ProneOboe

 Don’t wait for it. The lowest notes on the oboe are notoriously difficult to play. They don’t want to speak, they MIGHT splatter, they are SLOW to respond, they feel flat. And if your instrument is even slightly out of adjustment, they can be even more resistant - sometimes literally impossible. And some students WAIT for that low note to come before they go on, and THIS disrupts the rhythm, the tempo, the flow of the piece, and the musical line they are trying to create.  It distracts the listeners, it throws the ensemble off.  The pianist has to lurch to catch them, the conductor has to stop and yell.   One missed note, or one note that doesn’t quite speak - THAT doesn’t ruin your communication. But the distraction and disruption for both you and your listener that happens when YOU acknowledge the problem, when YOU make us all wait patiently for the response of a low C - that’s when you lose us. I think every low note has three possibilities within it. 1. It ...

 For oboists, endurance is a huge problem.  We can play an endlessly long phrase, because of the way the instrument is constructed, but we can really only do that a few times in a row before our embouchure starts to get fatigued.  We develop a buildup of air that feels exhausting to hold onto, and the thought of sustaining that kind of energy over  an entire page of music, much less a 45 minute recital program, is intimidating.    There's almost always a lesson, a week or two before a jury or a recital, where my student comes in and says, "I just can't DO this! I can play every detail in my music, but I can't put the whole thing together!  My mouth comes right off the oboe when I try - I'm going to fall apart in front of the audience, and it's going to be terrible!"  Look, I'm putting this on my students now - but there's a moment a week or so before MY performances that feels exactly the same! I have not outgrown this moment of panic. And at that...

Classical musicians are trained to make it perfect. To make all the notes correct, to make it sound like the CD, to do it the way everyone else has done it. The only way to shine is to be BETTER - which means cleaner, more in tune, more perfect. We DO NOT SHIP until it’s perfect, which is why so many people struggle with performance anxiety and stage fright. Live is scary because you can’t control how perfect it is. But here’s what the kids are doing, over on Instagram. They are making “practice accounts” and sharing their work in progress. They are sharing snippets of pieces, little technical etudes, minute-long snatches of what is happening. They are sharing the messy middle. The first magic in this is that the process of recording yourself, listening to what you’re doing, making judgements for yourself about what is good ENOUGH to share, trying again to make the snippet REPRESENT where you are in the journey - that PROCESS is making you better. The second magic is that seeing your ...

I was just trying to pick up my kid’s prescription at the pharmacy. No, it’s INGLE.   EYE ENN GEE ELLL EEEE.   Between the mask covering half my face and the plexiglass barrier, I was almost reduced to charades as I tried to communicate a simple order.   And we’ve all discovered this lately, I’m sure.   When you are wearing a mask and trying to speak with someone else, you have to enunciate MUCH more than normal.   You have to slow down and say all of the words distinctly.   You might have to rephrase, to use more distinctive sounding words.   Expressive eyebrows are helpful.   It takes EFFORT to communicate in this age of COVID. But you know what? We HAVE this skill already.   As performers, we know what it is to have to heighten our affect and PROJECT our intentions beyond our bodies.   We know that although we FEEL the music deeply within ourselves, that feeling doesn’t necessarily translate to an audience unless we S...

I got an email from an oboist a while ago, back before COVID.  After thanking me for the reeds I had sent, and complimenting the warm tone they had, they asked a question about the VERY FAST technical passages in the Polovetsian Dances.  “There is a section of the piece where it is conducted in one beat, but is in 6/8 time. The eighth notes I must play moved so quick that at the tempo I just cannot keep up. My fingers don't move that quick.  When you play a section like this what do you do? Don't play at all, but fake it with the reed in your mouth?”  I had some thoughts on this, which felt universal enough to share.  As you might guess, I’m not a huge fan of just LEAVING THE WHOLE THING OUT.  It just feels so dispiriting!  All around you people are PLAYING the licks, and you are the one giving up?  There’s always something you can contribute, even if it’s just a light downbeat every other bar or so.  You don’t want to try to be a h...

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 ...

I judged a university Concerto Competition recently and heard some great playing.  But I was disappointed to hear some contestants play their concerto like an etude.   An etude they had been assigned, one they didn’t especially like, one they had practiced only to ask for someone else’s approval.   All sort of at a middle dynamic, all a little pitchy, no real variety of color or articulation, and often no musical line at all.   I was shocked.   Playing concertos is probably my favorite thing EVER to do in the world, and I consider it a serious responsibility.     When you are playing a concerto, your job is to be the Hero.   If you are playing loud, play heroically loud.   Softs should be heroically soft, should make the audience lean in and take notice.   No matter what you do, it should be done with intent, with ownership, with design.   Sometimes we look at superheroes and we want to peek in to discern the simple hum...

