 It is my distinct pleasure to welcome my new friend, Jason Schafer, to Music & More. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Would you please tell us maybe where you're from and how you actually began playing the clarinet? Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be on the show and great to meet you and get to spend a lot of good time with you this week. I originally grew up in Columbia, Maryland on the East Coast, and I went to school, kind of stayed up on the East Coast a bit. I went to school up in Upstate New York at the Eastman School of Music. And then from there, kind of stayed over there, went down to Miami Beach and played in the New World Symphony. And after that, finally made my way out to Colorado, and now I love it so much, I'm definitely not leaving. And in terms of when I first started to play the clarinet, I actually have to say my story is not tremendously exciting because one day in elementary school in third grade, they sent a little piece of paper home with me to my parents, and it just had a bunch of little check boxes for what instrument do you want to play. And I said, oh, clarinet, that sounds good. And I picked it, and I loved it, never put it down ever since. I have to say that it actually makes me think about why public school music programs are so important because without that, I wouldn't be playing. I can't agree more on public school music and music teachers. These school educators, music educators are some of my heroes. They are, I consider them really to be on the front lines of making sure that the future of classical music is strong. So I couldn't agree more, and thank you for giving that shout out to them. Oh, absolutely. You know, the clarinet is one of my favorite instruments. I've told you before, I'm a cellist. However, as I began studying and playing more, I fell in love with the clarinet. And while you just checked a box to say, OK, I'm going to play the clarinet, was there something really that drew you to the sound? What really drew you to the instrument after all those years? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, as time went on, I definitely fell in love with it more and more and more every passing day. And I think the reason for that is that kind of similarly to the cello actually, the clarinet can do so much. It really isn't in one little box of the possibilities musically. And I feel like the clarinet can be as calm and relaxed and peaceful as, say, the second movement of the Mozart-Clarinet Concerto. And you can make an audience feel that incredible sense of just relaxation and peace. And then on the total flip side, you can take a composer like Mahler, for instance, who will frequently write in his clarinet parts to essentially sound like trumpets. And we can be these crazy, loud, intense, declamatory kind of sounds. So I think the instrument is just, with no changes, the instrument itself is capable of so much, and composers use it for all of those different ways of making music and all those different sounds and personalities. You know, that's a perfect segue actually to my next question, because you will be performing Mozart's clarinet concerto coming up very shortly. And the clarinet, maybe I should say like this, Mozart discovered the clarinet when he was, oh, I don't know, about 20-something years old. And once he discovered it, he began really writing for it. And I find it to be fascinating that the last work that he really completed was this clarinet concerto. And he wrote many other works. Can you talk about how the clarinet maybe evolved during Mozart's time and what drew, what maybe you think drew Mozart to the clarinet? Sure, absolutely. I mean, Mozart actually was really good friends with this clarinetist Anton Stadler. And so I think we really owe Stadler a lot for the clarinet concerto and the clarinet quintet and even the Kegelstadt trio, those big clarinet works that Mozart wrote. And, you know, getting back to your question about why the clarinet, what does he love about the clarinet so much, there's even a letter that Mozart wrote to Stadler where he says, I just am amazed, something along the lines of, I'm just amazed that you can make your instrument sound so much like the human voice. And amazing to hear Mozart himself say something like that. And especially because back in that time, right around Mozart's time of when he was really known for being the amazing composer he is, the clarinet was actually looked completely different and it was still really under development. It was a brand new instrument in the orchestra. Haydn was one of the very first to actually use it. And it looked totally different. I mean, like you have this beautiful modern clarinet now with all these silver keys and kind of a very hard African wood called grenadilla. And back then in Mozart's time, I mean, probably most of these keys wouldn't be there. They were just randomly trying, drilling them in different places. I mean, all these crazy things that they used to do to try to really get the instrument to evolve and become the amazing thing it is now. And so an interesting fact about Mozart's connection with it, speaking of that evolution, is that Stadler was really on the forefront of these instrument developments. And he had a brand new instrument made for him by an instrument maker that was now we kind of referred to as the Bassett clarinet. And that instrument actually has a few more notes at the bottom of the range. It kind of, you know, my instrument goes down to a written low E and his could go down to a low C. And Mozart composed the concerto specifically for that instrument to use that full range of his exciting new development, I guess. And just kind of turned out that that instrument kind of fell out of favor and now we really use the modern clarinet. So when modern clarinetists have to play this, have to play, I should say, it's our most wonderful piece we get to play. When we get to play this amazing piece, we have to kind of make some small modifications to the notes that are actually written in order to fit Mozart's writing into the range of the modern instrument. Well, would you be so kind as to maybe play a little bit of the concerto for us right now? Absolutely. It sounds great. Thank you for being with us. And of course, we're really excited to be featuring you in Mozart's clarinet concerto coming up on April 17th. Well, thank you so much, Elliot. And I'm super excited for that too. And I have to say, I'm a fan of your show, really big fan, and I'm really happy to have been on it. But kind of, I wanted to mention something in the spirit of music and more, I found this Mozart wig and do you think there's just anything that we could do with it for your show? I think we could figure out some way to work it in. Awesome. Beethoven! What can I get you? Nothing for the best. Mozart? Beethoven? Come to my bar? Is this some kind of joke? Herr Mozart, what are you doing here? The Longmont Symphony is performing a concert of my honor called A Portrait of Mozart. Oh, big deal! Last season, the whole season was dedicated to me. How did that go? Well, not so well. Pity, why not? Well, you know, global pandemic. You were mentioning jokes earlier. I was recently reading TMZ and Arnold Schwarzenegger's making a new movie with Liam Neeson and Robert De Niro. And it's about classical keyboard players. And Liam Neeson says, I'll be Mozart and Robert De Niro says, I'll be Beethoven Arnold Schwarzenegger says, I'll be Bach. You know, Herr Mozart, you are very funny. It's a pity that you died. Well, I have a joke that's equally insulting to both of you. When I was last in Vienna, I visited your cemetery where your graves are at and when I walked past it, heard some beautiful music emitting from the ground. I asked the undertaker, I said, what is the sound that's coming from the ground? And he said it's Mozart and Beethoven decomposing. It's a pleasure, Herr Beethoven. It's always a pleasure to hear your music. Have a wonderful, happy 251st birthday. Well, goodbye. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen, like you. Here is another example of a repetition in music. If we look at these four bars closely, you will see that the first two bars are identical to the next two bars. In addition to the equal sign, I will also add a repetition sign, and that looks like this. I find that marking all of these repetitions is very helpful for me being able to conduct a score by memory.