My name is Tom Hill and I have been a clarinetist and musician for about 45 years. I was fortunate to have been born in the rather rich environment of well-founded musical standards and schooling available in the New York/Philadelphia region of which I took full advantage, and subsequently got educated at The New England Conservatory during an especially advantageous time in Boston, during the reigns of clarinetists Harold Wright and Peter Hadcock. For graduate work I was chosen to join the very select class of Robert Marcellus at The Cleveland Institute of music.

 

My subsequent professional national and international playing included work in Boston and New England (including The Boston Symphony) and with well-founded ensembles in New York City and then in Los Angeles and Southern California.

I returned to Boston with an invitation to be the founding clarinetist of the acclaimed Boston Chamber Music Society where I then played for twenty-seven seasons alongside twenty-three seasons serving as Principal Clarinetist of The Boston Philharmonic.

 

All right. Now that the basic bio-bragging is over, please let me get to the more immediately relevant matter of what this might mean for and to you.

 

During the aforementioned 45 years, there has never been a time when I didn’t teach (including as faculty at several of Boston’s outstanding schools of music) and give masterclasses. Formally speaking, that teaching involved the clarinet and chamber music. Needless to say, I got better at it along the way –- more directly in touch with the raw active ingredients which make the specific acoustical signature of the clarinet authentic to itself, and more naturally able to convey something of the narrative essence which is music itself.