Dale Taylor

Woodwinds

Dale Taylor studied early performance practice at the University of Miami, where he worked under Arnold Grayson in the Collegium Musicum.  He then studied recorder privately with Phil Levin and Bernard Krainis, attended the Oberlin College Baroque Performance Institute twice, and worked as Supervisor of Levin Historical Instruments for five years, building quality hand made reproductions of renaissance and baroque woodwinds including recorders, traversi, cornetti, bassoons, shawms, rackets and clarinets.  He restored early woodwinds for New York's Center for Musical Antiquities.  Subsequently he has been in demand to repair instruments on his own.  In the late 70s he ran the national office of the American Recorder Society.  He has spent considerable time working in living history museums, where he acquired a broad-based knowledge of the social history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he uses to inform his understanding of early musical thought.  He has studied the way in which period acoustics influenced musical performance style.  He was the featured woodwind tuner at South Street Seaport Museum's musical district tours. Dale wrote Writer's Digest Books' Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Colonial America, 1607-1783, and Putting Recorders and their Players to the Test, which appeared in the November 2000 American Recorder.  He read Occurrences of European Double Reed Instruments in the New World to 1815: A Survey at the 1986 annual meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society, and he wrote A Bird Fancier's Delight which appeared in Early American Life in February of 1986.  He recently began to self-publish a variety of music for recorders and early double reeds. Dale has performed in the Victoria Bach Festival, Mercury Baroque, I Solisti da Camera, Capriole, the Cooke-Taylor Duo, the Governor's Music, the Locrian Consort, Musick's Monument, Texas Early Music Project, Passing Measures / Passing Fancies, the Virginia Pro Musica and in ad hoc chamber ensembles with personnel from the NW Philharmonic, NJ Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Vienna Boy's Choir and the NY City Opera.  His solo performances include numerous sonata performances, Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, the solo part in Britten's Noye's Fludde and parts in several Bach cantatas.  He has appeared on Public Television, recorded a L'Oreal commercial, appeared at the Houston Revels and Texas Renaissance Festival and been Music Director for the Virginia Shakespeare Festival.  He has taught at the "Texas Toot", in Rio Grande, NM, Denver, CO "Rocky", Little Rock, AR, Birmingham, AL, Gainesville, FL, and Providence, RI, Chapter American Recorder Society workshops, led meetings of the Austin, TX, Phoenix, AZ, New Orleans, LA, West Suburbann, IL, Albuquerque, Rio Grande and Santa Fe, NM, Denver, CO, Bergen County, Navesink, North Jersey, Princeton and Somerset Hills, NJ, the Virginia Beach and Williamsburg VA, Greater New York, NY and Philadelphia, PA Chapters of the American Recorder Society, privately and through Young Audiences.