© John Mack, Cleveland Heights, Ohio -- 1974
Editor's Note:
John Mack, principal oboist of the Cleveland
Orchestra, was appointed to this position in 1965. He was born in Somerville,
New Jersey, where he had his early musical training. He studied with Bruno
Labate and Harold Gomberg at the Juilliard School of Music and with Marcel
Tabuteau at the Curtis Institute. Mr. Mack played with the Sadler's Wells Ballet
on tour of the U.S. and Canada in 1951-52. He was first oboist with the New
Orleans Philharmonic, 1952-63, and the National Symphony, 1963-65. He has
participated in the Casals Festivals and the Marlboro Festival. Since September,
1965, Mr. Mack has been Chairman of Oboe Studies at the Cleveland Institute of
Music; he has also served on the faculty of the Blossom Festival School since
its inception in 1968.
This article is a transcription of Mr. Mack's address to the convention of the IDRS at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, in August of 1973. The editor is grateful for Mr. Mack's permission to use it here.
I wanted to direct my remarks towards teaching - looking after the young and a number of things that might help them, because I speak from my own personal experience since I started playing the oboe when I didn't know one end of the oboe from the other at all, and I had no one to tell me anything, and when I did finally get information, the information really wasn't too good. And as I have wended my way gradually upward in the world of the oboe, I have discovered, at least it seems that way to me now, there is not that much, or that great, or that broad a supply of first-class knowledge about the instrument, and the problems to do with it. I find myself doing a fair amount of teaching over the years - too much - and the more I do of it, the more I become aware of many of the things of tremendous importance.
I'm going to try to cover a lot of things this afternoon. If you want to shoot me down or ask me questions later, I'll certainly not be reticent. Undoubtedly, many of the things I will have to say you are already familiar with, maybe you aren't, maybe they'll be expressed in a way different than the way you are accustomed to.
This is the way it looks to me. First of all, the very purpose of teaching itself is two-fold (it seems that everything we do is two-fold, whether it's balancing a reed--). It's a question of developing the taste and the ability of the student, and in order to do that, we find ourselves making demands on students of necessity to develop their taste, which for a while, be it several years, puts them in a rigid position. I feel, as a teacher, one of the most difficult things to do is to be able to amass the do's and don'ts, and enforce them rigorously, because discipline has to be injected into a student. If they don't have the discipline and the great demand put on them, they will never demand it of themselves. To me the difficulty is to get this discipline, this development of good taste - where a young musician learns to love fine playing and abhor poor playing in anyone - including in himself or herself - so that a natural development can take place. The difficulty, as far as I'm concerned, is to do that, and at the same time, not discourage a young person, and I really find that quite difficult. The other great problem is that we have this two-fold presentation for the young student the presentation of musical goals and the presentation of physical information. A lot of teaching that is done, I've observed, is physical information, and the musical goals are rather haphazard - what comes out comes out. You do this this way, you do this that way, and of course this isn't music whatsoever. And yet if the musical goals themselves are presented solely, this doesn't necessarily work out too well, and I speak from first-hand information. I happen to be a student of the great Marcel Tabuteau, and his teaching, I would say, was 98% aligned in musical directions, musical goals, similes, metaphors all kinds of comparisons with nature, with this, with that, and this is marvelous for the development of your imagination, just marvelous. The only thing is that he left it up to the students themselves to find their own physical way to adapt themselves to this goal, and in so doing, they might be doing something in a rather strange way very often, and still getting quite a creditable result. That's fine as far as that goes, but what happens to the next generation? What happens to the people that they teach? That's one of my great concerns as far as this whole subject goes. The very best information in the best possible way must be disseminated so that things can keep from becoming, what shall I say? - too polluted, one of our great concerns today.
Now in the whole process of development, that we as teachers would assist in the development of a person, I find that one of the real difficulties with the instrument is that it is getting in the way. It's just very often that the young person is stymied by the presence of the instrument in their face and hands, so that the music doesn't come out, and the goal as far as the instrument is concerned - I'm not talking about instrumental capacity - the goal with the instrument is to come as close to absorbing the instrument completely within oneself as possible, and I don't mean stick the reed too far in your mouth or anything like that - but to envelop it. I do know, in my own case, when I'm playing my very best, I don't even think about a reed, an oboe, blowing, anything whatsoever; I just feel as though the music comes directly out. It doesn't happen too often, but it does happen sometimes. I think this is a worthwhile goal. I also perceive, that on the whole, most people, especially people who have chosen to evidence their interest in music by the study of it, these people have quite a high level of musical sensitivity and sensibility within them . . . much more so than usually comes out of the instrument. And I want to give you a little example so you'll see what my reasoning is here. The human voice is our first means of communication, and we can be so expressive with our voices. We don't have to be a great artiste or anything like that to be expressive with our voice, so that it's almost impossible sometimes to disguise our feelings when we're talking. It just naturally comes out. Still talking on the subject of an instrumental goal, it should be the pursuit of the means of having as direct and easy an expression with the instrument as with the voice. Most young people are very reluctant - they're bashful, they're terribly embarrassed if you ask them to sing three notes. When I say "sing that passage," I don't mean to sing as though you had a glorious voice, but singing as though you would sing a melody when you're out in the middle of nowhere and there's no one to hear you - you're singing because you love music and you're singing something that you like - that kind of singing, where you sing something with expression. For instance (I didn't mean this to be a lecture-demonstration) but - (sings from Saint-Saens) that kind of expression, reaching for that, trying to get a student past the instrument where they can play that way, this is a fundamental goal.
