Then & Now: Shannon Lannigan Thompson, PYP Alumni (1981-83)

Posted on May 27, 2019

I played second clarinet in the Portland Youth Philharmonic from 1981 to 1983 during my senior year at David Douglas High School and freshman year at Reed College. College students dominated the wind and brass sections back then (with the exception of wunderkind clarinetist Theresa Schumacher), and I felt completely out of my league. My first concert with the orchestra included some of the most famous symphonic music: Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Bolero, and Afternoon of Faun. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 was also on that concert, and it remains my favorite Beethoven concerto. Other PYP musical highlights for me were Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky Cantata and Dohnanyi’s Suite in F# Minor. During this time, I experienced my first (but not last) tears on stage listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings. This exposure to learning and performing such masterworks was a huge influence on me, and my experience in the Portland Youth Philharmonic was the single biggest factor that led me to enroll as a music major when I transferred to the University of Oregon.

I suspect that Mr. A regretted his decision to bring me into the orchestra, as I was not a very good clarinetist, and I remember being called out a lot in rehearsals. PYP rehearsals were two evenings each week. (I believe they were Wednesday and Thursday). One was a wind and percussion sectional and the other was the full orchestra. My friends were playing a concert with the Greater Portland Youth Wind Ensemble on one of those rehearsal evenings, so I decided that I would attend their concert. I thought it was important that I stop by before rehearsal to inform Mr. A that I would not be attending his rehearsal. You can imagine the lecture that followed after Mr. A got over the shock of what I had just told him. I don’t know what I was thinking, except that it had been very clear in my head that one would be excused from rehearsals to attend a concert.

When I first joined the orchestra, I had a regular B-flat clarinet only. Many standard orchestra pieces call for a clarinet pitched in A as well. I was not adept enough to read most of the clarinet parts down a half step, so I ended up having to rewrite each A clarinet part for B-flat clarinet. It was a very tedious job, particularly for this busy eighteen-year-old. My clarinet teacher, Stan George (who was certainly joking), told me that one could lower the pitch of the instrument by putting a string down the bore. I experimented with different materials at home, and I found that I could approximate the pitch of an A clarinet with a length of bias tape. The results, as you can imagine, were stuffy and imprecise. Nevertheless, I decided it was worth a try, and I came to rehearsal one evening with the bias tape in my clarinet. Mr. A was on to me immediately, as the strange sounds that were coming from the second clarinet section were not jiving with the rest of the woodwind section. What proceeded was one very awkward conversation, and a lot of scrambling by me to transpose my music by sight. Soon after, Stan found me an A clarinet at a church sale.

I just completed my twenty-second year as the clarinet professor at Western Carolina University. I am also a member of two regional orchestras: I serve as principal clarinetist of the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra and I am bass clarinetist of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. The ASO Season concluded with Rite of Spring, and I’m back on clarinet prepping (i.e. furious metronome work) for HSO’s first rehearsal on the Firebird.

I’ve been observing the Portland music scene a bit more closely the last few years, since David Hattner took over the PYP. David and I share a clarinet teacher, Richard MacDowell (he at Interlochen Arts Academy, me at the University of Texas), and when I was working on my doctoral treatise, David was the guy on the internet who knew and had all the old recordings of the great clarinetists.

When I lived in Austin, Texas, I taught private clarinet lessons to a highly intelligent and motivated sixth grader named James Shields. I knew there was something different about this beginning clarinetist when he brought the clarinet solo part to the Mozart Concerto into his second lesson. I showed him how to play the one passage in the exposition that stays within the lower range of the instrument, and James showed up to his next lesson with that passage fully learned and at performance tempo! It is a beautiful coincidence that James is now the principal clarinetist of my hometown orchestra, the Oregon Symphony.