Founding Story

At a PMEA Band Festival in one of the historically coldest winter of Pennsylvania in 2024, I heard my three years old Grenadilla wood clarinet popped and the upper joint cracked on stage at a rehearsal. I immediately panicked knowing I will be performing as the first chair clarinetist at the evening concert in just a few hours with quite a few exposed solo parts. Thanks to my dearest and generous clarinetist friends at PMEA Band, I was able to swap instruments last minute and give a wonderful performance. Later that week I learned that quite a few of my clarinet friends experienced the same unexpected cracking of their instruments during rehearsal and performances due to the intolerance of the wood under the drastic temperature and humidity change in the cold winter. The repair of the cracked wood clarinet was costly, time consuming and heartbreaking (the repair of the crack requires drilling multiple pins on the wooden body of the instrument to secure and seal up the leak!). Unlike piano or brass instruments which seem to last forever and are literally unbreakable, woodwind instruments like the clarinet, bassoon and oboe are not only expensive to own, but are costly to maintain and easy to break. The constant need to resupply reeds and many other necessary accessories like barrels, ligatures, and mouthpieces, reed making equipments and humidifiers, etc, are all adding additional costs on top of owning the instrument. 

To handle all these hassles and consistently maintain a passion for playing a woodwind instrument requires tremendous support both financially and emotionally from the family, teacher and school, especially for students who are not from a family with a musical background like myself. I personally went through all these hassles for over ten years (four years piano and six years clarinet) and thanks to my dearest parents who are not musicians but are extremely supportive for my passion and provided everything I needed to my musical pursuits. Understanding how challenging and discouraging this journey could possibly be, I initiated this idea of establishing a platform to provide free and handy information young woodwind musicians could possibly need to start on their musical journey from instrument selection, free beginner lessons, instrument care, repair and maintenance tips, piano accompaniment, recording studio to performance and competition opportunities. This is also a place for senior musicians to donate their retired instruments or possibly swap instruments and exchange accessories to save costs for each other, and share the donated instruments and supplies with younger students and family who can not afford or have limited access to such resources. 

Music education, particularly classical music genre, has been evidently in decline for recent years and music programs like band and orchestra in public school are less and less popular than other extracurricular activities like sports, arts, social media and video games among Gen Z and Alpha. It would be a great honor and accomplishment if this platform and our team of young musicians could contribute to elevate music education and empower younger students to pursue and find passion of music particularly the timeless beautiful classical music. 

Founder & President of Empowering Woodwinds

Daniel Xu