ProneOboe

Photo by  Kris Atomic  on  Unsplash I’ve been reading about Tall Poppy Syndrome, since hearing SOMEONE mention it in a podcast interview.   I’m embarrassed that I can’t source that podcast - too much travel recently, too many amazing podcast interviews.   I have no idea who drew it to my attention.   Basically, though, it’s the concept that anyone who seems to be getting above their station needs to be cut back down.   Someone who presents as better than other people should be brought down to size, because everyone ought to be equal. Don’t be sticking your neck out, don’t draw attention to yourself.   This shows up in orchestras a lot. An orchestra is rigidly hierarchical, and there’s only one principal flute, only one concertmaster.   No one is surprised that a concertmaster gets to play a solo.   But when a section player stands out in any way - starts a chamber music series, gives a recital, speaks at an event - ...

I can remember at least two old cranky violinists coming to talk to young me about NOT going into music.  There was a session, for example, during a Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra retreat in which a real RPO professional (who was probably 47 but whom I remember as ancient) told us that, statistically, no one who graduates from music school wins auditions for jobs because there are only like 4 jobs out there in the world and 7000 hotshots coming into the job market every week.  Quit NOW.  I may have misremembered the details of this speech, but I remember the emotional jolt.  It was designed to discourage. Last weekend I was presenting at a Double Reed Festival, and heard some oboists grumbling about another presenter who had evidently given something of the same talk to a roomful of masterclass attendees and participants.  High school students and cheerful adult amateurs. And look, there's an element of truth to this.  Classical music is not...

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom -Leonardo da Vinci The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution - Igor Stravinsky Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run.   And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer - Malcolm Gladwell I bought a printer this summer.   I bought it specifically to carry in the camper with us when we took our long national parks vacation.   It was the smallest, lightest, simplest printer I could find that did what I needed - it printed in color or black and white on letter size paper, period.   With it, I was able to run my reed business from the road, and it took up barely any space, and weighed almost nothing, and it was also white and cute. I loved it for the freedom it gave me - to mail reed shipments from anywhere - and for its adorable design factor. ...

I love auditions.   No, I do, really.   First of all, I like the game of it.   Fifty people come to the hall, one leaves victorious.   The drama is deeply fun.   I love playing auditions.   Picture it - you get to walk out onto an unfamiliar but beautiful stage, the home stage of an orchestra better than yours. You have the entire space to yourself.   Gazing up into the rows of darkened seats, you can take deep breaths and choose the perfect moment in which to break the silence.   You can stand there for up to fifteen minutes, playing all of the BEST and most famous solos for your instrument, to an audience that is listening intently and wanting you to succeed.   You can take these solos at the tempo you choose, in the style you like.   No conductor is trying to alter your vision of the piece. It’s all for you.   I love sitting behind the screen, too.   It’s fascinating to listen to other people audition, and ...

How do you change your reed making habits?    Even if you feel like a reed beginner,   I can promise that you have developed some habits, for good or ill.  This is how our bodies work, right?  If the way you hold your knife on day one gets you close to the scrape you want, you’ll hold it that way again.   After even ten minutes the process feels a little less foreign, and you are apt to keep repeating the same tricks.   But if you remain aware of what is going on, you can start to make decisions about how that increasing consistency is helping or hurting your process!   I’m thinking specifically of two students I have, with easily identifiable reed issues. One consistently leaves a moat, or a thin region immediately north of her rooftop, between the heart and the rest of her sloping tip. The other allows the center of the tip to be thin, especially while working on the left side of the blade.  We’ve identified the problems...

After my concerto performance last June, I was chatting with a lovely woman from the audience.   “It’s not like you’re blowing through the oboe,” she said.   People are always interested in the AIR, and I had just finished talking about circular breathing with someone else.   So I was sure I knew what she was about to say, but I was wrong.   “It’s as though you’re sending your very soul through it.”   Needless to say, this statement floored me.   Because it was so poetic and lovely, and because it made the work I had just done - a real physical effort, right? - seem like a greater good, somehow.   Because it actually felt incredibly resonant to the way I think about the oboe, and about air and breathing and support, and was just such a perfect and efficient way to say the thing I always struggle to describe.   On the physical side, I relate very well to the verb “sending”, compared to the word “blowing”.   To blow f...

