ProneOboe

I am writing this from a coffeeshop in downtown Lancaster, Ohio, where I am based performing with the Lancaster Festival Orchestra for the rest of this month. We have a few too many amazing concerts and events to list, but you can check out the details HERE . We met for the first time yesterday and I am thrilled by the quality of the orchestra and conductor. This is going to be a great couple of weeks! Our first performance is tomorrow night - Roman Carnival Overture, Pines of Rome, and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. We meet our piano soloist, Olga Kern, tonight, and I have high expectations. What a treat to have a new orchestra to play with this summer! I know only a few of the musicians here, and so they don't know me either. Coming in with no expectations gives me a chance to show myself the way I want to be - obviously I will play as well as I am able, but I also want to be a unitasker in rehearsal. No crosswords or sudoku for this girl - I am going ...

I had a friend whose father had a quirk. When he bought a new car, he would drive it home and immediately use his key to put a nice big scratch in the paint. His rationale was that you tend to drive a new car overcautiously for fear of marring the shiny new toy, and he didn't want to go through that unsafe phase. He just got the first scratch out of the way as quickly as possible so he could move on. In a concert, I sometimes have that same overcautious feeling at the beginning. Before I make a mistake, it is possible that I might have a perfect performance. Maybe this will be the night in which I am awesome in every entrance from the start to the finish! Of course, that is not really possible - there's always something I could do better - and it's also not a particularly productive way to think. It makes me play tentatively and boringly. Generally, once I get that first mistake out of the way I can relax and move on. I can open up and take some risks, and ultimate...

I'm seeing Zoe through other people's eyes this month, and it's an education. Day to day we live together and I know her intimately, but I seldom am able to step back and really see her as others do. We spent two weeks in a cabin in Vermont with my mother and my siblings, and are now up in Michigan staying with a marvelous host family for a week and a half. We will have new hosts for two nights this week for a runout concert, and at the end of this month we'll be in Ohio at yet another host's home for two more weeks. Because she's sociable and delightful and adorable, she is the object of everyone's attention, of course, and watching other people watch her I can see another side. I have noticed this tendency on the oboe, too. As soon as I ask a colleague to listen to me, I become horribly aware of the little inconsistencies in my playing. The feedback I get from them is helpful, but the self-awareness is almost more so. Practicing alone, little things...

The Pine Mountain Music Festival is a long-time gig for us - Steve and I have been playing up here since 1998, but financial troubles had forced the festival to downsize and for the past two summers we have not been able to participate. This year, although the festival is not back to its former glory as an opera, symphony, chamber music and teaching extravaganza, we are delighted to be back here playing La Traviata and enjoying the spectacular weather and good company. We have friends in this orchestra and in this town that we can only see up here - colleagues from other states and our wonderful hosts. I love playing opera! I don't necessarily think I would be cut out for a full-time opera orchestra job - I really do like being on stage instead of under it and getting my solo bows every so often. The music written for opera is so great, though, and I adore listening to the singers and there are always significant challenges that come along with playing an accompanimental role a...

I am beginning to recognize myself in Zoe. She is the most methodical baby I have ever seen. She learns a skill and by gum, she works at it until she has it. She's been climbing stairs ever since she started walking - up is easy. But for quite a while she had no idea how to get down, or even that she didn't know how to get down. She'd just turn around and take a big step and tumble into my arms, which was exceptionally nerve-wracking for me and resulted in a lot of gates being placed in our house. Eventually we convinced her that downstairs was different. I taught her to sit down on the step and scootch forward to get her legs down and then stand up on the next step and sit and scootch. She was excited by this new knowledge and wanted to work on it, but I had work to do and wouldn't leave her unsupervised on the stairs. It's been two weeks since then, and we arrived Saturday night at my mother's house on the way to our Vermont vacation. Her porch is sep...

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...