ProneOboe

It's never wrong to go back to basics. I was working with some college freshmen and we were playing two-bar phrases. I talked about arcing the air over the barline. I talked about singing. I talked about how the tongue is just the consonant of your speech, not the punctuation. I talked about D articulation as opposed to T.  I have a LOT of different words I can use for any given concept, and I pulled all of them out. I drew the phrase on my whiteboard, I explained how the LINE is longer than the SLUR, and how the BARLINE is not a STOP.  Still, though, this ONE articulation brought the whole thing to a standstill, every time. So the piece moved measure by measure and not phrase by phrase. They were frustrated and I was too.  And I finally realized that the thing I wasn't saying was this -   if the AIR is moving consistently through the oboe, THAT'S what is making the sound .  Within that, every instant that your tongue is touching the reed is an in...

You ARE the music. YOU are the music. It’s not the oboe. It’s YOU. Too many oboists live RIGHT up against the resistance of the oboe, blowing straight into the instrument and waging war against it DIRECTLY.  Using their mouths to try to compensate for the intonation or clenching their fingers to hold extra tight, I guess so it doesn’t get away? But what if you didn’t have to go in there, into the fray? What if you could maintain a bit of critical distance? What if you could be the boss of the oboe, instead of its timid colleague? Here’s how I think about it - or at least how I teach it.   Play a note, play it beautifully.  Now.  See if you can take a metaphorical step back from the oboe.  Focus the air inside your mouth BEFORE it hits the reed.  Now see how it feels different. How much LESS work can you do, and get ultimately to the same result? Could you blow 20% less, and project actually  more?  Can you find the resonance in your o...

Last semester, my student came in with the Hoedown from Copland’s Rodeo.  Let me guess, I said - the low tonguing passage? Of course she assumed that she had a tonguing problem.  We always assume that. I started by checking her oboe. There’s no point in beating yourself up to tongue a low D if your instrument is fighting you.  Turning screws is less work than practicing.  That could have been but was NOT the problem. Then, in rapid succession, we isolated and improved her air, embouchure, and fingers.  Within 20 minutes we had solved the passage and moved on.  All of these aspects of oboe playing get so tangled up as we work on difficult pieces and passages.  You can work on something as HARD and as EFFORTFULLY as you want, but it can’t really get better until you can isolate your issues and get to the bottom of them. In our case, I started by taking the tonguing out and asking her to slur the passage. It sounded terrible.  We slowed i...

I was out running this morning and I crossed the street to avoid a perfectly nice lady walking her perfectly nice dog.  We smiled and waved at each other - but didn’t dare to get close.  Runners in this COVID season allow a lot of space.  The air I use when I run comes right out of the bottom of my lungs, like my whole body is exhaling at once, and I’m aware, in a way that I never was before, about the cloud of exhale that surrounds me when I am breathing like this. About having to keep it to myself. 
 And then I got to thinking about the oboe.  
 We use our air in a variety of ways, right? And we oboists have that trick, that superpower, of not ACTUALLY needing that much ACTUAL air to play the instrument, so I often see students trying to get away with HEAD air only. Blowing only from the neck up, letting their lower body NOT be a part of the process.  As you might expect, this leads to an unsupported sound, a fair amount of throat strain, a need for very s...

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash In rehearsal last night, the concertmaster suggested to the strings that they play with a more open bow arm. I don’t know precisely what that phrase means to a string player - if it’s a technical term or more of a kinetic metaphor - but it immediately set my mind spinning. When I am playing my best, I do feel open. I feel that there’s a lovely big halo of air around me, like the space surrounding me is part of the physical act. I feel spaciousness in my chest and softness in my elbows and I’m grounded through my chair or my feet but everything else is lifted and filled with air and space and ROOM. I have open arms. This sensation - or the lack of it - stood out to me in my first Dreams and Visions performance last week. I have since listened back to the recording, and honestly things didn’t go all that badly - but I FELT bad in the moment. I started getting a lot of water in the instrument, I got flustered, and I got into...

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...

I've had five different concerts in a row this past four weeks, and for three of them I was not playing principal.  Which meant that I got to sit back and enjoy watching someone else sweat the tuning notes. Maybe everyone doesn't find the tuning A as stressful as I do - certainly no one I've played with seems anxious about it or sounds bad in any way. But I've struggled to find a consistent approach.  It's not the pitch itself - I know what A 440 feels like in my body and on my instrument and I can produce it on demand.  No, it's the attack. What an ugly word, attack.  But that's sometimes what it feels like.  The concertmaster stands up, and suddenly NOW, NOW is the moment and I have to make the sound instantly. I know how to gently start a note.  I know how to support into the center of the pitch and I know how to stabilize it with my air and not my embouchure so it sounds full and unshakeable and confident.  But somehow when on the spot I ca...

I've been watching the bows of my string colleagues this week, and I've realized I'm jealous.  I have bow envy. I have always loved wind instruments.  There is something so beautifully, terribly intimate about having to generate sound and music with your own personal air, the air you use to breathe and to live.  It's natural to make big phrases that match the shape of the breath, and it's natural to drive those phrases forward to their conclusions, and to the next breath. When I am following and matching my string colleagues in their elegant, light baroque style, I can imitate the lift that their bows have.  The weight and speed of their bows, and the way they don't force phrases to be longer than the bow itself - these are characteristics of the style we are working in and I can mimic and match this with no problem.  It makes the long long arias and choruses feel easier if I can lift with the strings in all of the tiny rests that occur all the time.  I...

When I played Eric Ewazen's Down a River of Time  a few weeks ago at a small house concert, the number one comment I got for the audience members - over and over - was "How does a little tiny person like you produce so much sound?" It struck me as a really strange thing to comment on. But this past week, as I played  Porgy and Bess  with the Northwest Indiana Symphony Orchestra , I  began to understand it. Because our large choir necessitated a complex arrangement on stage, I was seated very close to the front. We had two wonderful vocal soloists, and as I watched them from not very far away, I was reminded of how impressive good support is. Kim Jones , the soprano, is not a large person.  She would take a deep breath, collect her body, and produce an enormous, rich, vibrant, shimmering sound out of seemingly nowhere. It looked effortless. I know what it feels like to produce that kind of air with that kind of support. It feels like your whole lower body is ...

I’m working on the Bach E Major Partita, and it’s significantly difficult for me.  Not so much the notes, although E Major is not the most effortless key on the oboe.  Not so much the music-making, although I could work my whole life on solo Bach and never be perfectly satisfied with my choices, because it’s that complex and THAT good.  No, the problem is breathing, and breathing is always a challenging thing for a wind player. Oboists can play long, long phrases with ease. The opening in the reed is so tiny that it really rations the air, so we can play longer lines than any other orchestral wind instrument.  It’s also comparatively easy to circular breathe on the oboe, which means that we can actually take in new air while  playing and maintain an uninterrupted line.  The downside is that an oboist can never fully expel her air through that tiny opening.  We end up with excess carbon dioxide in our lungs, and as we breathe in again the new good air...