Another thing I want to touch on before I go to a thousand other things here - it has gradually dawned on me over the last few years, that one of the things that needs to be developed also which is helpful is this process of self-improvement. After all, the student studies, and at some point or another the student stops studying with a teacher per se, and they pursue their instrument and music on their own. And in doing that, very often that's the end of improvement for a lot of players. When they're on their own, they either stay where they are, or they gradually sink, and I think I have a couple of cures for that, something that I think is very good advice, and that I think very few of you have thought of in these terms. Most people when they play, most instrumentalists are playing from a piece of music. There is a visual input and there is a physical output towards the instrument. The visual input is their perception of the black marks on the white paper, and what it means to them is of course conditioned by their training to that point and then there is a physical effort made to try to achieve what they sense from the paper. Now I would say that almost never does the output achieve the goal, however limited it might be, at any stage of development of the student, and my sure proof of this is to ask anyone who has ever played into a tape recorder - "And how did you like it when you heard it back?" and everybody says "ugggh." "Well you know, I didn't realize I played it that way - it can't be right." The proof of this observation is that when people play, they really do not hear themselves; they have never thought of hearing themselves - it's only one-way: the visual comes in, and then it goes out, and while it's going out the player is busy thinking about the next item coming up and so forth, so people don't really acutely hear themselves. I'm sure that any one of you who plays an instrument, if you were to closet yourself with a tape recorder - forget the faults of the tape recorder - but by other standpoints, of rhythm, intonation, legato, all kinds of things, it tells quite a bit. If any one of you takes a short passage and plays it into the tape recorder, listen to it back, and decide "I'd really like to do it a little bit better than that," you listen, you do it again, and you listen, and gradually your satisfaction with the result doesn't get much better, but the result gets much better.
Usually if you make a conscientious effort to let the music reach you - that sounds awfully puritanical, simon-pure, but I honestly do believe this . . . Learn to hear yourself and learn to hear the music, and it will guide you, and if you do that, and your students do that, there is always the possibility of improvement and development, forever, for as long as you work.
Now that I've gotten over some of our more lofty attitudes, I do want to cover some of this enormous amount of physical information, which will be familiar to many of you. I may cover some points that are not familiar to you. Whenever I speak, I'm always asked about instruments, and so forth. I'll touch on that subject later, but I would like to say a few words about instrument maintenance, which I think is something which must be learned because most people don't have close access to assistance with these things. For instance oiling; there happens to be a great deal of difference of opinion on should you oil the bore or should you not. A little bit goes a long way, but as far as the mechanism is concerned, it is a definite necessity. There are products on the market; one can always be safe with clock oil, not watch oil. Singer Sewing Machine oil - not bad, but the thing is to put it on regularly. I think it's a wise thing to do different climates have different effects - I cadge a hypodermic needle off of my doctor, and that's very nice. Certain keys seem to want to cause trouble sooner than others, F for instance or the little F# key, or B-flat on the left-hand the trills on the left-hand, they seem to be highly susceptible to that, and a lot of people seem to be very cautious about the idea of taking an instrument apart and putting it back together, for fear it may not go back together correctly. Even under the best of circumstances, if you know what you're doing, it very often has to be readjusted after you put it back together. Therefore it's a good idea to keep applying a bit of oil here and there, but certainly not enough to run down the posts. When I see young people's oboes, I often see dirt in the tone holes, in the little hole in the E key for example (which makes high C# possible) and should be cleaned out now and then. Just running one's fingers over the open key or the holes in the keys of the left hand can deposit dirt in them. - (your A-natural seems to get flatter and flatter, just because there's dirt collecting in the hole).
