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 ...

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...

In Reed Club last Monday, we took a moment before we started scraping to set some intentions.  We each said one word - an adjective to describe what we WANTED our reeds to be.  An aspirational adjective. Efficient was a word that came up, and Consistent . Dark and Mysterious . Mellow . Predictable .  Trustworthy .  Honest .  BIGGER . Reed affirmations actually felt helpful - both in the moment and in the results we found as we worked.  I don't know why that surprises me - I set intentions at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of a run, in the morning before I work.  I love a good affirmation.  I love WORDS.  But I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of applying one to the mundane work of reed-making.   You don't have to know exactly how to GET to that result.  But having clarity in your mind about what that result is?  Helps you to stop going down unhelpful rabbit holes...

 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...

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...

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...

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...

I recently met with a former student who proudly described THE reed she was working on to me.  She’d gotten it to a point where it made a beep, but it didn’t really play on the oboe yet, but it HADN'T CRACKED!  I celebrated with her - but I limited my glee.  One slightly successful reed - in the past month - is a good start.  It’s further than she had gotten before.   But that is no way to be abundant.  If it takes you a month to sort of make one reed, where’s the incentive to even start? No one has that kind of time, and you can’t make your living on one reed a month even if it’s a perfect reed.   More to the point - the learning curve at that rate is basically a flat line.  Reedmaking is an art as well as a craft.  I can teach someone to construct a reed in a single session, and we can get to a beeping reed in that time. But the next part? The part where you finish it to your comfort and then go out in public and play on ...

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...

I've been seeing so many complaints among my friends and colleagues about the quality of their Skype, FaceTime, and Zoom lessons. I have to say that while I acknowledge the limitations of the media, I actually really LOVE teaching online. 1. Lesson transitions are better. Sometimes when we are live, our chit-chat can take a fair amount of time, while people get their instruments out at the beginning, soak their reeds, and put everything away again. Online no one calls in before they are ready, and we can end the call at the end of the content and let everyone take care of swabbing in private. We use ALL of our allotted time efficiently online. 2. My personal focus is better. I have to listen hard to hear the details through the medium, and it keeps my mind from wandering. I think the tighter transitions help me with that, too. And I perceive the same from my students - it could be that my focus directs theirs, I suppose, but either way we’ve gotten a...

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...

Here’s my FAVORITE thing about that Shaquille O'Neal video everyone's sharing this week - it’s how HAPPY he is playing this silly game and how little he CARES what the oboe actually SOUNDS LIKE or how to play it.  Almost as if the oboe is not a giant obstacle to overcome. Instead of focusing on the CRAFT of the instrument, the precise fingerings, the quality of the sound, the finesse of the vibrato - his focus is on DELIVERING the SONG.   It’s on COMMUNICATION, not perfection. What a LIBERATING concept! When I am playing my best, I find that I can surpass the STRUGGLE and come to a place where my focus is on communication.   I can sing through the instrument, and I can use that voice to reach out and find someone else.  This is really what being In the Zone means for me - it's when I don’t have to engage with the OBOE and instead can be generous with my VOICE for the audience. I seek and strive for this Zone all the time - it’s the whole point of practi...

I can remember at least two old cranky violinists coming to talk to young me about NOT going into music.  There was a session, for example, during a Rochester Philharmonic Youth Orchestra retreat in which a real RPO professional (who was probably 47 but whom I remember as ancient) told us that, statistically, no one who graduates from music school wins auditions for jobs because there are only like 4 jobs out there in the world and 7000 hotshots coming into the job market every week.  Quit NOW.  I may have misremembered the details of this speech, but I remember the emotional jolt.  It was designed to discourage. Last weekend I was presenting at a Double Reed Festival, and heard some oboists grumbling about another presenter who had evidently given something of the same talk to a roomful of masterclass attendees and participants.  High school students and cheerful adult amateurs. And look, there's an element of truth to this.  Classical music is not...

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...

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...

Here's a thing that happens ALL THE TIME.  A student misses something - a low attack, a slur, a high D.  People miss things, no problem.  But then they miss it again.  Immediately, I stop and say, What's happening there?  Is it an oboe problem, a reed problem, or you? Almost without fail, they say it's them.  Their own personal failing that made the note not speak. And bless their hearts, it's in a broad sense true, right? When my Tough Love Hat is on,  I have to point out that every reed problem is your own fault - you made it, or selected it for today's task, or let it get to this decrepit state, right? And not paying attention to your instrument's adjustments is a lapse on your part, too. But in the immediate sense,  it nearly always turns out that that problem was NOT the student being careless or sloppy. Very often, it's the mechanism of the oboe or the construction of the reed that is sabotaging things, and THAT is a screwdriver or a k...

Last night as my student performed a terrific degree recital, she gave a speech in which she thanked her friends, her parents, her teachers, her mentors.  It was beautiful.  She mentioned me, very sweetly, and then blew my mind when she cited my upcoming resignation from her school as an inspiration.  I had been feeling much more guilty than inspiring. I am about three weeks out from graduating all of my private students away.  I'm leaving one of my several adjunct teaching positions, and I am not going to be teaching weekly oboe lessons in my home anymore. My teaching time next year will be more than cut in half.  I am reclaiming - no, claiming - some work-life balance. It's not, objectively, that huge a deal.  Most of the students leaving me really are graduating from school and moving on.  The actual number of young oboists I'm orphaning is only three, and I've directed them to other good teachers. But at the same time, this decision feels ENO...

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 ...