Hi. My name is David Schorr and I've been playing the clarinet in orchestras, studios and chamber groups for over 30 years now. In an effort to get more clarinet music played in Los Angeles, I started the Clarinet Institute.
At first, it was lots of fun. I made business cards and started handing them out to musicians. Every time I'd play a job, I'd hand out the cards. People started calling me. I soon realized that if I was going to have an institute then this institute had better do something.
Things got busy fast. I had a day-job and then students in the afternoons. Evenings were for music jobs and orchestras. I started promoting the Clarinet Institute as a place for clarinet players to come together and play lots and lots and lots of chamber music. We started giving concerts in my garage for the local neighborhood. Then we moved to other outdoor public venues. We got so popular that we were honored by the City of Los Angeles.
To make it easier to publicize our concerts, I started the Clarinet Institute web site. At first it was just rehearsal reminders and concert ads. Then I decided to post some pdf copies of some of my Reicha wind quintets. I thought it was a nice service. Little did I realize the tsunami I had started....
Musicians went nuts! Sharing music online was something very new and people loved it. I started posting out-of-copyright music from my own collection. Then people started sending music from their collections to me. I spent hours scanning music. I thought it was great doing something that was so popular.
Then one day the website crashed. I called my hosting company and they told me that so many people all over the world were downloading sheet music that it had crashed the servers! If I didn't want to have to come up with more money to buy more bandwidth then I had to come up with a solution.
The solution we came up with was to put the entire clarinet library on a CD and offer to sell it at our cost. Instead of spending an hour or more clicking and downloading music, you could now spend a few bucks and get the whole library organized in one place.
Pretty soon, flute and oboe players started contacting me asking if I would provide the same service for them. Then one day I got a huge box in the mail. It was from a flutist who had heard about the Clarinet Institute and wanted the same thing for flutes. The box was filled with old music. Very old music. Brittle and yellow, some of the pages fell apart in my hands as I tried to scan it. I spent over a month scanning all that music. That was the birth of the first Flute Archive.
People heard about the box of flute music and soon music came pouring in from all over. Next came the oboe and bassoon archives. My brass-playing friends started needling me for archives of their own. The work became overwhelming so I took on some friends and family to help with the archiving. Katy Locke, Bob Ernenwein and Heather Klenk have been with us since the beginning and they are still editing and archiving today!
With a little bit of time on my hands, I got to start doing what I really love.... writing and arranging music for clarinets. Throughout my clarinet career I kept coming across music either edited or arranged by Himie Voxman. I always wondered who he was and what his story was. With the internet, now everyone can know about him. Some people dream of fame, fortune or power. I dreamed about being a famous clarinet music arranger!
I've arranged hundreds of works for all sorts of instruments. I really enjoy it. I've learned so much about music performance of every instrument. It's the kind of learning you can't get from a book. All I ask is that one day, years from now, some kid will look at one of my arrangements and say, "Hmmm. David Schorr. I wonder what his story was."
We now have up a problem that was totally unexpected when I started this whole thing. The Clarinet Institute was no longer just about clarinets. Our get-togethers and concerts included all sorts of musicians on every kind of instrument. Our archives cover a huge assortment of instruments and ensembles. We've really outgrown the name "Clarinet Institute." We are kind of like the March of Dimes. Inflation has made dimes less relevant, but everyone knows the name. We decided to keep the Clarinet Institute name for the same reason. Everyone knows us as having the largest music archive collection in the world. We've done so much archiving under the Clarinet Institute banner that it just wouldn't be right to change the name now.
To make it easier to publicize our concerts, I started the Clarinet Institute web site. At first it was just rehearsal reminders and concert ads. Then I decided to post some pdf copies of some of my Reicha wind quintets. I thought it was a nice service. Little did I realize the tsunami I had started....
Musicians went nuts! Sharing music online was something very new and people loved it. I started posting out-of-copyright music from my own collection. Then people started sending music from their collections to me. I spent hours scanning music. I thought it was great doing something that was so popular.
Then one day the website crashed. I called my hosting company and they told me that so many people all over the world were downloading sheet music that it had crashed the servers! If I didn't want to have to come up with more money to buy more bandwidth then I had to come up with a solution.
The solution we came up with was to put the entire clarinet library on a CD and offer to sell it at our cost. Instead of spending an hour or more clicking and downloading music, you could now spend a few bucks and get the whole library organized in one place.