There are certain basic adjustments I feel every oboe player - and I insist on this with my students - should make every time you pick up the instrument. Certain basic adjustments, which do tend to change from time to time - F#-G#, play a low C and tap the G# key, nothing should change, nor should you have to press any fingers down too hard. I do not believe in strong springs I used to when I was in my teens and could make any oboe cover just by the force of the fingers, but it really doesn't work too well. D-flat - E-flat should be checked every time you play; low B-C# - some people believe in leaving that slightly loose so the B will seat with greater ease, and only tighten it up for "Tombeau de Couperin" or something like that. Another one I think is rather important, something the young student should be able to look after for himself is the relationship of the strength of the G key to the B-flat. I'm also a great believer in teaching the young student to do a few simple things for himself like putting in a pad if they have to, like an octave pad or something like that. I don't think that's such a difficult thing that a young person can't learn - to find a piece of cork without blemishes, and with a piece of wet-and-dry sandpaper, fashion a pad to perfection. There is a new little wrinkle that Bill Brannen in Chicago has come up with that of putting Teflon tips in the screws and eliminating corks. I'm sort of old-fashioned and I thought that was just dreadful, but I changed my mind, especially since he has improved his method of doing it. The little adjustment screws, he drills a little hole in the end, stuffs a little round piece of Teflon in, cuts it off, adjusts it a bit so it's well in place and won't change. This eliminates three bug-a-boos for us oboe-players: 1) the cork adjustment falls out - 2) it just wears through and changes - 3) it wears through to the glue and sticks. Now, if you have a screw with a Teflon tip in it you don't have to worry about the cork doing any of those things; it stays and stays and stays! - and wears forever.
I want to mention another thing about instruments also, most of them are silver plated, and a lot of us tend to tarnish the keys rather badly. There's a nice little invention that an English company named Goddard has come up with, called silver-care cloth - it's a blue cloth. If you clean the keys regularly with this cloth, not only does it remove tarnish, it protects the silver from the acidity, the bile in your perspiration that causes it. There is another cure for turning the keys black - just have your gall bladder removed! I haven't, but many have, and it works 100%. I want to say something about the care of new instruments. I found myself in dispute with some of my colleagues here and there; Ralph Gomberg was telling me one day "I have this friend at MIT who told me it's the humidity differential between the inside and the outside, every bit as much as the temperature differential that makes new instruments crack." I didn't go to MIT, but I still say, it's the vibration that does it, and I have proof. The proof is very simple - if you have an instrument that's new, it cracks and when it's broken in, it doesn't crack. The temperature differential is the same, inside and out - the humidity differential is the same, inside and out - the only different thing about the broken-in instrument is that the molecules of the wood have been re-adjusted from being played on, from being put in vibration, and whatever strain that puts on the wood, the wood has become accustomed to. Therefore a new instrument must be played very cautiously. Because wood is not seasoned now at all the way it used to be many years ago, I would certainly advise my students or anyone who asks me - fifteen minutes a day for the first month. Fifteen minutes twice a day for the next few months and then gradually add on to that, and then if you mind your p's and q's - don't play in front of the air conditioner or anything like that - then the chances are you might be all right. I also made a sheep-lined bag to put the instruments in in the winter time, so that in going from one building to another the instrument doesn't cool off that much. Saves a lot of strain on the instrument - and a lot of time for the player - holding it in your hand trying to get the thing to warm up.
Now I'd like to get into some of our basic considerations as far as teaching is concerned. Tone is a great problem for the young oboe player. An amusing syndrome for the young oboe player is they usually play like this, dying to be heard but afraid that someone might hear them. Of all the instruments, probably the oboe takes the most amount of time to get off the ground, to get to the point where you don't sound so objectionable. And yet at the time you're trying to do all the physical things - with the reeds and so forth - you must have this dual arrangement, that you're trying to point them towards something fine, give them some kind of concept and ideals about the sound. Explain to the student that the tone is the vehicle for the music. A beautiful tone, per se, doesn't necessarily do the job; a beautiful tone may take attention away from the music. Although there are very few tones I hear that I care for at all I don't feel limited to finding enjoyment in only one particular kind of sound, but there is one characteristic that leaps to mind here, and that is something I would call integrity. Conviction in the sound. Most all the best players seem to have that quality - even though their tones may vary from one player to another quite a bit. It sounds corny, but I like to say tone is a matter of life and depth; to have those two characteristics in your sound. This goes for any instrument I think you don't want any instrument to sound shallow. In order for your tone to not be wasted, it has to be effectual; it has to have conviction, and in order to do that, it must have depth, and it really must have life. If it's dull - nothing. During the development of a player as a student, there's something I've observed usually happens and I think making a student aware of this is helpful and that is, during their playing career, probably there is going to be a gradual change in their tone quality. The best word that I can think of to describe that change would be a distillation. The tone starts out nebulous, scattery - and gradually, with maturing and usage, the young person discovers that your tone has to become more centered or what have