ProneOboe

It is finally time for my two-week vacation - and for five weeks of non-home, non-routine life. I love my well-established patterns and I love being comfortable in my own home - I already miss my early morning coffee and journal time alone at my porch table - but I really think that this next month will be fabulous for me. I was needing a shakeup to restart my productivity. All last week I was teaching at the Dake Academy - the SBSO's summer chamber music camp for highschoolers - and it was completely all-consuming. Monday I devoted every spare minute to preparing for my Tuesday seminar and solo performance on the faculty recital, and Tuesday after the recital I spent a couple of hours preparing food for the faculty party which I hosted Wednesday after the camp. Thursday was the long day which included the big performance at night, and Friday I was the bus leader as all of the chamber groups toured South Bend. During the camp I was busy coaching my chamber trio (in which I wa...

I've been enjoying these past few weeks of relative leisure, and I'm finding myself in a new part of my creative cycle. This week I am seeking outside inspiration. I am reading other people's blogs and listening to recordings and watching videos. I'm still doing my own work, of course - plugging away at the early stages of preparing my next sets of music - but I want to hear how other people turn their phrases or what kinds of sound and color choices they are making or what they are thinking about. I believe, deeply, that listening to music is an important part of growing as a performer. You can learn so much from hearing what others do. I think I am not alone among musicians, however, when I say that by the time I finish my day or my week filled with orchestral rehearsals and performances, my own personal practice time, and my focused attention to the playing of my students, the last thing I want to do is to seek out other oboists or hear one more note of classic...

I'm tapering for my BIG RACE, which is tomorrow morning. The taper makes a lot of sense - I obviously want to start my run feeling as fresh as possible, and not risk being tired or sore from a recent hard workout. So this whole week I have been resting - or at least, not running - and eating heartily. After all, I have to do something with the hours I'm not running, so I might as well cook. As a result, I feel fat and sluggish, which is not making me confident about racing 13.1 miles tomorrow. My mind knows that this is smart, but my legs aren't quite as sure. Training for this race has been interesting - I have been more structured about it than I had been for previous, shorter races. I had expected that the distance would feel overwhelming, as I had really never run more than an hour at a time before. I built up gradually though, adding just a mile each week, and it really turned out that the distance was not a big deal. As long as I go nice and slow, which is my...

I am on page 287 of a book on FileMaker Pro - less than one third of the way through - and I think I'm still just reading about how to import my list of customers. I just finished a section on "Sub-Summary Parts and Printing" (that followed one on "Leading and Trailing Grand Summaries") and I am utterly glazed over. I have not yet opened the program on my computer. I am not actually stupid, but I've never seen anything as apparently confusing as trying to set up a meaningful relational database. My reed business has grown since I started it up in 1998 - and has really outgrown my little Do-It-Myself Excel (now Numbers) spreadsheet. I have become frustrated by the limitations of my system, and I am aware that I need to upgrade and start thinking of myself as a real business. It is hard to be entrepreneurial. My education was focused on the rarified details of creating classical music. The academic classes I took were entirely music-related - Baroque P...

I have to be busy to get anything done. I think this is not too unusual, but it surprises me every year at about this time. I've been on break since last weekend. My symphony jobs are off in the summer, the colleges have ended, the demand for reeds is down. I just finished the last recital of my spring series, and took the last audition that I had scheduled. I now have time to start on the new music I'd been itching to explore, plan my next set of performances, rework my website, learn some new software, clean and purge the house, improve my double-tongue, and write far more thoughtful, detailed blog posts, as I had been intending to do. But what I actually am doing is baking desserts and breads and eating the heck out of them, taking Zoe to the park to swing, napping, watching movies with Steve…there's really no excuse for how completely not busy I'm keeping myself right now, except that it's summer! Fortunately I do still have the half-marathon that my sister ...

I wonder who Zoe is going to be. I don't know how much to read into the traits she has as a baby - that she loves a particular teddy bear, for example, or hates to have her diaper changed but thinks that having her bottom wiped is completely hilarious. These won't be identifiable features of her adult self, I suspect. I don't have a sense of her personality yet, and I don't feel like she'll be a real person to me until she starts talking - for now she seems like some sort of endlessly enchanting pet. This, though, I have noticed. She's very stubborn about the way she approaches things. She goes at her own pace. She's learning to walk right now, and has just about got it. She can take a few steps from a standing start to one of us. But she knows her limits. If you try to plant her in the middle of the floor she refuses. She will not stand up. She collapses her legs beneath her and insists on sitting. As soon as you let her go, she turns and crawls...

I'm preparing excerpts now for an audition, and I know them too well. I've had a long break from thinking about orchestral excerpts, what with the baby and the dearth of actual job openings this year, and as I re-explore them I am trying to bring a little space and perspective to bear on them. I have practiced these snippets SO MANY TIMES in the past. My interpretations of these solos and difficult passages from the repertoire are valid. I have studied them for years, listened to many many recordings, taken lessons with numerous wonderful teachers, and considered them deeply. I have drilled them and drilled them, and all of them are memorized, and I know exactly what nuances I'm making and when. But, you know what? Those nuances aren't HOW THEY GO, they are just HOW I PLAY THEM. They are not wrong, but why should I be a slave to my younger self? There are other ways, and other approaches, and I'm having a difficult time finding them. Even when I spend an hour ...