Dr. David A. Wells
Bassoon
David A. Wells earned the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied with Marc Vallon; his dissertation is an expansive history and discography of the bassoon in jazz. He also holds degrees in bassoon performance from Arizona State University and Florida State University. In addition to his studio at CSU Stanislaus, Dr. Wells teaches bassoon at California State University, Sacramento and San Joaquin Delta College. He is the Operations Director of the Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition, a biennial competition for young women bassoonists from the Americas, and co-hosted the 2012 competition at the University of the Pacific.
Dr. Wells serves as principal bassoonist of the Townsend Opera Players and the Merced Symphony, and performs often with other orchestras around Northern California. He can also be heard playing bassoon and clarinet in the gypsy swing quintet Hot Club Faux Gitane. His past performance activities have been widely varied, ranging from renaissance and baroque music on period instruments (shawms, recorders, baroque bassoons and oboes) and avant-garde music on electric bassoon with Downbeat Means Attack. In addition to his career as a bassoonist, Wells also devotes time to music scholarship. He earned an M.A. in Historical Musicology from UW-Madison, and contributed nearly a dozen articles to the forthcoming second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music.
For more, please visit davidawells.com