William Short

William Short was appointed Principal Bassoon of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 2012. He previously served in the same capacity with the Delaware Symphony Orchestra and has also performed with the Houston and Detroit Symphonies and the Philadelphia Orchestra. William has performed as soloist with the Vermont and Delaware Symphonies, the New York Classical Players, and the Strings Festival Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Gotham Wind Quintet and has performed many times with the Camerata Pacifica, Dolce Suono, and Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble chamber music series.

A dedicated teacher, William serves on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, and Temple University, and is a Valade Fellow at Interlochen Arts Camp. In addition, he is a Visiting Faculty member at The Tianjin Juilliard School and has held visiting guest positions at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has presented classes around the world, including at conferences of the International Double Reed Society, for which he served as a board member from 2017-2021.

William has performed and taught at the Lake Champlain, Lake Tahoe, Mostly Mozart, National Orchestral Institute, National Youth Orchestra, Stellenbosch (South Africa), Strings, Twickenham, and Verbier Festivals. An occasional arranger, editor, and composer, his work has been published by the Theodore Presser Company and TrevCo Music.

William received his Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Daniel Matsukawa and Bernard Garfield, and his Master of Music at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he studied with Benjamin Kamins. As a student, he attended festivals including the Music Academy of the West, Pacific Music Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, and the Verbier Festival. Additional major teachers have included Jeanine Attaway, Kristin Wolfe Jensen, and William Lewis.

A Fox Artist, William plays on a Model 750, which he is proud to have helped develop.

Release

April 02, 2015  /  William Short

“Don’t think of the moment when you throw away a reed as a point of failure. Think of it as a point of release, because that reed is out of your life forever.”

As discussed before, having had a fatalistic attitude toward making reeds, I would go for unconscionably long stretches without making any. Half of the solution was committing myself to a regular schedule of reed-making—the pipeline. The other half was an attitude shift.

The above is advice Ben Kamins gave to me during one of my summers at the Music Academy of the West. Over time, it has revolutionized my concept of success and failure in reed-making. I no longer measure success by the number of reeds that pan out. My feeling of competence has nothing to do with whether or not any particular piece of cane turns into a usable reed. Moreover, if I’m making reeds regularly, I’m rarely so desperate as to be wholly dependent on the outcome of a single day’s work.

Instead, I derive the most satisfaction from clarifying where I stand. Sure, confirming that I have some good pieces of cane is great, but so is weeding out those pieces of cane that will never, ever pan out. We’ve all had the experience of hacking away at reeds that simply won’t change. While the time spent on those can easily become frustrating, I'd rather find comfort in throwing them in the trash. (Incidentally, that’s the eventual fate of all of my reeds, except for the few on which I won jobs, which I keep for sentimental reasons.) I love knowing, at the end of the day, that I’ve narrowed the field to only my best prospects.

Even in “dry spells,” this attitude, coupled with my annual reed experiment, gives me the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve collected data and reconfirmed a standard for what’s acceptable and what isn’t. There's a certain comfort in ruthlessly adhering to that standard.

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tags / Reeds