ProneOboe

Thesis: Communication is important. Letting the other person know your CONTEXT is a part of that. Scene: We’re walking the doggo, so I can’t step into the co-op with Steve.  We’re all wearing masks, which as you know makes communication a little bit more fraught.   "I’m going to grab some coffee - what can I get you?" "Kombucha." "Coffee?"  "Kombucha." "Columbian?" "No, Kombucha, please." "WHAT? Cup of joe?"  Bless his heart. He REALLY knows me.  In 22 years of marriage I have given him no reason to think that I would prefer a non-coffee, non-booze beverage under any circumstance. I’m a complex person, and I reserve the right to change up my order on a hot day when something with a little pro-biotic tang sounds appetizing.  But he was confused, which I get.  I was working with an Invincible Oboist recently, reiterating that the METER must be clear when you perform. It’s remarkable how much of my energy as a listen...

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...

I work all the time.  In addition to teaching and making reeds, I play in a different orchestra almost every week.  Most nights find me out in a rehearsal or a concert.  Different repertoire each week, different colleagues, a different commute.  I take it all in my stride. But sometimes there's a gig that is clearly special.  That is worth getting really excited and happy about.  That gig happened last week. Steve and I got to spend a week in New York City, playing Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet with the Joffrey Ballet at Lincoln Center, to packed and enthusiastic houses, with a great orchestra , being paid well.  It was fantastic, spectacular music which was genuinely fun to play every time, and it was the greatest city in the world.  This gig felt like the best EVER band trip, in that I got to do it as an adult with grownup social skills, sovereignty over my free time, and real money, instead of as a painfully introverted 15-year-old being d...

This week I’ve been working with the West Michigan Symphony , playing Beethoven’s 4 th Symphony and the Shostakovich Cello Concerto. The commute is long - that’s the downside - so I’ve had to reschedule most of my students and accept the short short nights that come along with Zoe’s early morning getting-ready-for-kindergarten needs. But on the upside, I get to play with my husband - Steve is on this gig with me, for a change - and I’m having such a great time working with the orchestra! It’s a treat to play under Scott Speck.  He’s got a calm and low-key approach, and he knows what he wants the orchestra to sound like.  He works efficiently - even before tonight’s dress rehearsal I feel that the group is very well prepared and I know exactly what’s being asked of me in every section.  We know what to listen for in each passage and how he wants it played.  He’s scholarly about the material, but not to a tiresome degree.  I get the sense that he knows more ...

I’m on vacation this week, up at our family’s camp on Lake Carmi.  This place always makes me think of the Tarot, as it was here that I first learned to read the cards.  Though it’s been over a year since I’ve had time to touch a deck, I love the early morning reflection of a daily card, especially here where the world is peaceful and beautiful (and everyone else sleeps in). This morning I drew the Five of Cups, which is an unusual card for me.  It’s about regret - looking at what you’ve done and wishing it had been different.  This is totally foreign to my personality.  On the rare occasions I’ve seen that card - most often in readings for other people, I have focused almost exclusively on the two full cups in the background.  Don’t dwell on the past!  I point out.  There’s so much more to see and do and LIVE than the three spilled cups - look around and find the joy instead of the sorrow. But this morning I think the other aspect of the card is ...

My husband and I were playing a gig together a few weeks ago.  Rare for us.  And we were debriefing in a coffee shop between services, and he said, “You know, I looked at my parts for this concert a little, but there was really nothing to practice.  I hate feeling superior to the music.” And in that statement is a great and valuable lesson for a musician.  The more experience you have playing orchestrally, the less likely that a given piece will hold true technical challenges for you.  There’s nothing in, say, Haydn 104 that I can’t pull off on my instrument.  No scale passage too fast, no rhythm too complex.  I understand the stylistic constraints of playing Haydn and I’ve heard and played the piece many times so the solos are known entities.  So should I not practice before a Haydn concert? Obviously this is not the case.  A given symphony may not present technical challenges, but the oboe always does.  It doesn’t matter that I can pla...

I’m going to run a marathon!  I did not believe I could ever get to this point, but I’ve done my last long run, and I’m tapering just like the training plan says, and after June 1 I will be a marathon finisher. Honestly, I’ve never been worried about my ability to complete a marathon.  I’ve been in enough hard races - where running turned into short walk breaks which turned into long walk breaks which turned into walking - to not be afraid of that option, and if walking is an option I know perfectly well that I can finish a marathon.  I do have a time goal, which I’ve been revising over the course of my training, and I still don’t know whether I can achieve that or not.  But I know I can finish.  I just wasn’t sure I could start.   I had never run more than 13.1 miles, and I have tended to get ITB injuries when my mileage goes up, and I WRECKED my knees seven or eight years ago in an olympic distance triathlon that I really hadn’t trained well enough f...

