it teaches to other music.
These are a few reed-making resources that are helpful for creating your own reeds,
and fine-tuning the ones you already have:
Photo by Jennifer Grubbs