There’s a lot that people don’t know about the bassoon: what it looks like (long and cylindrical), what it sounds like (rich, deep, slightly buzzing), or the name of a single person who plays it (Edward Elgar, if you’ve ever heard the “Pomp and Circumstance Marches”). But, almost every day on Instagram, Morgan Davison, a twenty-two-year-old bassoon master’s student at Juilliard, has answers for the bassoon-curious, providing her nearly thirty thousand followers with a running selection of practice excerpts from Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, and the gamut of bassoon-heavy composers.
Davison benefits from a years-old trend in the flourishing micro-niche of online orchestral practicing. In 2017, the renowned violinist Hilary Hahn posted an Instagram video with the caption “#100daysofpractice.” The premise was simple: for a hundred days, she would post a daily video of herself practicing, letting other musicians see how she prepared for performances. On one day, Hahn played a series of slow, precise double-stops from Robert Schumann’s piano quartet; on another, the athletic, isolated shifts from Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. The hashtag sparked a revolution: in three years, thousands of dedicated Instagram practice accounts have emerged, in which musicians—from top-flight pros to middle schoolers—post daily clips of themselves practicing their instrument. Since Hahn’s post, the #100daysofpractice hashtag has been used three hundred and eighty thousand times.
The accounts are a way for musicians to hold themselves accountable for consistent, productive practice and to receive feedback from other musicians. They are also an archival tool, a way to track progress over time. Practicing, long an activity completed in solitude, with only a metronome and tuner as company, has now become its own sort of performance. Playing to a virtual audience has become one of the few remaining incentives for musicians who are otherwise holed up at home, away from their schools, orchestras, and teachers. “Before the quarantine and everything, I was practicing for a concert I had in three weeks, I was practicing for a concerto competition, I was practicing for all these different things that were taken out of thin air,” Alec Glass, a cello-performance major at California State University, Northridge, told me. (His account is approaching four thousand followers.) “Now I’m posting to better myself, and people are watching and commenting, and [it’s] very encouraging.”
Davison started her account two years ago, days before her senior year of college, after realizing that she was not good enough at the bassoon to get into top master’s programs. “I thought for a really long time about how I could change something about myself or something about my playing or practice,” she said. “I narrowed it down to my quality and quantity of practice time. I was just not practicing as much as I needed.” She had started playing bassoon in sixth grade, after her oboe-and-flute teacher revealed that it was her favorite member of the woodwind family. Davison had never heard the bassoon before, so her teacher took out the log-like instrument and demonstrated. “As soon as she played the low B-flat, which is the lowest note, I was completely sold,” Davison said.
Davison quit oboe, flute, and piano lessons to focus solely on the bassoon—a decision of passion but also strategy. “I realized that no one played bassoon and everyone played flute, and so I got all the best parts and all the solos, because I was the only bassoon player,” she said. The instrument’s goofy reputation didn’t bother her. (Rainn Wilson, in his memoir “The Bassoon King,” calls the instrument his “nerd crucifix,” and during a promotional appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” he spiked one into the ground.) Davison was a regular attendee of International Double Reed Society conventions, and enrolled in the Interlochen Arts Academy, in Michigan, an intensive arts-focussed boarding high school. But, as Davison prepared to enter her last year of college, at the Manhattan School of Music, she confronted the cruel numbers of the bassoon world. The best conservatories have only a handful of bassoon spots open every year, and stable orchestral jobs are even more scarce. She’d have to step up.
A bassoon practice account was the solution: if Davison had to post daily videos of herself playing, she’d constantly have to create something worth putting out into the world—a flubbed scale was not an option. “At first, I kind of started it as a joke,” she said. “I only followed my close friends and was, like, ‘Oh, you can follow me back if you want, but I totally understand if you don’t. It’s fine.’ ”
The friends did follow back, and so did thousands of others. “I was, like, Well, I don’t really understand why they’re following me,” Davison recalled. “They probably don’t even know what a bassoon is.” As she posted such clips as the eerie opening solo of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” her audience began to dwarf that of any student recital. She had always practiced with a metronome and tuner, focussing on tempo, pitch, and rhythm, but listening to herself made her strengths and weaknesses more apparent. “If I were to walk into a professional audition right now and play it the way that I just recorded it, would I get the job?” she’d say to herself. Often, the answer was no. She’d re-record her practices until she was happy, and then do it again the next day.
The viewers watching Davison’s videos, or those of any other popular practice account, are a mixed bag. Some are classically trained musicians, but most are not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the bassoon, or of classical music generally. For John-Henry Crawford, a Manhattan-based professional cellist approaching Day 900 of what he’s dubbed #the1000dayjourney, the feedback that he receives on Instagram is less professional but no less helpful than what he’d received as a student at the Curtis Institute of Music or as a participant in international cello competitions. “It’s more of a perspective from a distance rather than a micro-perspective of, you know, ‘This little tiny thing that you’re doing with your bow,’ ” he said. “It’s less related to what you’re doing and more about the sound of the instrument, the pieces you’re playing.” The comments from his fifty-five thousand followers are usually short and sweet: a repeated clapping emoji, “beautiful playing,” a question about the equipment he’s using. Davison gets those comments too, though she estimates that eighty per cent are men telling her how gorgeous she is. She’s learned to focus on the more music-centered remarks.
As a classically trained clarinetist myself and the past owner of a short-lived practice account, I’ve found that the most important factor for a popular Instagram practice account isn’t skill—nor good looks—but consistency. Instagram’s algorithm seems to reward those who post every day with prominent placement in feeds, search, and discovery. I’ve seen motivated high-school violinists with more followers than the first-prize cellist in the International Tchaikovsky Competition, and internationally touring clarinet soloists upended by full-time clarinet teachers.
In the analog world, it’s a joy to hear renowned musicians at their most polished, performing sophisticated repertoire with superhuman command and control. At a concert, I want the Swedish clarinet virtuoso Martin Fröst to play so well that I leave the hall unsure whether to practice arpeggios for eight hours or retire. On Instagram, I’m less exacting. I appreciate the mistakes—the flummoxed look of someone who, after thirteen run-throughs, can’t quite nail a pesky chromatic passage. There’s something comforting and inspiring about the slow crescendo of daily improvement. Any musician has been told that “practice makes perfect” (sort of) and the premise of the ten-thousand-hour rule. It’s nice to scroll back through someone’s feed and see that the maxims aren’t so far off—that the long slog can be worth it.
When Davison was accepted into Juilliard for graduate school, it seemed that her practice account had done its job. Sometimes, despite the flood of engagement that she receives on the videos, she’s considered deleting the account. It was time to move on. “But then I get these messages from high schoolers that say, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s completely revolutionized the way that I think about bassoon,’ ‘You’re so inspiring,’ ‘Please keep posting videos’—and it’s just so inspiring and encouraging,” she said. “So I plan on keeping the account for as long as possible. And I think I can use it to really help myself grow even more.”
