Welcome!

Hello and welcome to PBDB! This blog is, to our knowledge, the first group blog by the entire bass faculty of a music school. We’re making history! (Well, bass blog history, anyway.) We hope to use this space to share our thoughts, experiences, and views on a wide range of subjects related to bass playing, learning, and teaching. We’ll also be posting about what’s going on bass-wise here at Peabody. And, given our natures, I wouldn’t be surprised to se a few posts on some random topics only marginally related to music. We’ll also be having some student guest bloggers from time to time.

Our goal in starting this blog is sort of twofold. From our direction going out, we want to share what we do and think about here in Baltimore, and share it with folks. But we also hope to get some flow from the outside in as well, hearing from you about what we write, or just sharing your thoughts and questions with us. Conservatory faculty traditionally have a stuffy and sort of unapproachable quality – that classic ivory tower feel. Perhaps we can use this blog to demystify ourselves a bit and let you all see what we’re about.

We will each blog under our own names, although certain posts of a more informational nature can be assumed to be from all of us. Mr. Weisner, who already spends way too much time online reading blogs, will be the “lead” poster and will do most of the maintenance work.

We already have some good material lined up for the blog. Mr Weisner will be posting a multipart series about what applicants should look for in a music school, which is a hot topic for a lot of people this time of year. Lee Philip, a senior at Peabody and a student of Mr. Hood’s, is spending this semester at Peabody’s sister school, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore. He will be guest blogging about his experiences here. Mr. Johnson has promised some interesting thoughts on some books he’s read that have applications to our musical lives. Plus, I suspect some photo and video content may appear on the site fairly soon.

We should mention at this point that Peabody has an excellent website at www.peabody.jhu.edu where you can learn a lot about the school and about us. Our departmental site, found under “strings,” has lots of general info about our program. Mr. Weisner briefly blogged on that site, but he is closing that effort down to focus on PBDB.

Enjoy and thanks for checking us out.