you? Actually it's a question of making the tone hold together better, making the tone more effectual, so that it will carry the line of the music - and that leads right into the whole idea of projection. Projection is a funny thing. There are some players who can sound enormously loud and yet you can't hear them out front when they're playing in an ensemble for example. I feel that projection, while it 's not exactly mystical or metaphysical, there's something strange about it, because some players have a tone of no seeming great strength, and somehow or other it will come through relatively intact and unscathed. It's almost like having the sound post exactly in the right place in a string instrument. A difference of a 32nd of an inch can make a Stradivarius sound like a $30 fiddle. I don't know if any of you have encountered that situation; I have, and I just could not believe the difference. I think that this is a mental matter almost as much as anything else almost by force of the will, a seeking on the part of the player to find a way to do this. I had an unusual thing happen myself that way, playing in the Kennedy Center. I found the hall absolutely dreadful; it felt like playing into a sponge. I was very upset about it, but the next year we went back there to play; after about the first ten minutes of playing, all of a sudden it was almost as though I had found where the bullseye was. You play towards that spot and all of a sudden it's there, so I know when we talk about something like projection, we can't use concrete terms. There is something higher than this in the whole concept of projection. I remember when I was a youngster going to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra with their great English horn player, John Minsker. The whole orchestra could be tuning up on the stage of the Academy of Music, and Minsker would pick up the English horn and begin to play in this great cacophony of sound, and you heard him! There it was, no forcing, no anything, perhaps by the purity of his thoughts or something! Maybe we could get some Zen Buddhist on the subject we might find there are things we just don't know about - it's possible.
I want to stop right here to interject a plea - to any and all of you who have any control whatsoever over the situation anywhere - fight for good pitch! I'm not talking about intonation, I'm talking about pitch. Don't be too ugly about it, unless you have to be. If you make people angry they won't be as cooperative as they might be otherwise. There's nothing wrong with 440 nothing wrong at all - it's just delightful; the only way you can come close to having any decent intonation on the oboe is to play it in tune with your low notes, and this is something that's a great bugaboo to young players. They take a flat reed - they bite and they can play everything on the oboe a quarter of a tone sharp except the low notes so they say "my low notes are so flat." The low notes aren't flat - the player is playing the rest of the instrument out of tune to the low notes - maybe the pitch is high also; that's very possible, more than possible, it's probable. Please remind your students, and all their wind-playing colleagues, that there is only one classic way to play as far as the pitch is concerned in an orchestra, a band, an ensemble - no other way is possible but this: a wind player must be warmed up when he or she starts; start at the pitch and maintain the pitch from beginning to end, none of this start here, finish there business that's baby stuff - and very prevalent, many people do it. Somebody comes at the last minute - hauls out his instrument, barely warms up, so they start here and finish there. Because they do that, string players are never going to listen to their A's - "the A isn't bad, but look where he or she is playing fifteen minutes later - why should I take that A? He gives one A and plays a different A." Of course, nobody's going to respect that. The only possible way to have good pitch plus good intonation, is that wind players must never give an excuse to anyone else to misbehave. They must be warmed up when they start; they must maintain the pitch all the time; there is no other way. Then at least you have some constancy of pitch; the various players can go about trying to solve the problems of their instruments. I must ask all of you please do all you can with us and try to suggest to your young ones to follow that policy and to try to proliferate it among their colleagues. It's the only way. I assure you that I don't have any particular difficulty playing in tune in the Cleveland Orchestra, but if I went to a lot of other orchestras, I'd just have to throw in the towel. So many orchestras play floating pitches. This is just carelessness. The players have to monitor this, and anyone who's up front has to constantly remind people about things like this.
I'm often asked - "at what angle should you hold the oboe?" Somebody told me a story - I won't mention any names. Some youngster went to play at a contest or something, and got a message back from the judge. "You hold the oboe too low. Why don't you hold the oboe high like that man in Chicago?" Well, that man in Chicago studied with the man in New Haven. The man in New Haven holds the oboe lower than anyone else in the country. Bob Bloom holds the oboe rather low; Ray Still rather high and one studied with the other, and they get along fine. The instrument must be in such a position to help your embouchure be effective, that's what it has to be, and I'll go into that further when I discuss embouchure.
It depends to a great deal on your orientation to your upper or lower lip, and the relationship between your upper and lower lip and the teeth - as to what you do naturally as a player. I'll go into that a little bit, as I think it's something of universal interest. As far as the angle is concerned, about the only thing I can say now is, please hold it straight in front. If you have the stand in front of you, look at the stand and point the oboe at it. It does look funny for someone to look at the oboes, and see their instruments pointed toward the flute section! Something that's very prevalent among young players - speaking of the hands and arms - is that they look like they're playing while standing in a narrow doorway. I don't know why that is - not that you should taxi down the field either, but remember as players that the visual impression means a lot. People who go to concerts see more than they hear!