I haven't shared anything about my playing work for quite a while.  These past two weeks have been overwhelmingly busy, filled with driving and performing - three different organizations, seven venues, six separate programs, very hard music - all this to say, I've been drowning in repertoire and putting in hours behind the wheel for the privilege, and I have not been able to sit and write as I normally would. Heck, I haven't even been able to lie down and sleep for seven hours as I normally would.  Late nights and early mornings should not go together like this.  Here's to the return of a civilized schedule soon! The most fascinating bit of this craziness is a snippet of music I play from offstage at Lyric Opera's production of Siegfried.  I've written before about the stunning experience of being behind the scenes at this fantastic organization - the attention to detail, the care and integrity from everyone I see, from the amazing and hard-working musicians t...

When my students get too MOUTHY with the oboe, I put them in a corner. Really. They tend to play the oboe only from the TOP of their body, north of the collarbone, and it winds up unsupported.  Fussy.  Weak.  And out of tune. So I back them into a corner, and have them stand a foot or so out from it, facing out into the room.  And I challenge them to find a sound that resonates BEHIND them, out from the corner of the room that they are not facing, to fill the space without blowing directly into the space. It's a weird metaphor.  I wouldn't have any idea how to describe the physical technique to do it. When I find it in myself, it feels like my back is puffy and my body is round, and large, and barrel like, and also collected and zipped up, and supremely powerful.  If you know me, you know that these statements about my body aren't remotely true.  But that's what I feel when I'm blowing well, and filling the room, and owning my resonance. I te...

I LOVE practicing West Side Story.  I realized today, as I was working through the fugue portion of "Cool" in the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story , that I was reluctant to leave my folder at rehearsal tonight as I would always otherwise do.  I know the part, I've performed it many times, but I feel like I could work through these weird tritones and swing rhythms and aggressive flutter tonguing every day without getting tired of them.  It's not that I need more practice, it's that I don't want to stop playing. It's not merely that I grew up knowing this music and that it's nostalgic for me - my mother played hundreds of musical theater records in our home and although I can sing every word to every song in that Great American Songbook my heart does not thrill when I play Oklahoma on the oboe.  Bernstein is special.  Smart.  The melodies are SO beautiful, the angles and turns that the harmonies take are SO striking.  I never, never ever ge...

I always like to share what I do on this blog.  The South Bend Symphony closed its season last night with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, and the Maestro asked that four members of the orchestra introduce the four movements of the piece, before we played the symphony through.  He provided some formal notes but encouraged us to personalize our speeches with our own thoughts - and you never have to ask me twice to write stories and speak into a mic, you know? I’m shameless like that. The first time I played Tchaikovsky 5 was after my junior year of high school. It was the first summer music camp I had ever been to, and I'm sure all of my colleagues here on stage can attest to a similar story. Your first music camp is when you first find your tribe, and the first time you realize that you're not a complete weirdo outcast. I met a whole group of people who like me vibrated with the sheer excitement of creating music, of pulling together to realize this symphony, the most monstr...

I was listening to Seth Godin's podcast on Wabi-Sabi and Quality and Right Effort , and I was moved by it.  Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese term for the beauty of imperfection.  For the natural facts of impermanence, of incompleteness, of imperfection and decay.  The art is in accepting and embracing the beauty of flawed reality. What could be a better metaphor for my entire career? Performing on the oboe is special and magical BECAUSE the oboe is not your friend. There's always SOMETHING that goes wrong with an oboe - water, sticking keys, REEDS.  The reed is made from organic material with a mind of its own.  Even the very best, most beautiful sounding, most effortlessly responsive reed has flaws. It's really never going to be as perfect as you want it to be, and the barrier is not just the oboe or the reed but also the humanity of the performer.  What you see in a live oboe performance is the eternal struggle of human against a resistant inanimate object, ...

I went in for my yearly mammogram last week. As you know, it's not exactly a painful procedure, but it's uncomfortable, and as I was being manipulated into the unwieldy machine I got to thinking about what a peculiar job it must be to jam women into awkward positions, over and over, every fifteen minutes all day. So after we were done I asked the technician about that, and she LIT UP, the way people do when they FINALLY get to talk about the thing they are passionate about, and she talked about the advances in the technology since she was starting out, and the things this machine was capable of.  She talked about the women it has saved, from dying of cancer, of course, but also from unnecessary surgical disfigurement.  It was completely inspiring listening to this lady love her weird job, and I left feeling fantastic about the whole ordeal. It's great to see someone who is doing what they are supposed to be doing! Two weeks before, I had my first Mendelssohn rehearsal w...