We took a vacation this summer.   This is not news to anyone in my life - anyone who knows me or especially Steve on Facebook followed along with all of our pictures.   We took our travel trailer out to Arizona - via St Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, Roswell, Santa Fe - and then stayed a week in Clarksdale and Flagstaff and visited some ancient pueblo ruins, Sedona, Jerome, the Lowell Observatory, the Grand Canyon.   We swam in swimming pools, lakes, and icy mountain streams.   We hiked.   Eventually we came home again, via Albuquerque, Amarillo, Tulsa, and St Louis. (our inventiveness had somewhat worn out).   After a week at home we took another trip, and drove to Vermont via western NY and the Adirondack Park (stayed an extra day to hike a mountain), lived four days in East Franklin VT, and came home via Catskill and eastern Ohio.   This vacation felt different from all of our previous ones.   In the 21 years we’ve been married, I can name on...

Here's a thing that happens ALL THE TIME.  A student misses something - a low attack, a slur, a high D.  People miss things, no problem.  But then they miss it again.  Immediately, I stop and say, What's happening there?  Is it an oboe problem, a reed problem, or you? Almost without fail, they say it's them.  Their own personal failing that made the note not speak. And bless their hearts, it's in a broad sense true, right? When my Tough Love Hat is on,  I have to point out that every reed problem is your own fault - you made it, or selected it for today's task, or let it get to this decrepit state, right? And not paying attention to your instrument's adjustments is a lapse on your part, too. But in the immediate sense,  it nearly always turns out that that problem was NOT the student being careless or sloppy. Very often, it's the mechanism of the oboe or the construction of the reed that is sabotaging things, and THAT is a screwdriver or a k...

Last night as my student performed a terrific degree recital, she gave a speech in which she thanked her friends, her parents, her teachers, her mentors.  It was beautiful.  She mentioned me, very sweetly, and then blew my mind when she cited my upcoming resignation from her school as an inspiration.  I had been feeling much more guilty than inspiring. I am about three weeks out from graduating all of my private students away.  I'm leaving one of my several adjunct teaching positions, and I am not going to be teaching weekly oboe lessons in my home anymore. My teaching time next year will be more than cut in half.  I am reclaiming - no, claiming - some work-life balance. It's not, objectively, that huge a deal.  Most of the students leaving me really are graduating from school and moving on.  The actual number of young oboists I'm orphaning is only three, and I've directed them to other good teachers. But at the same time, this decision feels ENO...

When we started the opera cycle ( An American Dream,  showing at the Harris Theater tonight and Sunday afternoon), the four woodwinds were sitting stacked in a rehearsal room.  In other words, the flute to my right, the bassoon behind me, the clarinet behind the flute, just like in the orchestra.  And it was OK.  We were fairly close together, the room was resonant, and we were working on orchestral details.  But when we moved into the pit, this seating felt VERY isolating.  The four of us were far apart, on two different levels, the wall was right next to me, and intonation and ensemble were very much more difficult.  Our entrances and releases were not clean together, and because we had to balance to the singers on stage, I found my playing getting more and more tentative.  Don't be too loud, don't come in early before the clarinet, keep everything in the box, try to lead the entrances but stay in the texture... And it felt like everything that...

I had the most interesting conversations with a few of my students after my first recital performance last weekend.  One thanked me for exposing her to so many interesting new pieces that she had never heard before.  One admitted unabashedly that his favorites were the familiar ones, the ones he already knew from his previous listening.  And both of these observations rang true to me. See, I LOVE learning new music.  I really enjoy digging into a piece and breaking through an unfamiliar harmonic language to get to the depths of it.  To discover the composer's intention, and to find the universal emotion or experience at the heart of the work, and then to communicate that meaning back out to an audience.  This challenge is fun for me, and I think I do it well. I have to be fair, though.  By the time I have put that kind of work into a new piece, it's not new to me anymore.  By the time I get it to the recital stage, it's an old friend.  I ...

Let no one suggest that I am not grateful for my nearly three weeks of vacation.  I was so lucky to be able to take that much time to sleep, read, travel, fill my house with people and love, and catch up on all most some of the busywork from the year.  It was a lovely break. But TODAY school started back up for my daughter.  I'm heading out to teach again this afternoon.  I'm playing Beethoven next weekend.   I'm getting serious about the recitals I have scheduled for next month, I'm thinking ahead to some auditions the month after.  I've been making reeds at a break-neck speed. I am SO EXCITED to be back in the saddle and back in a routine and SO READY to do this year even better than last year. I called 2018 my Year of Temperance, and I used it to back off, very intentionally, from many of the things that were keeping me busy and frantic.  I did not accept new students.  I withdrew from SEVERAL orchestra committees.  I was far more...