In accordance with the Unversity-wide measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, this performance has been canceled.


Dr. David A. Wells teaches bassoon and music history at California State University, Sacramento, where he also formerly served as co-director of the annual Festival of New American Music (FeNAM). As a performer, he plays both modern and period instruments in a wide variety of ensembles and styles. On modern bassoon, he freelances with orchestras throughout Northern California, collaborates with colleagues in chamber groups, and plays with the swing sextet Hot Club Faux Gitane. On Baroque bassoon, he has recently performed with the American Bach Soloists, the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Sinfonia Spirituosa, the Sacramento Baroque Soloists, Capella Antiqua, and at the Carmel and Oregon Bach Festivals. This season, he will also perform on a Romantic-era bassoon with the Musica Redemptor orchestra in Austin, TX.



Wells serves as co-Executive director for the Meg Quigley Vivaldi Competition and Bassoon Symposium, a biennial three-day conference centered on a competition for young women bassoonists from the Americas. He is also active as a music scholar, having presented papers at the conferences of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the International Double Reed Society, on topics including the history of the bassoon in jazz, rediscovering the bassoonist who first played the Rite of Spring solo, the effects of World War I on American orchestras, and cross-gender casting in the operas of Lully and Rameau.



Wells holds both a DMA in Bassoon Performance and an MA in Musicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and previously studied at Florida State University and Arizona State University. His principal teachers include Jeffrey Lyman, Jeff Keesecker, and Marc Vallon.