Oboe reed staples are important. Sure, you can build a good reed or a bad reed on any tube, but the material, the bore, and the dimensions of the staple MATTER. The staple is an extension of the bore of the oboe! I haven’t done the most extensive testing of staples, and I’m not the smartest person in the world about their metrics. I look at ​Ann Hodge’s amazing blog post​ defining staple length and width and shape, and I see her tables of numbers, and my eyes sort of glaze over. I cannot tell you anything intelligent about a staple from its measurements. But I am a performer and I know what I ..read more

SCHOOL HAS STARTED. What a relief!  Up until the last minute, my child was trudging through summer math homework. They resented it desperately but I had fun working on it with them!   I used to love this kind of math. Arithmetic, really. Just a long list of problems with figure-outable solutions. Products, quotients, realize this fraction as a percent, etc.  None of these awful real-world story problems in which you have to spend all of your time parsing the language to figure out what math to solve. -6.7/0.2 is satisfyingly straightforward and I love me some lon ..read more

I trust people. When I walk in the city or jog on my riverfront path, i meet people’s eyes and say hello. When I need directions I ask for them. When I am asked a sincere question I respond sincerely.  AND I maintain some awareness of my surroundings. I don’t get into cars with strangers. I don’t leave my drink unattended. When I have an icky feeling about a situation I listen to my gut and leave.  Similarly, I trust the oboe. I don’t spend all of my time trying to manipulate and mouth the reed into doing exactly what I want, rather I make an embouchure, voice the note I want, and ju ..read more

Recently I played a two week run of My Fair Lady in Chicago. It was superbly professional, so it ran exactly the same every show, 8 shows a week. Recently on The Long and the Short Of It podcast I heard a discussion of Vuja De – the opposite of déjà vu. The idea that you KNOW you’ve done the exact same thing before, but you FEEL as if it was completely fresh and new.  So this was what I tried to implement. I brought my attention to something different in every show, and tried to notice something new each time.  I noticed the harp part, the bass part. I tried to listen for all of the ..read more

I was working with an oboe student recently who was struggling on her back-up oboe. Nothing wrong with the instrument, it was fine, but all oboes have their quirks, and their little ergonomic differences, and my oboist couldn’t quite get her fingers to line up and things were glitching and she was frustrated.  You know that feeling when you rent a car, and when you first sit down it feels weird? You can’t see the mirrors, the seat is at an unfamiliar angle, sometimes it’s a pushbutton start and you can’t find the button right away? And even once you get yourself oriented and start to driv ..read more

I was talking with my FLOW group about our upcoming recital. Most of my participants have their pieces in pretty good shape, with a month to go. This is fantastic! But there’s a difference between having your piece in pretty good shape and being performance-ready. We talked about play-throughs, and how running the piece multiple times is critical to work out both your physical endurance and the emotional and mental arc of the piece. The more your performance framework is in place, the more confident you can be delivering it even in higher-stress situations. But the question then arose – what d ..read more

I heard a colleague complaining about having practiced music which was later cut from the concert. What a waste of time, she griped! Something about that attitude rubbed me the wrong way. Why complain about time spent on your instrument improving ANYTHING? Even if the specific notes in question aren’t being performed, surely the act of working them out is building neural pathways and keeping you in shape, and that music itself may come up again somewhere, sometime. Fourteen years ago I decided it was finally time for me to learn how to double tongue on my instrument. Double tonguing is a techn ..read more

What does it mean to Play Beautifully? That’s what one of my FLOW oboists asked in our group this week.  My teacher, Richard Killmer, used it as a mantra – “When in doubt, play beautifully.”  I think that’s a great saying. I have it as a decal on my wall, and I think about it a lot, and use it in my teaching. Sometimes the more focused we get on the craft of oboe playing, and the greater the difficulty of the technical problem we are trying to solve, the less we remember to pay attention to the actual sound of the instrument.  “Play beautifully” is a nice re ..read more

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing a student who SIMPLIFIED her air, her embouchure, and her approach, trusted the oboe, and let an entire slow movement gently unspool for me. It was beautiful, it was expressive, it was effortless. It was a testament to the power of getting out of your own way. It had been a long time coming for this student, this release and ease.  “Well, BUT,” she objected when I raved about her transformation, “This slow movement is more of a glorified long tone. I couldn’t do this for anything more technical.” REALLY?  On a wind instrument, isn’t EVERYTHING ..read more

I’ve had FOUR orchestra concerts now, in our new transitioning-to-post-pandemic world. We are so lucky, here in South Bend, to have management and a board that are forward thinking and prioritize our safety and the safety of our audience while also being inclined to ACTION.  I’m really proud of us.   In some ways returning to the orchestra is like riding a bicycle, if riding a bicycle were an exhilarating wave of sound produced by humans that you love and haven’t seen in over a year.  But it’s also different from before, in some critical ways.  Here ..read more