Skip to main content

Logistical Morass

You know that old puzzle about the fox and the goose and the grain and the guy who wants to ferry them to the other side of the river but can only take two at once and can't leave the goose with the grain or the fox with the goose? That's completely what I feel like this week, trying to make my baggage efficient to all the gigs I'm doing without forgetting anything.

I have one case that holds an English horn and an oboe, and one case that holds any two instruments, and single cases for everything but the EH. I needed the oboe, oboe d'amore, and English horn to teach with yesterday, as we are gearing up for this week's St Matthew Passion over at Valparaiso University (click HERE for details and tickets) and I wanted to be able to play along and check reeds with and for my students that are involved with that. But this morning I need two oboes to teach a methods class (at Goshen College), and tonight I need just my one good oboe for a quintet recital (in Plymouth) but I need to send my d'amore in its single case to Valparaiso to be used by my sub. Tomorrow I have a gig in the morning (in Fort Wayne) which is EH alone, but I'm going straight from there back to teaching two oboe lessons (in Valparaiso) and from there straight to VU where I need all three horns again. Friday is the same. And the limiting factor to just shoving everything into the car and moving on with my life is that I still strive to be the Unfussy Oboist, so I want to be walking into every service as lightly laden as is possible (plus it's heavy to lug them all around) and every transfer of an instrument to a different case carries with it the risk of leaving something essential behind. So I want to maximize my carrying potential while minimizing transfers and take the smallest number of instruments possible to every service.

And I cannot tell you how much mental energy I have expended on this so far. I just know there's a way to make it perfect.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blog has MOVED

 Have you been waiting ... and waiting ... and WAITING for a new Prone Oboe post?  Don't wait here anymore!  The blog has moved to https://jennetingle.com/prone-oboe/  and will not be updated here on Blogger anymore.  Please come and check me out there!  I love you all - stay safe out there!  Jennet
Post a Comment
Read more

How Do You WISH You Could Describe Your Reeds?

In Reed Club last Monday, we took a moment before we started scraping to set some intentions.  We each said one word - an adjective to describe what we WANTED our reeds to be.  An aspirational adjective. Efficient was a word that came up, and Consistent . Dark and Mysterious . Mellow . Predictable .  Trustworthy .  Honest .  BIGGER . Reed affirmations actually felt helpful - both in the moment and in the results we found as we worked.  I don't know why that surprises me - I set intentions at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of a run, in the morning before I work.  I love a good affirmation.  I love WORDS.  But I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of applying one to the mundane work of reed-making.   You don't have to know exactly how to GET to that result.  But having clarity in your mind about what that result is?  Helps you to stop going down unhelpful rabbit holes...
2 comments
Read more

Choose the YES

Special moments come at the least expected times. This video , the one I circulate periodically whenever Facebook reminds me of it, was literally just a gig. I didn’t know Sullivan when he reached out to me to play because he needed the video for some application or other.  I didn’t even ask what it was for.  I only had a day or two to prepare the music and I was annoyed that it was so hard and annoyed at myself for accepting the gig and annoyed as I drove up to the church he had booked which proved to be basically unheated. I love what I do, but some gigs ARE an annoyance.  Holiday pops runouts leap to mind here. Endless drives through the snow for ungratifyingly formulaic performances of insipid music.  My annoyance level going in to this was about the same. But it turned out to be marvelous fun!  Once I got going, the challenge turned out to be the BEST kind of challenge, the thing that is difficult but totally attainable if you bring your A game and yo...
Post a Comment
Read more