ProneOboe

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 was chatting with a friend this week and she was lamenting being too busy to write.  It’s exactly the way I’ve been feeling, and something I rarely hear a musician say.  We always complain that we haven’t been practicing - in fact, I think I said precisely that back to her - but mostly we musicians don’t talk about our other forms of creativity, and that’s a sad thing,  Even when I can’t make time to practice, I play the oboe every day.  When I’m sitting in rehearsal I try to bring mindfulness to my work, so it’s not just walking through notes and rhythms but actively trying to be artistic, to be interesting, to play with integrity, to be great.  This is why I can let practicing go on a busy day - it’s not that I don’t need it, but I can scratch that itch at work, while simultaneously doing something someone else wants.  I’m a multitasker from way back.   Writing though, is a thing I can’t do while I’m making reeds.  Or when I’m in rehe...

I've been thinking about speaking about music. Whenever I can I like to talk to the audience during performances, to give them a path into the works I'm performing.  I'm working on the script for my Musicians for Michiana show next weekend, and am always looking for connections that I can make to really make the music resonate.  I find it very frustrating to be in the orchestra and observe missed opportunities for that type of connection. Communication is important. I had a great haircut a few months back. When I raved about it, my stylist told me that she thought of her job as being more about  communication than craft, and explained that many people - like me - didn't really have words to express exactly what they wanted their hair to be. I gave her vague images and emotional language about my hair, and she crystallized those into a concrete hair proposal and executed it. When I said, inarticulately, that I liked what she'd done and wanted more, she underst...

If I had a New Year's resolution this month, it was to take better care of myself.  Which has an awful lot of component parts, not every one of which relates to the oboe... I'm making no progress on getting to bed earlier - that's just not changeable for me at this time. But less booze, more stretching is going pretty well.  Daily exercise and daily journaling are at about 80%, which is still a big improvement over last fall.  My new archery hobby is nourishing my need to learn, practice, and improve in a highly satisfying way. But one thing that isn't coming back together for me yet is this blog.  My posting schedule, if there ever was one, has dwindled down to once or twice a month, and I don't exactly want to add more stress to my life by committing to something I can't follow through on.  But I miss it.  I miss feeling inspired to write and having the blog always in the back of my mind as I go through my life.  Lately it feels more like guilt...

I am in Illinois this week for the Peoria Bach Festival, with concerts tonight and tomorrow night.  As always, I love this festival.  Love the challenges of jumping between three instruments, love playing my oboe d'amore anytime.  I love playing for the music director, John Jost, who has this music in his heart and communicates it so effectively and effortlessly to us that I feel it in mine as well. Details HERE Out of town gigs used to be the norm for me - when we first lived in Chicago I played principal with the Illinois Symphony , which necessitated regular five-day stays in Springfield with a host family.  My husband and I frequently took jobs several hours from home, staying with local people and getting to know them. This was fun in its way, of course. These gigs always necessitated long days of time-killing - we'd practice and work out, and then we'd read, or shop, or drink coffee.  In my home I can do busy work every minute and still end the day f...

I am excited to get back to work this weekend with the South Bend Symphony.  It’s been a long vacation.  We welcomed it, and made good use of it- some traveling and a lot of sleeping, mostly, but every day is fun with Zoe. We made Hide and Seek Muffins and French Toast and Ice Cream out of Snow, and played innumerable games of Uno, and hiked and shoveled when the weather permitted and watched movies when it didn’t.   Our family needed the break desperately, but after three snow days - right as school was supposed to begin again - extended our vacation another week I am intensely ready to get back to a routine of regular orchestra work.  My private students all came back this week, and the college kids will start up soon - but the playing is really what it’s about, isn’t it?  So we go back to work tomorrow morning.  This will be the first non-Christmas orchestral playing I’ve done since mid-November!  I hope I remember how to maintain a tempo...

January 3, 2013.  This was my plan.  To observe everything unique and fascinating about China, and about the development of this student orchestra over the course of our 10 day tour, and about Zoe’s response to being on the other side of the world, and to write daily even if I couldn’t post until we returned home.  And we are now on day five? Six, maybe?  And I can barely even remember day three.  We’ve been in a haze of bus travel, jet lag, and cold, glowery weather that makes me want to cuddle under a comforter and never leave.  Zoe has been amazing - a real trouper- but she remains three and as such is very very hands-on here.  Now that we finally have a morning off - the first one - I am writing in a hotel lobby in Hangzhou, wearing my winter coat and scarf because underheated and even unheated buildings are entirely the norm here, and I have no idea even where to start.  There’s no way to capture all the details of a trip like this. This tour...

When I have taken time off from the oboe, I dread going back.   Even if I crave it, and desperately wish I was active again, I fear those initial few notes.  The reeds are unrecognizable in their case - WHICH one did I use for that last concert?  Is THIS one any good? - and feel uniformly horrid. I’m not quite sure whether I am soaking them up enough.  The instrument is clumsy under my fingers.  My lips feel puffy and unresponsive.  Although I know the oboe better than almost anything else, the first day back feels awful.  It seems that I’ll never get back to the freedom and ease and authority that I left behind.  Sometimes the expectation of that discomfort can keep me away for another day or even two.  I can let time pass, wishing I was playing but unwilling to work through the re-introduction.  I’ve been playing the whole time here, don’t worry - but for the first time in my life I feel about writing the way I do about the oboe....

Why can’t I write? I can’t seem to have any ideas or focus this month.  I have impulses for ideas, as I am sitting in the orchestra or driving, and I make notes about them.  But I can’t seem to turn them into posts, or even particularly smart ideas.  I’ve been busy - but I don’t actually believe that I’ve been any busier than normal.  The college year has just ended, so I have 1 and 2 half additional days in my week now, and although I did just travel to the East Coast for a major recital that I had been working very hard on as it was a different program from the two self-produced recitals I delivered a month earlier, and although I am working on promoting my Reed Boot Camp and learning a fairly unusual excerpt list for an audition and reviving the Lofstrom Concertino for a performance at IDRS in July, and trying to determine a recital program two weeks later, and although I just played the Rite of Spring this evening, I don’t see why all that and an active 2 year ...

I love auditions.  I genuinely do.  I like how preparing for an audition makes me a much better player, and I like playing the audition game.  I like having the opportunity to play on some of our country's great stages, and I like performing for a committee of great musicians who are listening closely to every note.  I like traveling and seeing my friends and colleagues in the waiting rooms.  I like advancing, and I really like winning. But I don't like talking about auditions.   Every time I write about auditioning on this blog, I squirm in my seat.  I edit and re-edit, and publish an uncomfortable over-worked little piece that doesn't really express what I want it to, and I've been trying to figure out why that is. The audition scene is insanely competitive - we routinely see fifty or more oboists come out for a single job opening.  Every one of us has prepared to our very best ability and traveled at our own expense to the audition site....

Conditions on the ground can change rapidly. Three days ago I started composing a blog post about the current state of my oboe playing. It was all about how I am struggling right now and not physically playing well and feeling desperate about it. It took me a good three days to edit it into an essay I could publish. I needed to find the right way to spin my story so that I had a lesson that was relevant to others, because I know that this cycle of self-loathing is a normal part of creative life and everyone has been there. So rather than just writing what I felt - that I suck - I was working on putting that feeling into context, and establishing how I got there. I also spent some time figuring out how to turn the post around at the end - I wanted to have some solution to the problem in mind to show readers that I wasn't just whining, but actually working to solve things. But you know what? After three days of analyzing the problem in writing and coming up with ways to work on ...