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...