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 have been absent from this blog for nearly a month.  I was resting.  And working on other projects.  But I've missed long form writing, and I've missed YOU, so I'll be more active here again as we move forward. Here's a thing that's happening - I'm playing tonight with the terrific  Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and having a blast.  Mozart 41, and a new commissioned world premiere by Chen-Hui Jen, an up and coming young woman composer.  (Why is this description so hard to write?  I think it is cool that she is young, female, and a composer, and won a commission, but somehow every way I write it sounds condescending, which I don't mean.) And a Shostakovich Piano concerto that I'm not on, but that sounds amazing. It's fun to play with a group that is new to me.  The habits are different. The way the woodwinds shape and end their notes is a little different.  It's an enjoyable challenge to fit in and match.  I always think that ...

I heard a student's sophomore recital last week, and noticed that although she played all of the notes and technique well, chose appropriate tempos, and used her own reed - which is all FANTASTIC for a sophomore - her playing was small and felt static from where I sat in the audience.  This surprised me - in lessons I find her a lovely player who makes real musical shapes. Then, this past week, I had a college conductor speak to me about another of my students - he's sounding great, he said, but it needs to be bigger.  I was surprised.  This student did not appear to me to have a small sound.  Then I realized that it was once again time to talk about Projection.  Projection, according to Merriam Webster, means:  control of the volume, clarity, and distinctness of a voice to gain greater audibility.  When you tell a student to play more, to project, the most frequent thing that happens is they blow harder.  They get red in the face trying to ...

It was winter, now it's spring It got humid and my reeds changed I was tired from driving The conductor was unclear I couldn't hear my entrances I'm not good at playing second oboe My reeds are all too old or too new My oboe is out of adjustment I wasn't warmed up because of not playing the first piece Dvorak is mean to the second oboe Every one of those thoughts went through my head during the ten minutes that I was onstage playing the piece I couldn't play, and not one of them was helpful. Because, ultimately, it was all on me.  I couldn't pull it together,  I didn't do a good job, and I disappointed myself.  Bad concerts happen to everyone, occasionally, but in this case it happened to me and it was no fun at all.   A student came in this week, and told me a sad story about the concert she'd played over the weekend.  But unlike the defeated me you saw above, she framed everything in the form of a lesson learned.  She shouldn't hav...

There's a moment - a few weeks before the event - in which it seems like you might really surpass yourself.  That your Mozart concerto, say, could be something really special.  You have a good reed.  You're working on small sections, or you're doing slow run-throughs, or you're tossing a single movement onto a CD Release recital, and you feel pretty unstoppable.  But the closer you come to the actual performance date, the more it becomes clear that THIS is the you you are going to be, that THESE are the reeds you are going to have in your case, that miracles are not going to happen and thus THIS is how it's going to go.  And it's a sort of a disappointment, you know? I'm not actually disappointing, I know that.  I'm playing well, and I love Mozart, and this concert will be tremendous fun.  But it probably won't be transcendent.  It probably won't live up to the potential that I sensed a month ago. It probably won't herald the dawn of a whol...

I'm working on Mozart this month. On March 24, I'll be playing the Mozart Oboe Concerto with the Northwest Indiana Symphony .  It's a piece I've performed many times, but it never gets easy. Working on it in my room was feeling more like a chore than a pleasure - all those scales!  All that busywork! Last week I went in for a lesson with a colleague, which was intensely inspiring, and exactly what I needed. It was a stand-out moment - I've known the Mozart for a long time, but I've been out of the habit of thinking of it as a big deal.  I started at the beginning and immediately she stopped me and demanded MORE.  More energy, more quality, more sparkle, more PLAYING.  We spent two hours working through the entire piece and I was glowing with effort and joy the whole time.  THIS is what working on a concerto is supposed to feel like. The soloist's job is to be the hero.  To bring the appropriate energy to the piece of music, to set the tone for th...

You know how sometimes you have a gig with a good group that you are super excited about, and you carefully prepare your music, and then when you get there it turns out that one of your pieces is a stand up solo - in which you and two of your colleagues get to play standing up because the part is so important and the conductor wants to feature it?  And the thing that you thought would be fun is EVEN MORE FUN because in addition to getting to play great music with great colleagues, you get to be seen? That's this week.  I'm super delighted to be performing with Music of the Baroque this Sunday and next Tuesday.  The particular piece is this - the Sinfonia from J.S. Bach's Cantata No. 42 - and the performances are in Skokie and at the Harris Theater in Chicago. Details HERE .