As far as hand position is concerned, let me briefly go over what I tell my students. Right hand - F# and C# - no knuckle should show, even if you have to bend your G# key down a bit. The index finger of the right hand can be cramped slightly and still operate, the other fingers cannot. No straight fingers on the oboe - straight fingers are out on the oboe, completely out. Don't stand for it. Put your index finger on the F#, your little finger on the C#, and then the other fingers coming straight on their own angle onto the keys.
Any of you who do oboe teaching with young people, one of the first things you discover is they can't keep this finger on the G key, with the tiny little hole in it. They can't keep that thing covered. They'll reach for the E-flat on the side, and off they slide; they reach for low B. and off they slide the other way. The reason is that the ring finger gets locked in place. The finger is straight, and if you move your hand with the necessary flexibility to service those five keys down there you're off the hole. So for the left hand curve at all fingers, and you'll have enough give to be able to reach what you need to. Also make your students play chromatically from B-flat to D and back down. If you make them do that, their left little finger will gain strength and courage and they won't fret over this. That left little finger is something young players have a great deal of difficulty with. I do not believe in removing the octave key when you go to the high octave. The left thumb belongs either on the wood or on the octave key (on the end of the octave key). Nowhere else not in the air. On the wood or on the octave key. I'm a great believer that in the transition from octave G to octave A, the motion is one of a slight rotation of the wrist - the same motion that lifts the finger off the G key depresses the high octave key with a minimum of effort and it's so easy that you can play the opening of the Handel G minor concerto - the octave G trill - and octave all the A's - very simply. It puts your hand in a marvelous position to do everything it has to do. I'm a great believer in making the transition from half-hole to octave with a sliding motion, a parallel motion of thumb and index finger, not rolling, because the left-hand index finger roll must coincide with the thumb action, which cannot roll, and if you train your finger to slide, those fingers will work much much better, more cleanly, more dependably.
Correct fingerings are something that a lot of young people don't seem to run into. I haven't seen any fingering charts lately! There's one in the Gillet studies - what's that? 1907 or something like that? It's fine, a wonderful fingering chart. Insisting upon correct fingerings is an important part of good teaching, especially in the high notes, so that when your students go into the high register, they don't become unhinged; it's just a matter of using the correct fingerings. The left F - a very good fingering; let's learn to use the side F key. Let's discourage young students from running around playing forked F's with E-flat. Another thing about fingerings which some of you may have run into - the way in which you blow aids your fingers for evenness. If you have difficult fast fingering passages, and you try to make them even with your fingers alone - if you overblow ever so slightly, maybe it makes the notes respond more quickly and therefore more evenly between notes of different resistances, I don't know, but it helps.
Now, speaking about blowing, let me say a few quick words on that subject. Some teachers feel about breathing that you just take a breath and you blow and that's all there is to it, and I would say for a lot of young players that's all that's necessary. Just take a breath and blow. However, you run into those pupils who don't do that. Their shoulders go up, their chests go out, and they're blue in the face, and they don't have any air in them at all. So I generally like to make the observation that Mother Nature has provided a quick source of oxygen for us under emergency situations. You walk down the street and somebody steps out from behind a telephone pole and you go like this. That's magnificent. You think about it you've filled your lungs with air; you've just taken a big load of oxygen in an instant, and your shoulders didn't move. Now I don't say you should breathe that way, but the manner and method of breathing is closely related to doing just that. Everyone knows "breathe from the diaphragm" well, I don't know about that "from the diaphragm," but breathe to the bottom so that you have more control over your wind, a muscular control, and not the locking kind of control that comes from the rib cage. I would say that once that is your premise, there are lots and lots of things you can do as far as blowing is concerned. It's not all cut and dried. Not from where I stand anyway. There are different levels of support, you don't just blow from the diaphragm all the time I assure you if you tried to do that, you'd have a hernia in five minutes! it's just impossible. You relegate some support to the girdle of muscle around your middle and even inside your mouth, you can compress the air with your tongue inside your mouth and make it louder. I know that you can do it - I do it myself.
