ProneOboe

Here's something my students can all do, if I remind them.  They can play beautifully.  Some more beautifully than others, of course, based on their level of development, but they all know what it means. When I ask for it, they take care of the beginnings and ends of their phrases, and make themselves sound pretty.  It's an easy add-on. Not one of them defaults to this without being reminded. Again, the more advanced they are the better they basically sound - but it gets better every time when I ask for beauty. The regrettable aspect of this is that I, too, sometimes need to remind myself to play beautifully. We can all get focused on the easy, quantifiable stuff - the notes and rhythms - and lose track of the overall aesthetic point. Of course, when I'm at my music stand at home learning the music for the gig that night, I'm not really thinking about the inherent beauty of my sound. I just want to make sure I'm not caught out unprepared in rehearsal, and I ca...

I had a blast today sightreading the Joffrey Ballet's Sylvia performance.  I've sightread performances before , in emergency situations, and compared to that this was a non-stressful gig, since I had had it on my calendar for weeks. I had had the music to prepare from, and I had attended one performance to hear the way the orchestra played and to practice watching the conductor's tempo changes.   That didn't mean that I wasn't a little tense about it. Being able to play all of the licks in the privacy of my room, at the tempos I set for myself, is one thing. But finding my place in the chords, picking my way through tempo and key changes in real time, and discovering in the moment just how my other colleagues were interpreting the tunes we play together is quite another. What made this experience amazing was how nice all my colleagues were to me. I got lovely, clear, helpful cues from the principal flute, the second oboe, and of course the conductor. I felt ...

Lately I've been writing a ton about my students.  It's fun to start the school year and really get to know the new ones and reconnect with the old ones and figure out what everyone needs to work on.  It takes a few weeks, sometimes, to find the nub of the issue for each one.  The crux of the matter.  The overarching thing that, no matter what piece of music they bring into their lesson, we wind up talking about and working on. Posture.  Air.  Vibrato.  Expressiveness.  Rhythm. Once we have that thing identified, we can focus on it until it's fixed, or at least until they REALLY understand how to work on it and how to tell when it's good. In my own playing there are cruxes as well.  Of course there are. But without weekly feedback from outside myself it is sometimes challenging to identify them, or at least to identify them precisely. Particularly over the summer, when I'm playing outdoor concerts and practicing by myself at home, it's easy...

I'm playing with the Chicago Philharmonic for the Chicago Opera Theater's production of Lucio Silla, an early Mozart opera that I had truly never heard of before.  It's charming, in an early Mozart kind of way, and the singers sound wonderful and so does the orchestra.  If you like nearly incomprehensible historical storylines and impressive coloratura and light, elegant, beautifully played orchestral accompaniments, this show is for you.  We open next Saturday - details HERE . But I wanted to talk about logistics. Every week is different for a family of freelance musicians.  Sometimes we can take turns watching Zoe at home, sometimes we can hire sitters for a few hours as we work in town - and sometimes it's very complicated. Often our gigs are nearby, or at venues with convenient parking lots, but sometimes they are not. On Saturday I had a three hour opera rehearsal in Chicago.  It was the only thing on my calendar and the venue should have been less...

I can hardly believe that we are starting the season up again!  I haven't played an indoor concert in months and hope I remember how.  We rehearse tonight for the first time and I am eager to see all of my South Bend Symphony friends again. Annnnddddd... we're playing Symphonie Fantastique.  By Berlioz.  And I never get tired of that piece. It's one of the first pieces that I "discovered" myself, as a high school student.  One of the first CDs I purchased for myself.  One of those that I would stay awake listening to in my room because it was just so thrilling.  And even if it's a little overly melodramatic for me now, my teenage heart still beats a little harder every time the English horn calls mournfully for her love and gets only the rumble of distant thunder in response... I am a sucker for music that tells a story, particularly one of drug-addled hysteria and lost love and scaffolds and guillotines. This will be a great concert. ...

I love the beginning of a new teaching season.  New students, new energy. I'm feeling great about my teaching and in the mood to share some of my techniques.  Feel free to chime in with your own! My new student didn't know the fingering for high C#.  We were still on a getting-to-know-you page in the book - something I chose to be intentionally too easy so we could talk about breathing and support and articulation in a non-panicky way, and at the bottom of the page it asked for a D Harmonic Minor scale and we got hung up right there.  This particular fingering isn't hard, but it is totally non-intuitive, and unlike any other finger pattern he'd learned up to that point. So we started by just using brain power.  I spelled it out for him - 2, 3, 1, C.  His fingers found their way to where they belonged.  Then he tried putting it into the scale and it flopped- he got as far as the Bb before it, and then had to stop and mentally put 231C together again...

So you are ready to take some oboe lessons.  You've just moved to the area, or you've gone through a year of band and your parents have decided that you seem committed enough to begin to be serious, or you feel that your own private practice has stalled and you need new insights.  What does it mean, when a teacher suggests that you come in for a trial lesson? The trial lesson is usually not a free lesson - you are still occupying the teacher's time and energy with your presence.  It is, however, a low stakes, low commitment way to see if you and your teacher are going to be a good fit for each other. Of course you should use this opportunity to learn as much as possible.  Even if you've been taking lessons for years, a different perspective will inevitably offer some  new insight into your oboe study. If your teacher says something brand new, that lesson was 100% worthwhile. If the teacher only says exactly the same things as your previous instructors, that ...