On the whole, I would call my first Oboe Reed Boot Camp a smashing success.  On Friday, the last day, we did time trials, and the first playable reed emerged in fourteen minutes.  That’s from soaked, shaped cane to a functioning reed, by a person who had never made one before that Monday.  The slowest took about 28 minutes, which still seemed pretty great. On Tuesday, Day Two,  we had worked with bars of Ivory soap, to simulate the feeling of carving out the tip.  It’s not exactly like a scrape, more like a cut, and the soap is soft enough to make it easy, so we worked for a while to get the feel of that slicing gesture before we went back to our cane.  Today, after the long week of ORBC and four intense days of IDRS I was unpacking my bags of equipment.  I came up with six bars of extremely beat-up Ivory, and decided to move them into the bathtub for use, because I am frugal like that.  Steve saw me transporting my load, and inquired. Me:  W...

We are on our way up to the Upper Peninsula now for a week of Mozart with the Pine Mountain Music Festival.  Cosi Fan Tutte will be touring the region, with performances in Iron Mountain, Marquette, and Calumet, Michigan. Details HERE .  The reduced orchestration is not without its challenges, but this is a time I always enjoy.  The area is beautiful, the schedule is light, the orchestra is full of my friends, and Steve and I get to play together, which doesn't happen very much during the regular season.  Currently, at this moment, we are stopped in Milwaukee with a flat tire, but that dampens my mood not one whit.  Opera is fun, Mozart is wonderful, and an easy-going road trip with my husband is a rare pleasure.  I love summer.

In 2002 Steve had a one-year position with the Oregon Symphony.  I was working steadily in Chicago, and didn't want to jeopardize the network we had built up, so I stayed in town.  We visited back and forth a few times, but I lived in my apartment and he lived in his, and it was fine.  In some ways, I really enjoyed it. I had never lived alone, after all.  I had had a roommate in college, and had lived with Steve basically since we met.  I found that I easily got used to eating, practicing, and sleeping on my own schedule, and I liked being able to walk into a room and see the book I had set down exactly where I expected it to be.  I missed him, but I'm pretty  self-sufficient.  I got my work done, talked to him on the phone, and lived my life. The challenging part was when Steve's position ended and he came back home.  Suddenly my apartment was our apartment again, and I had to relearn how to live hour to hour, day to day with another huma...

I've mentioned before that I started out on the piano by figuring out melodies.  Connecting notes and trying to learn how they worked.  I'm fascinated to observe that Zoe's initial approach to the instrument is totally different from mine. She sits at our new piano and plays random notes, and tells us what to feel.  If she is playing slowly then the music is sad, and we should cry. When we are "crying" she either gets up and hugs us so we feel better (so awesome!) or bangs faster, to indicate that the music is now happy and we should dance.  Her other piano game is accompanying herself - she plays "chords" in alternating hands while she "sings" the ABC song or Camptown Races or Sesame Street.  She makes us sing along.  She loves it when we clap at the end.  When I was little I wanted to know how music worked. Although I make my living as a performer now, I learned about the interpersonal aspects of music later.  Her immediate interest is in ...

We have been traveling to eastern Tennessee regularly ever since Steve and I started dating - about 16 years ago, now.  It's a gorgeous part of the world, but I've never paid more than a passenger's superficial attention to it.  Steve drives, I read a magazine or play with my phone, and every now and then he draws my attention to a particularly stunning vista.  End of story. This time around, though, we had to split up a few times.  Zoe needed a nap and a snack, Steve wanted to stay with his father, so I was in charge of driving little girl back to our home base at Nana's house.  And I couldn't get over how beautiful that 20-minute commute was!  Rolling hills, winding roads, mountains off in the distance, fall colors, cows and goats in pastures right beside me.  When I had to do it alone, and engage myself in driving and navigating, I couldn't believe how much more I saw. Also, I suddenly sort of understand the route between Steve's dad's house and his...

Last week was a rough one.  Last Sunday, while on vacation in Tennessee, Zoe rolled out of the bed and broke both bones in her arm.  Steve took her to the emergency room down there, of course, and we spent an afternoon with the orthopedist here once they got home.  She's fine - in a hard cast, happy as a clam, and scheduled for a full recovery in a few weeks.  Still, stressful and expensive. On Wednesday night, while driving home from our gig in Fort Wayne, we hit a deer in Steve's car.  We weren't hurt, and the car was drivable so we got home just fine - but now that vehicle is in the body shop until the end of the month.  Insurance is picking up the huge tab but of course we are paying the deductible and adding on a windshield repair that had been needed.  Stressful and expensive. After the week of work in Fort Wayne, I pulled my car into the driveway and turned it off.  The next morning it wouldn't start, and after an unsuccessful jumpstart and...

We are buying a house. We've been visiting loads of them, and the layout is always a big factor. Which arrangement will make it possible for us to work productively and also watch Zoe? How can I teach in our home without trapping Steve and Zoe in one small room? If I'm working in the office/studio, say, and Zoe isn't asleep, where are she and Steve based? If Steve does fulfill his dream of turning the garage into a writing room, can he work there while I am working inside and who is keeping Zoe from burning the house down or inventing nuclear fission? If Steve is out performing, can I accomplish anything, or will I have to be in the playroom constantly? I was working through yet another scenario in our current favorite: So, we'll be sharing the office, which is fine if I'm just making reeds. You can be in there working too, assuming she's asleep. To practice I can step out into the front room if you are working. When I teach, though, you won't...

