Michael Drapkin has enjoyed a career as a music performer, symphony orchestra clarinetist, composer, arranger, publisher, music retailer, educator, clinician and adjudicator. As a clarinetist, he was a member of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, as Associate Principal and Bass Clarinet, New York City Opera Touring Company as Principal Clarinet and Lake George Opera Festival (now Opera Saratoga) as Principal Clarinet. Drapkin has performed with the New Jersey Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic, the Portland Symphony, the Long Island Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and with conductors Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, Neville Marriner, Leonard Slatkin, Lucas Foss, Christopher Keene, Klaus Tennstedt, Frederick Fennell, and many more celebrated orchestras and maestros. He has spent summers playing at Aspen and at Tanglewood as a Berkshire Music Center fellow, and was Solo Clarinetist and Executive Director of Music Amici, Rockland County, NY’s oldest professional chamber music group and one of the finest in the New York City area, and performed with them in Carnegie Hall. He also co-founded the Texas Chamber Orchestra and the Cypress Chamber Orchestra in the Houston, Texas area.
Upon moving to Sarasota, Florida in mid-2020, Drapkin was recruited to join the Venice Symphony as Principal Bass Clarinetist. He has soloed or performed with the Chamber Orchestra of Sarasota, the Southwest Florida Symphony in Ft. Myers, and with his klezmer band Yiddish Cowboys, which headlined the IsraelFest in Ft. Myers. He has also performed with EnsembleNewSRQ in Sarasota, Florida’s premiere contemporary chamber ensemble. He is also a member of the Sarasota Clarinet Trio with members from the Sarasota and Florida orchestras, and the Venice Symphony Woodwind Trio.
Mr. Drapkin is internationally known in the clarinet world as author of the Symphonic Repertoire for the Bass Clarinet series – excerpt books Volumes One, Two and Three, and his transposed parts books Volumes Four and Five, which were tested in 53 professional orchestras in the US ranging from the New York Philharmonic to the San Francisco Symphony, and internationally from La Scala to Reykjavík. His books have become standard literature for generations of bass clarinetists worldwide and are sold at his eCommerce website at bassclarinet.net. He also released two books for the clarinet: “How to Work on Clarinet Reeds,” and “Drapkin’s Book of Clarinet Calisthenics,” and published his series of the six major public-domain clarinet concerti transcribed for clarinet and string quartet.
Drapkin founded and presented the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship (BCOME) for two summers at the Brevard Music Festival in North Carolina, attracting as attendees professional musicians, industry professionals, college music faculty and deans from as far away as Singapore. For BCOME, he was awarded $100,000 in grants from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City – the nation’s largest entrepreneurship foundation – and was one of their first music grantees ever. For his efforts with BCOME, Drapkin was a finalist for Best Non-Profit CEO for The Ten Awards – the “Academy Awards of New York Business,” an annual selection of ten companies and individuals in the greater New York business community that display extraordinary leadership and innovation to improve their business.
He has delivered keynote speeches, lectures and master classes across the U.S. including Eastman, Juilliard, Northwestern and the California Institute for the Arts. Many deans believe that the curricular movement towards the curricular integration of entrepreneurship in higher education was a result of Drapkin’s lectures and conferences, as well as the committee leadership positions he held with the College Music Society (see below).
Drapkin served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Phil, which implemented one of the most progressive community-based models for symphony orchestras in the United States: the Brooklyn Model. He wrote a book of the same name about their groundbreaking model, which can benefit any classical music group of any size, and will be released shortly with a foreword by American conductor Leonard Slatkin.
Following the Wall Street adage of eat what you kill, Drapkin developed his own klezmer band Yiddish Cowboys in Austin, Texas, which released a CD on iTunes. He featured them in the Classical Crossover showcase he ran for South by Southwest in 2010 and 2011, where he brought bands from around the world that are classically trained and have crossed over to the mainstream and brought their virtuosity with them. Yiddish Cowboys is now the only professional klezmer band on the Florida Gulf Coast, and they have performed in numerous venues and festivals from Clearwater down to Cape Coral.
