Orchestras on YouTube – a bad thing?

As a creator of freely distributed Creative Commons content (on Contrabass Conversations as well as doublebassblog.org), I see YouTube, podcasting, social media, and other such distribution platforms as a huge and largely untapped resource for classical musicians....

Nutcracker…in the summer!

I’m up at Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois (the summer home of the Chicago Symphony) playing a Labor Day Tschaikowsky concert. Guess what’s on the program? Nutcracker excerpts! Nooooo… Winter after winter of driving to Milwaukee to play the...

Franco Petracchi performs “Alla Marcia” by Nino Rota

Here’s another video (again courtesy of Italian bassist Vito Liuzzi) featuring double bass soloist extraordinaire Franco Petracchi performing “Alla Marcia” by Nino Rota (Divertimento Concertante) during a perfomance in Japan some years ago. Vito also writes: A...

Audition preparation advice with Matt Heller

Calgary Philharmonic bassist Matt Heller (a frequent subject of posts here at doublebassblog.org) recently put out an excellent audition preperation breakdown on his blog hellafrisch.blogspot.com. Matt is an excellent bassist and blogger (and a swell guy to...

Why I love iPhone blogging

I have been doing a surprising amount of blogging on the iPhone ever since the WordPress mobile application was released for the iPhone operating system. While it may seem kind of cumbersome to write extended blog posts on a mobile device–I only planned on doing...