I want to say something on the subject of the throat. Since I first started reading magazine articles, I remember "breathe from the diaphragm and play with an open throat." Well, is there anybody here who can play with an open throat? First of all you would have to define what the throat is. What are we talking about? the back of the mouth? the roof of the mouth? down where the larynx is? where your tongue is? Where is your throat? When you get a sore throat you know it covers a lot of territory. There's not much that's open back there as far as I can see. I have tried desperately to play with an open throat - and it comes out sounding like a hooty owl. So far as I'm concerned, I honestly believe that the concept of the open throat is a lovely concept in some ways. As far as reality is concerned, I consider it an old wives' tale! If you think open throat and your tone is better - great! Then think it, and the same with youngsters. but as far as being closed back there, I see nothing wrong with being relatively closed in the back as long as you are not in a choking position. It just so happens that the inside of your mouth has an enormous effect on the quality and the placement of the sound, the depth of the sound, the pitch of the notes, the shape of your tongue while you're playing. Try a little experiment - the next time you're fiddling with your oboe, play a low F; play it very softly and get the very best tone that you can; spend a couple of minutes experimenting around until you think it sounds the very best tone you can get on that note. Soft and beautiful not a bony, knock-kneed sound and while you're doing that, try to figure out where your tongue really is in relation to the rest of your mouth. I'm not going to say any more than that, but I think you'll be in for a little surprise. You won't believe it.
The shape of the inside of the mouth where your tongue is, where your soft palate is - these things, as your playing develops, change and adjust all subjectively subconsciously to a mental image of the sound that you're after. Those things just happen. Look at the whole subject of voice - voice teachers - talk about metaphysics! So far as mental images are concerned, if they help you, fine. Getting down to the nitty-gritty, I don't think you can say, yes this and yes that. All I'm telling you is that inside there makes an enormous difference. Anybody can discover this by maintaining the same embouchure and making different vowel sounds in their mouths, and see what happens. As far as I'm concerned, I don't try to blow down through the reed; my teacher taught me to blow in this direction (at the bridge of the nose) and I don't know why it works as well as it does, but it does work. It puts more spring in the sound.
This brings us into embouchure. I don't know what to say to those of you who find yourselves teaching youngsters in high school. I think you have to take several things into consideration - How serious are they? How much time do they have to devote to practicing? Because in my opinion, as an ideal, the oboe is played with the mouth open, and the reed is held with the lips and not with lip-covered teeth. Now you can't do that too well unless nature has provided you with musculature in your face that makes it easy for you to do that, unless you go ahead and develop the necessary mask of muscle. Sometimes I think the young ones that are playing who have nice dull teeth, maybe it would be better to let them play a flat reed and bite because they don't practice that much and it will keep them from being sharp and all over the place. At least then they'll stay relatively constant when they play. For the ones that are more serious, I really do feel that the other way is the ideal way. In order to do that, your reeds have to be made along these lines. The reed has to hold itself up; in order for the embouchure to permit the reed to play, the reed has to do its part. So we have these two possibilities, we have the possibility of playing what we might call a bite, or playing with the mouth open. I prefer the latter myself - greatly and for many reasons. One obvious one is the inside of that selfsame mouth I was just talking about before. When your mouth is shut on the reed, your mouth is much smaller inside. Now I think that between the upper and lower lip there must be some kind of a difference. For the upper lip and the lower lip to strike the reed exactly opposite each other - and the main strength that undergirds them wherever the teeth are located to be exactly opposite from each other doesn't seem to work out too terribly well. It gives you less control of the reed. I mean it's obvious, if you come at the reed this way, and this way you have some kind of leverage if there's a difference. And also for some strange reason or other, in every student that I've ever encountered - and other pros that I've talked with - I find that it seems to be almost universal, that they get good results because there's a difference .... there's more lower lip than upper lip or more upper lip than lower lip. Most oboe players orient to the lower lip. There are some who orient to the upper lip, not too many. Now, getting into the usage of the lips and some of the dangers that we come upon there - for the most part, young people tend to want to muscle everything, as though this gave them more control. While it gives them a feeling of strength, it gives them less control. The catechism, of course, is that the chin is down when you play and looks the same way that it does when you whistle; that's number one. Now, this doesn't mean that the lower lip becomes rigid, so that you can't move it but it does mean that there's enough placement there so that you have some control of this part. Which reminds me to touch on the subject of the red part of the lips. A lot of people feel that you shouldn't play on the red part of the lips - that's not really necessarily so at all; it depends on the way your lips are. I think that if you'd play on the red part, you're better off; I think you have more sensitivity. I mean doesn't the safecracker go for more and more sensitive fingers? sanding his finger tips you know? I think the same thing is true. You may feel stronger putting more lips in your mouth, but I think you have less control-less control. I have read articles by others that say the embouchure should surround the reed, go around the reed, come like spokes in a wheel towards the axle. I don't agree - I don't agree at all. I think that it comes from the top and from the bottom that's the way it's made. I'm getting inquisitive in my old age, and I don't feel that the "around the reed" business means a blooming thing. What I do feel is - too much lips on the reed dampens the reed and forces you to make a noisier reed than otherwise and depresses the pitch. Not enough lips on the reed and the pitch is likely to go up.
We're trying to find a balance in the embouchure, a balance that gives us enough tone with a limitation to keep it from becoming too nasty, and some kind of control over the reed pitch-wise, which keeps the reed from wanting to go up or down (assuming the reed might be stable!) Now the reed itself has a lot to do with that, but the embouchure has a great deal to do with it also.