Pretty soon, flute and oboe players started contacting me asking if I would provide the same service for them. Then one day I got a huge box in the mail. It was from a flutist who had heard about the Clarinet Institute and wanted the same thing for flutes. The box was filled with old music. Very old music. Brittle and yellow, some of the pages fell apart in my hands as I tried to scan it. I spent over a month scanning all that music. That was the birth of the first Flute Archive.
People heard about the box of flute music and soon music came pouring in from all over. Next came the oboe and bassoon archives. My brass-playing friends started needling me for archives of their own. The work became overwhelming so I took on some friends and family to help with the archiving. Katy Locke, Bob Ernenwein and Heather Klenk have been with us since the beginning and they are still editing and archiving today!
With a little bit of time on my hands, I got to start doing what I really love.... writing and arranging music for clarinets. Throughout my clarinet career I kept coming across music either edited or arranged by Himie Voxman. I always wondered who he was and what his story was. With the internet, now everyone can know about him. Some people dream of fame, fortune or power. I dreamed about being a famous clarinet music arranger!
I've arranged hundreds of works for all sorts of instruments. I really enjoy it. I've learned so much about music performance of every instrument. It's the kind of learning you can't get from a book. All I ask is that one day, years from now, some kid will look at one of my arrangements and say, "Hmmm. David Schorr. I wonder what his story was."
We now have up a problem that was totally unexpected when I started this whole thing. The Clarinet Institute was no longer just about clarinets. Our get-togethers and concerts included all sorts of musicians on every kind of instrument. Our archives cover a huge assortment of instruments and ensembles. We've really outgrown the name "Clarinet Institute." We are kind of like the March of Dimes. Inflation has made dimes less relevant, but everyone knows the name. We decided to keep the Clarinet Institute name for the same reason. Everyone knows us as having the largest music archive collection in the world. We've done so much archiving under the Clarinet Institute banner that it just wouldn't be right to change the name now.
If you live in the Los Angeles area and would like to play solo and chamber music with other clarinet players..... click here. We meet regularly throughout the year. It is a casual atmosphere and lots of fun!
Keep in touch and let me know how you like and use this service. The Clarinet Institute is a completely profitless organization. The feedback I get from clarinet players around the world makes this project worthwhile! Click here to send an email.
Send In Your Old Music
Do you have any old music for clarinet, other woodwinds or brass? If the copyright date is before 1933 (or it has no copyright date at all) it is probably out of print and lost to the music community. There are thousands of these works sitting in boxes all over the world. You can save these works and do your part to expand the growing clarinet repertoire. If you have a scanner, scan the music and save it either in .tif or .pdf format. Then email it to me. I'll check the copyright information and, if it is out of copyright, I will post it.
When scanning the music, don't use the "color" or "256 shades of gray" settings. While they do make beautiful scans, those settings create huge files. Instead, set your scanner software to the "black and white" or "b/w" setting with at least 250 dpi. That will create a good scan and a small file size. If you have any questions, please email me and I'll walk you through the process. Always check your spam folder. My emails seem to end up there a lot!
Composers! We Love Composers!
If you write music and want a wider audience, feel free to email me. Send in your music in PDF format. We love to post music of modern composers. Besides merely archiving music, one of our goals is to get new music into as many hands as possible. There is a lot of exciting new music being written every day. We want you to find that music and we want composers to get their music found!
Keep in touch and let me know how you like and use this service. The Clarinet Institute is a completely profitless organization. The feedback I get from clarinet players around the world makes this project worthwhile! Click here to send an email.
Send In Your Old Music
Do you have any old music for clarinet, other woodwinds or brass? If the copyright date is before 1933 (or it has no copyright date at all) it is probably out of print and lost to the music community. There are thousands of these works sitting in boxes all over the world. You can save these works and do your part to expand the growing clarinet repertoire. If you have a scanner, scan the music and save it either in .tif or .pdf format. Then email it to me. I'll check the copyright information and, if it is out of copyright, I will post it.
When scanning the music, don't use the "color" or "256 shades of gray" settings. While they do make beautiful scans, those settings create huge files. Instead, set your scanner software to the "black and white" or "b/w" setting with at least 250 dpi. That will create a good scan and a small file size. If you have any questions, please email me and I'll walk you through the process. Always check your spam folder. My emails seem to end up there a lot!
Composers! We Love Composers!
If you write music and want a wider audience, feel free to email me. Send in your music in PDF format. We love to post music of modern composers. Besides merely archiving music, one of our goals is to get new music into as many hands as possible. There is a lot of exciting new music being written every day. We want you to find that music and we want composers to get their music found!