ProneOboe

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 to hear what their preparation has brought to the table.  

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. We’ve agreed that we don’t want them there