Skip to main content

Staying on Track

How do you know if you're turning into a crackpot?

We all know them, right? The player who has sat principal in his small-town orchestra for forty years with no reality-check. The one so secure in his position that he's just always right, and no one around him is senior enough - or knowledgeable enough - to suggest that maybe his sound is getting weird and his intonation is off the charts. The player who has all the work sewn up so that every sub in the area has to go through her. These tend to be nice and lovely people, but something about the playing or the approach has just taken a strange turn in the absence of any real form of competition. I suspect these people turn up in all disciplines, but I know them best in the orchestral world.

It's great to be comfortable in your position, but you have to be vigilant about your playing too. Little habits creep in. Not bad ones, at first - you start to get a little lazy about reed-making, and think you've discovered a short-cut. Actually, you're just making worse reeds in less time, but you've developed a way of playing that makes them work. Then you realize that a different, less popular brand of oboe makes your new reed-style sound even better. Or that if you practice less you keep your embouchure fresher. Or that if you devote 20 minutes a day to meditation or headstands it makes your playing better - without additional effort! Or that your diet has more to do with your success than you had ever thought. None of these ideas is bad, but then you begin to solidify your theories, and no one ever says no to you , and you teach all of your students your tricks and suddenly there's a whole bunch of people in your small town who really do think you're right, though in actuality you are a kook.

How can I know I'm not becoming a crackpot? Lately I definitely spend more time making reeds, and way more time teaching, than I do playing. I found myself holding forth on some of my pet oboe theories with my students the other day, and it struck me that I am using words and phrases I haven't heard from other oboists. That's not necessarily bad - I shouldn't be derivative or plagiarize my former teachers, right? But it makes me a little nervous. Am I onto something brand new? Have I just developed my own explanations for the normal way we do things, based on my experiences and personal mindset and the imagery that has occurred to me while playing at a high professional level? Or am I, in fact, a crackpot, promoting my crackpot theories and corrupting a whole new generation? Will only time tell?

I do always try my best in the orchestra to keep my standards up, but it's hard to be vigilant all the time. Honestly, it's fairly easy in our regional orchestra to be good enough to get by, week to week. It's harder to be good enough to wow some of my amazing colleagues, which is my personal daily goal, and very hard to be good enough to transcend the small-town feel of the group and to escape. Please don't get me wrong - I love this job and my career, but I still have greater ambitions than this position.

I think that to be safe I need to get back out on the audition circuit. It's been months since I've dared - since just after Zoe was born. I'm not really loving the idea, but I do want a bigger job, and more to the point I think that preparing excerpts really keeps me fresh. If I'm going to spend the money to travel to a different state then I had better be ready to compete, and that requires diligent practice and recording and listening, so at minimum it would keep me doing that. Also, while there I inevitably hear others play, and hopefully can hear the orchestra perform, and I can draw inspiration from there, too. And when I actually advance there is the validation that I'm on the right track. And obviously, if I go several auditions without advancing I can assume that there's a new direction I should be going in. Or an older, more conservative one, I suppose. It would be nice if there was a less expensive, exhausting way to stay normal and be great. I would love to hear from anyone who has figured out this trick.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knife Sharpening

I've gotten a lot of questions on this topic, and the most recent querent prompted me to make a video to demonstrate.  You can find that  HERE . Knife sharpening seems to strike terror into many hearts.  And it's little wonder.  Many famous oboists have gone on record as saying that a sharp knife is the most important aspect of reed making. People have entire systems of stones and strops and rods set up to sharpen their knives. And it is important, of course it is - but I don't believe that you need your knife to be razor-like, or objectively the sharpest blade of any in your home.  The reed knife has one job - scraping cane off in precision ways - and it has to be sharp enough for that, and sharpened optimally for that purpose.  More than that is overly fussy for my taste. This is not to say that I allow my knife to be dull.  A dull knife forces you to put too much pressure on the reed and can cause cracking. Obviously it can lead to terribly inc...

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

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...