Darkest Night of Oboe Reeds and The Joy of Being a Musician

 Darkest Night of Oboe Reeds

And the Joy of Being a Musician

 The reed lamp is lit. Its magnifying lens lights the way as I commune with the fine grains of orindo donax cane. I’m back at the oboe reed making table at 4 in the morning, a time usually reserved for the dark night of the soul, but not for me. Instead, it’s the time of heightened concentration and focus when I start making oboe reeds, and I begin the process of making multitudinous changes over the next few days as I guide the cane into making the most beautiful sound  I can produce on the oboe. This was my practice in the years I was a principal oboist of a local orchestra. The reeds I produced that day ultimately would conform with the needs of my physiology, my mouth, my windway, my breath control. But mostly, I concentrated on accurate intonation (tuning). Without fine tuning, the reeds were useless no matter how intrinsically beautiful their sound.

I love the dark sounding reeds, the woody sound that echoes in the room. These are great for the Russian composers, the sound of deep sorrow and suffering in the Russian soul. But in the concert I was considering, we were performing Rossini, a composer of comic genius, like Mozart. Rossini was much honored in his own time. For Rossini, I needed a sound without a hint of suffering, a sound that doesn’t take itself seriously. It requires a silken beauty that reflects the slipperiness of the trickster, a sound that expresses comedic insight and irony.

The magic of instrumental music is that it evokes moods, emotions, thoughts and character without words, only with sound gestures that have their life and meaning within the cultural conventions of their time. If the music succeeds at being more universal, the composer is able to transcend the cultural limitations of their own time, and convey emotional meaning for all times. All with sound. True magic.

The musician takes on the character of the music much as a good actor personifies his or her role. If the musician succeeds at this, the music will be alive with the appropriate sound quality.  Then the musician can perform inside the same emotional mood and head space the composer is trying to convey, adding their own emotional spin to the music.

It is this kind of magic that makes audiences show up. I tell my tentative students the audience never comes to hear you “mess up.”  They come instead to hear you unify with the music and convey it beautifully. They give you, the performer, something precious, the gift of their attention. They desparately want you to succeed at your art. If you do, then if only for a few moments, they will forget their problems, their sick mothers, issues with their children, personal crises, and instead they will be lifted into a transcendent experience. And if you are a young person and you are brilliant on that day, then this gives them hope.