I would like also to discuss registers on the oboe, because this is something over which there is quite a bit of difference of opinion. I look at it this way: we have the three obvious registers, of closed to open low B-flat to C, C# up to high C, and the harmonics. We have super-imposed on that however, another different three registers, which I would call G-on-down as the low register; low G is a low note - there's no way around it, low G is a lower note than F#; G is a low note and has to be played like a low note, that is to say, nearer the tip of the reed. Please, I beg of you, if anyone in this room ever told anyone to play low notes, middle notes, and high notes in the same position of the reed, forget it! It's not so not at all. It might be nice to be able to do that, but it does not work on the oboe. I would call G on down low notes, G# to G# middle register, with the montage of the other (closed to open registers) showing through, which makes two parts to that, you see. High A is a high note, I'm sure all you oboe players will agree. When you reach high A you know you're in the high register. Now with the embouchure, we play the middle register more or less in a median position on the reed. The low notes we play nearer the tip of the reed, the high notes we take more in, progressively. But all of the registers are affected by the superimposition of the other, closed to open, which is long to short and then harmonics on up. The young student can't get a good concept of sound unless they play the low notes at the tip more than the middle register, and for the high notes take more reed in. When I say take more reed in, I don't mean slide the reed on the lips, I mean slide the reed with the lips so the contact stays the same. I think that's the reason, in so many of the exercises you start in the low register, you work your way up and you work your way back down, which I couldn't do when I first played the oboe. I could go up, but I couldn't come down; I didn't know you weren't supposed to slide the reed. All these things have to be very well fixed in mind when we're dealing with students, trying to solve their problems. Somebody asked me once, should the red part of your lips be soft? No, it shouldn't be soft; it shouldn't be rigid, but it shouldn't be soft, it's sort of half-way in between.
I wanted to say a few little things about articulation. Clear tonguing - my teacher made an instructional tape - I suppose some of you may have run into it. It's wonderful he made it just in the last months of his life he was 78. He insisted on an attack that is "tee" or "tah" and not "pah" and not "hah", and the most prevalent attack I hear from oboe players is "pah." I made some rather soft attacks today that may have misled you. It's just that the tongue is removed quickly enough and with a certain timing, so it doesn't project what I didn't want it to, but with a student, if you try to get the clearest possible "tee" or "tah" attack from him, you'll be doing him an enormous favor. And his tone will sound better for it; a clear attack makes a tone sound much, much better than otherwise. The whole matter of starting blowing - before, rather than as you tongue, or as the note starts . . . this is something I've found so haphazard among young oboe players. The embouchure's getting ready; the wind's getting ready; the tongue's getting ready; but the note is already starting - all at the same time nothing's really ready! It doesn't take but an instant with the youngsters to make some kind of regimen in what sequence and at what timing they make embouchure, pressure, and remove the tongue, so they can learn to prepare the wind speed and the lips for the particular note at a particular level, so they can just come in like that. This is also very good when they're trying to develop range and work on levels of sound. I must also say, on the subject of tonguing that one of the most difficult things to do on the oboe in articulation, is when you're playing something of a relative legato nature, to tongue a note without any interruption whatsoever of the line, direction, and tone. In other words to play:
Very often the player wants to make a good attack and that forces all kinds of muscular flinching here and there, the wind stops, the tongue goes to the reed too soon and so forth. If the young person can learn to tongue late enough - late enough and fast enough, not lightly necessarily, because if you tongue fast and you tongue hard it doesn't sound hard. The problem is solved best by taking one note - one note and rearticulating it. So instead of "stop-start-stop-start" the idea is "continue-continue-continue," and once the youngster can learn to do that on one note with a beautiful clear attack that doesn't stop the previous sound the living note is not stopped, it's just encouraged on by the tongue. After that can be done skillfully then it can be introduced into a legato line that has articulation in it.
