Janis McKay: Spotlight on the bassoon

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Sam Morris

UNLV music professor Janis McKay hated the bassoon when first assigned to it as a youth.

Name: Janis McKay, bassoonist, professor

Age: 45

Education: Bachelor’s in music education, University of Georgia; master’s in performance, University of Louisville; doctorate in music performance, Ohio State.

Titles: Principal bassoonist, Las Vegas Philharmonic; associate professor of bassoon, UNLV. She also is temporary principal bassoonist this season for the Reno Philharmonic, where she usually plays contrabassoon. She’s performed with various orchestras and headliners from Luciano Pavarotti to Metallica.

Getting started: Born and raised in Valdosta, Ga., McKay began playing piano and handbells at an early age, and sang in a choir. In sixth grade she started on saxophone and knew music would be her path in life.

Life with bassoon: Bassoonists are few and in demand by colleges and orchestras. At conferences, they flock to one another, discussing reeds that they make themselves (like woodworkers), delighted to be among their own.

Starting out can be tricky, says McKay, who has a warm sense of humor about the bassoon: “Kids are turned off by it. It’s awkward. It’s big. There are reed issues.”

The bassoon was thrust upon her when she requested to switch from saxophone to oboe in high school band. McKay hated it, but complied — planning to study jazz saxophone in college. About that time, a University of Georgia professor spotted her performing. Needing a bassoonist, the school gave her a scholarship “immediately,” she says. Once there, she realized opportunities that came with the bassoon, including a chance to play in the orchestra. Seminary was her next move. She wanted to become a music minister, but the Baptist church turned fundamentalist, knocking women out of high positions.

Las Vegas: She arrived in 1995 and loved it immediately. “It was the biggest city I ever lived in. I loved the desert. I loved that you could have a 24-hour drive-through cleaner, eat at any time.” Her husband, Bill Bernatis, the Philharmonic’s principal horn player and UNLV professor, joined her later.

Highlights: Playing with Placido Domingo, whose opening aria featured a bassoon solo, while scared out of her mind. Another highlight: sitting in with the Moscow Radio Symphony when it came through town to play Verdi’s Requiem and needed a fourth bassoonist. McKay rehearsed only one part with the orchestra, then sight read the rest of the program live on stage.

Challenges: “The most frightening is ‘The Rite of Spring.’ The opening is a very high bassoon solo. It’s hard to play. You’re sitting in the middle of the orchestra. All the energy in the room is directed at you. Everyone knows what you have to do. You know what you have to do. I cannot think of a more frightening thing than to start that piece.”

Advocacy: “Composers have started writing music without bassoon because there are not very many of us. That concerns me. I try to make people aware that there is a bassoon — get the kids thinking about it, get them excited. I commission work, too.

“All of us feel a duty to help if we can. I teach high school and middle school students. There are not enough teachers, not enough players.”

Arts in Las Vegas: “I would like to see more cultural growth. It’s hard to get audiences to come out for chamber music and there’s an energy you get from the audience. We do a lot of things at the university that are free and high quality. It’s astonishing to see how few people take advantage of them.”

Other interests: Hiking, backpacking, fashion, reading (an obsession) and quilting. She performs each summer in Austria and is completing a book about Las Vegas musicians from the 1940s to 1989 — a project she began with her father, who passed away. Together they interviewed almost 50 musicians.

Sticking around? “Yes. To have two musicians working in the same university at the level we’re at — we’re pretty lucky. We’re committed. I enjoy the West. There’s a freedom and openness to it.”