Drapkin is a scholarly member of the College Music Society, which represents college music faculty worldwide. He was appointed chair of their Careers Outside the Academy Committee three times, and led a pre-conference seminar on entrepreneurship for them in Atlanta. He also has been a member of the Board of Directors and a keynote speaker for their Southwest Chapter, and made presentations at the CMS National Conference annually for 13 years.
For 20 years Drapkin has been a music judge and chief judge at high school marching band contests around the country for US Bands, where he judged local, regional, state and national contests in 11 states. He has also been concertmaster of five community concert bands. Mr. Drapkin is a Selmer Artist. He performs on a beautiful Selmer-Paris Model 67B jet black bass clarinet.
Michael Drapkin is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Stanley Hasty, toured Japan with the Eastman Wind Ensemble with Donald Hunsberger, and played Principal Clarinet in the Eastman Philharmonia under David Effron. He also studied clarinet with Gary Gray, Charles Bay and Harold Wright; klezmer with Sid Beckerman.
Drapkin is working to change the classical music world through Restructuring Classical Music, which calls for more chamber orchestras in America in order to preserve the classical music canon, and he transcribed Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, Richard Strauss’s Salome’s Dance, and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique for chamber orchestra, and recorded them with the Janacek Philharmonic Ostrava in the Czech Republic. His recordings were released by the Pro Organo label, and are available on Naxos, iTunes and Spotify and Naxos submitted his Strauss recording for Grammy consideration. He also drafted an upcoming book Extreme Transcription, enumerating the techniques he developed, and will be released shortly.
Drapkin’s Berlioz transcription has been performed by orchestras on three continents, and he was commissioned by the Venice Symphony in Florida to transcribe the entire Nutcracker Ballet for chamber orchestra. It was premiered in December 2023. He will also be releasing The Nutcracker Suite for Chamber Orchestra, and More Nutcracker Suite for Chamber Orchestra.
Drapkin recently inaugurated a video series Did You Know? on interesting facts about classical music, and has been getting thousands of views on Facebook and YouTube.
In addition to Drapkin’s seminal books for the bass clarinet, he has been a prolific composer/arranger. His Suite of Old Yiddish Melodies for concert band was premiered by the Wind Ensemble at the North Carolina School of the Arts, his John Dowland Suite for Band was premiered by the Manhattan Wind Ensemble, his Gershwin – Walking the Dog for clarinet and band was premiered by the Rockland County Concert Band, The Rabbi Chaplain’s March was premiered by the Navy Band of the West, and My Resting Place – based on an old Yiddish Song – was premiered by the Mile High Freedom Band in Denver. He has also soloed Tempest Hora with numerous bands. He also recently completed his Der Rosenkavalier Suite for Band, Three Tallis Songs for Band. Drapkin has been composing arrangements for two clarinets and bass clarinet since he was in college, and they span repertoire from orchestra, band, opera, marches and other genres, and have been published as two volumes across over 56 pieces, 12 books and 1400 pages of music. Michael’s bass clarinet books are published by Drapkin Music Publications, and his entire catalog was previously distributed by Carl Fischer/Theodore Presser worldwide until his publications were reacquired by Drapkin Music Publications. You can see all of his compositions at http://www.drapkin.net/compositions/
Essays on Austin
Essays on Classical Music
• UT Austin Keynote Speech 2-3-2001: Putting your Degree to Work
• It’s a Pitch(published by Symposium and Polyphonic.org
• The Commoditization of Orchestra Musicians(published by Polyphonic.org)
• An Indexed Financial Model for Symphony Orchestras (published by Polyphonic.org)
• The Rise of the Industrial Clarinetist(published by The Clarinet and reposted by Polyphonic.org)
• Musicians as Programmers(published by Electronic Musician Magazine)