Katherine and I are a couple of clarinetists who met at Interlochen in the summer of 1984.

I was going into my senior year of high school; Katherine her junior year. Back then you could reduce your camp tuition by doing “work study,” and we were both ushers. We talked during our usher assignments, I bummed a back rub or two, and we played in the same orchestra. That was about the extent of it.

She went back to Maryland. I stayed at Interlochen for my senior year at the Arts Academy. The next summer, 1985, we started dating.

We got married in 1997. So apparently that worked out.

But I suppose you're here for our bona fides as clarinetists and not our love story, so let me back up.

Katherine started clarinet in fourth grade in Maryland in 1977. I started a year earlier, also in fourth grade, in Chicago.

My first clarinet was the instrument my grandfather had bought for my mom when she was in high school, which was then passed down to my sister and eventually to me. My parents' position was roughly: “Dammit, you're playing clarinet or NOTHING because we're not buying you an instrument you're just going to quit.”

So I played it.

Unfortunately, it was falling apart and I literally couldn't play the thing. After two years of struggling, my band director pulled me aside and essentially said, “Here, why don't you play bass clarinet, where you'll do less damage?”

And that was it. I like to say that the bass clarinet chose me rather than the other way around.

Eventually we both "Took Private^®" as the kids used to say. Katherine studied with Iggy Gennusa of the Baltimore Symphony; I studied with John Bruce Yeh of the Chicago Symphony, who convinced my parents that perhaps giving me a clarinet that actually worked would be helpful.

We both went through the youth-orchestra/conservatory pipeline. Katherine studied at the University of Michigan with John Mohler and later earned her Master's at UNC Greensboro with Kelly Burke. I went to Eastman, studying with Charlie Neidich, then received a Fulbright to go to Amsterdam and study bass clarinet with Harry Sparnaay.

That year changed my life.

Harry was a kind of pied piper for bass clarinetists. He convinced a whole generation of us that the bass clarinet didn't have to live in the back of an orchestra doubling the bassoons. It could be a solo instrument. You could build a career around it. So that's what I tried to do.

Meanwhile, Katherine was doing something equally important: teaching people how to play the clarinet.

After graduate school she played second and E-flat clarinet in the Kenosha Symphony and the Milwaukee Civic Symphony, and had a private studio of (what ultimately turned out to be hundreds of) students in Milwaukee before eventually moving to New York. Over the years she taught at the Special Music School at Lincoln Center and Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, and she's been on the clarinet faculty at Diller-Quaile in Manhattan since 1999. She's currently working on the international development of the Suzuki Method for clarinet and has contributed to several clarinet pedagogy books.

In other words, if you want to know why an eleven-year-old can't get over the break, ask Katherine.

I moved to Brooklyn in the early '90s and started freelancing. They say it takes about seven years to start “making it” in New York, and that was pretty much my experience. I started with a lot of Downtown/new-music work—Bang on a Can and similar groups—and gradually found myself doing the gigs I'd dreamed about when I was in school.

By 2005 I was teaching at Juilliard and New York University, had an orchestra job playing bass clarinet with the New Jersey Symphony, and was recording and touring with groups and musicians ranging from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus, Steve Reich and the Klezmatics to Art Garfunkel, Roberta Flack and the Beach Boys.

I played on more than sixty albums, three of which won Grammy Awards, and released eight solo recordings of my own.

But I was bored.

So I quit.

Not music entirely, as it turned out. But I left the orchestra and most of the freelance life and moved full-time into another career I'd already been building on the side: advertising.

I spent roughly 25 years in digital marketing and advertising, working at places including McCann/MRM, R/GA and eventually Amazon. I worked on brands ranging from Pepsi to Mentos (but never together, because apparently that's explosive), and eventually landed in Amazon's Brand Innovation Lab, where among other things I worked on figuring out how to sell cars on Amazon.

This might seem like a strange detour in a story about a clarinet store.

It isn't.

So how did Earspasm happen?

Earspasm.com started in 1997 because I needed a website to sell my first CD, Spasm.

Spasm.com was taken.

Thus: Earspasm.

For years Earspasm was mostly my personal music site. Then came YouTube. I started making videos about bass clarinet, clarinet, equipment, playing, reeds, mouthpieces, whatever I happened to be thinking about. People watched them. Then they started asking me what instruments I liked, what mouthpieces I used, where they could buy things I'd talked about, and whether I'd help them figure out what to get. And I found out that no one in the US sold many of these things, so I started carrying them.

Slowly, almost accidentally, Earspasm turned into a store.

Which brings us here.

In January 2024 I retired from Amazon to work on Earspasm full-time. In June 2026, Katherine joined me.

And this is basically what we do now: we try instruments. We play them. We argue about them. We try mouthpieces, reeds, ligatures and whatever other clarinet-related object somebody has invented. If we think something is good—and more importantly, if we can figure out who it's good for—we stock it.

If we don't like it, we don't.

Between the two of us, we've spent close to a century playing and teaching the clarinet. Which is horrifying when I actually write that down, but it's also useful when your job is helping somebody choose one.

We run Earspasm out of Brooklyn, where our shop is also a working studio. You can come in and try instruments rather than ordering five of the same clarinet hoping one works. We have a full recording setup, and we've built a surround-sound listening system that lets you hear yourself with acoustic simulations of some of the great concert halls.

Ever wanted to hear yourself play in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam? You can do that in Brooklyn. (You don't even have to buy anything. Although obviously we're not going to object if you do.)

Earspasm has become much larger than the little website I put up to sell a CD in 1997, but the basic idea hasn't changed much: we're clarinet players talking to other clarinet players.

We expect to keep doing this well into our “retirement.” (Ha! Retirement!)

Come visit us in Brooklyn sometime.

Love, Michael & Katherine