I can't believe that I've just sent out the first of my fall lesson scheduling emails. Where did August go? On the one hand, I am thrilled that this summer is coming to an end. Summers are traditionally bad seasons for freelancers and I haven't had any real weeks of work since returning from the UP in mid-July. The reed business is always slow at this time of year, and although my students always SAY they want to take lessons over the summer, I wound up teaching only a select few. I think the oboe lesson habit drops off during the weeks that I travel, and then it's a hard sell getting people to start back up. And no work means precious little money. We predict this every year, and plan for it, but expecting it doesn't make it feel any easier. I miss seeing my colleagues regularly and having the regular outlet of orchestra rehearsals and concerts. I miss knowing that somewhere out there, someone owes me money and it will arrive any day. But although t...

This afternoon, Zoe woke up from her nap and told me about a grasshopper who was green, and lived under the carpet with Elmo. We decided to check under our rugs for a grasshopper, and when we didn't find one she decided she would wait, and sat down in front of a rug which she periodically checked for grasshopper activity. It seemed totally bizarre to me, but not incomprehensible. I understood exactly what she was talking about, even if it was a little fantastical. Steve confirmed that on Sesame Street today there was in fact a grasshopper under a rug and lots of discussion about it. Zoe had explained all of the pertinent details to me so we could talk together about it. That's brand new behavior. Her conversations until now have consisted of isolated words, referring back to an experience we had already shared. (Peacock! Yes, I remember seeing the peacock at the zoo. Tabill! Yes, that peacock did jump up on our table. That was kind of scary, huh? nod. Chicken! I remembe...

Steve and I disagree this week. It's Holy Week, and Spring is the season of church gigs and musicians coming in as ringers with student ensembles, and as a result we are getting calls from a lot of people who do not regularly hire musicians. Steve gets irritable with these "newbies" who beat around the bush on the phone, don't have all of the details that we need, and have to be helped with the process. If we are not speaking directly with them but rather emailing or playing phone tag, the process can take days. And his point is well taken. We are professionals, and have a right to be treated professionally. For the record, the proper way to hire a musician is this. Call or email, and tell the person when they are needed, what instruments and repertoire are involved, where the gig will take place, and how much it pays. Then the musician has all the information he needs to decide whether to accept the gig or not, and he will respond within a very few hours with a...

He: I can't believe how much I ate today. I: I couldn't practice all day yesterday while we were driving here. He: I thought that bag of caramel corn in the car was bad, but I had, like, seven cookies and a beer between lunch and dinner alone! I: I only got a half-hour of scales in this morning before the baby woke up, and I sounded terrible! He: I already weigh a pound more than yesterday. I: I just don't know if I'll be able to make any time for the oboe with all the family here. He: And you can't really refuse pie if everyone else is eating it - you'd look like a jerk. I: I cannot afford to take a week off, with that audition in the middle of January. I've got to play well every day so I don't lose ground. I: Everyone else is just enjoying their vacation. Why can't I? Why must the oboe be so demanding? He: I really wanted to be at [goal weight] by January, but there is just so much food at this holiday. I: I can't believe you...

Day to day last January, I was continuing to basically function at a basic level. I made it to engagements on time, I ate and dressed normally. I thought I was coping. But the six-month accumulation of sleep debt was such a knock-out that I wasn't really even aware of how disabled I was, until I finally got clear and started to recover. Now, looking back at my journal, I can observe that that was the point where Zoe's sleep cycle began to turn around. She began slowly to sleep more reliably through the night, and even more gradually so did I, and now, three months later, I am beginning to have some perspective on the awfulness of that time. I arrived at my teaching this Wednesday, for instance, after my normal one-hour drive, and DIDN'T need a ten minute nap in the parking lot before I went into the school. This would have been unthinkable in the wintertime. My family and I compete most days in an online crossword game, and pre-baby I routinely won. Post-baby and in t...

We have mentioned before that I can be a little controlling. Everyone is aware, I hope, that I adore my daughter. And I will admit that I was skeptical early on of Steve's parenting style. But the other day I was upstairs making reeds. Nearly done for the day, even - I had a caseful of them ready to mail, and heard Steve and Zoe coming upstairs. Heard the cheerful chorus of the Diaper Changing song from her room across the hall. I waited for the end of the song and ambled over to pay my respects and found him lowering her oh-so-gently into the crib. "Get out before she sees you!" he crooned, in the baby voice. It's a measure of how far I've come that I did not question, I did not discuss, I did not hesitate. I dropped to my hands and knees and crept backward out of the room on my belly, careful to stay below the level of the crib bars. Because no amount of being right or being Mom trumps naptime.