I want to say something about mixed articulations. Basically we have articulations which are aided by the wind, and we have articulations which are on the wind, which is as continuous as a legato wind. These are all necessary. The articulation on the wind is very difficult for young players to do, because in order to do it they have to stop the notes with the tongue, and young players find it difficult to do without its sounding ugly, and so they avoid it and never come back to it, and they never learn how to do it so that it isn't ugly, which is very possible. Articulating on the wind - this is really serious - where you can tongue notes of different lengths, where the line continues through the notes, and the notes can be short, medium short, medium long, long, and all the work is done by the tongue, and it sounds good. What it is is simply this the notes are stopped by the tongue in a passive fashion. In other words, the stopping of the note is an act of permission and not commission. Instead of putting the tongue against the reed, you must learn to allow the tongue to return to the reed with the wind. It was a bassoon player who told me that many years ago - I tried it, and because it didn't work right away I thought it didn't work on the oboe. Well, now I know better and I can tell you, yes, it does; if it doesn't work the first time, try again. Learn to allow your tongue to go back with the wind so you can play a line that has the constancy and value of a legato line but with articulation, even with massive space between the notes. It's absolutely necessary because there are some musical situations which cannot be served by any substitute for that kind of articulation - there just isn't any. So with any kind of mixed articulation two and two, three and one, which seems to be a problem, I think that the problem usually can be solved best by insistence on evenness of the rhythm and audibility of the last slurred note, so that it takes its place with the tongued notes. Audibility and evenness can be arrived at any number of ways, but they are the essentials. The problem with unevenness in the two and two articulation - if you look at it through the magnifying glass - is usually one of the very first note being too short.
Let's get down- to reeds, shall we? What should the young ones do - buy them or make them? That's a problem, because it's difficult to buy reeds. Young people don't take care of their reeds - they leave them in a tube, and they turn green because they never dry out. The young oboe player should have a decent, nice French-made reed box. Are there any American manufacturers here? Maybe there are American reed boxes that do the job, but I don't know about them yet. What I'm talking about is something that's not hermetically sealed, so that when the reed dries out, it dries out fast. You know that cane passes through one superbly fragile period, and that is when it is drying out. When it's dry, it's strong; when it's wet it's strong; when it's soaking up, it's not ready but it's not weak; but when it is drying out it passes through a phase, especially if it's drying out too slowly, it passes through a phase of such fragility that if you picked it up and played it, it would crack, just like that. I've done it many times so I know! I cracked four or five reeds in the space of a few days during a European tour before I realized it was a metal reed box that I'd bought that those reeds were in that were cracking - they weren't drying out fast enough. I'd take them out and look at them and think that they were wet - they should have been dry already, so I'd have to soak them up.
Well, buy them or make them? If you buy them, you know what the problems are. They're expensive and they don't last the way we want them to. Let me say this one thing to you about cane - please don't get any ideas that there's good cane around. I mean maybe there is, but I don't know anything about it. I had some good cane many years ago somebody gave me a few pieces of really good cane. I couldn't believe it; I played thirteen concerts and a quintet rehearsal on one reed and it worked magnificently - and the cane was twelve years old at the time. You see the cane is not aged the way it's supposed to be any more; it's not seasoned properly. They take it out and sun it a little bit, chop it up and ship it over to the USA, and we try to make reeds out of it. It's not ready - it's supposed to be aged in the stalks for two or three years. Forget it - it's not done! So therefore we are all in the same situation as far as the cane is concerned. The cane is mediocre - so our problem is if we're going to buy them, we buy them and try to take good care of them; we try to learn to touch them up to make them work better for us personally, and if we make them, we also try to make them last. But the trick is, if you're going to make them, you must be willing to work very hard at it, because the problem is not one of making a reed out of good cane - anyone can do that! Out of good cane, even with a bad gouge, you can make something and it'll sound decent, and it will play. It's really incredible. But we don't have that option. We must learn to make playable reeds out of crummy cane. All of us! Remind the youngsters not to oversoak their reeds, if I'm in a hurry I'll soak a reed in hot water for thirty seconds and it's ready to go, but I don't think it's necessarily the best thing for it. Among my students, I find those whose reeds have the greatest longevity are the ones who soak their reeds in water rather than saliva. It's also important to clean your reeds; you should learn to clean your reeds with the plaque. Slip the plaque in, scrape over the inside of one blade, flip it over and do the same for the other blade. I do that maybe three or four times during an average rehearsal. Just from your breath there is a certain accumulation at the tip that changes the quality of the tone, and the response of the reed. For some people it's on the top blade, for others it's on the bottom blade, for yet others, it's on both, but it happens and it should be taken care of.
Now I would like to go on to some points for those who make their reeds or help the young ones to learn something about reeds. There are a few things I would like to state that I feel are of importance. Not necessarily for the person who is playing with a bite, that is to say, playing a flat reed and biting it. up to pitch. I'm not qualified to discuss that subject. I am qualified to discuss the kind of reed you play without biting so much. Now in this kind of reed, we're looking for balance. People say "balanced reeds" - but there are so many things to be balanced in reeds - response and resistance, up and down: take up and down for instance there's a basic thing that I think is of the utmost importance in a reed. Trying to make a reed that holds itself up and won't sink, and yet resists any inclination to fly away. It could be likened to a sailboat - it floats but we don't want it to be on top of every wave so it must have a keel to help it ride down in the water a little bit, so that you have more stability and more control. Elements of holding up and elements of depth - life and depth - and right in that overlapping millimeter, that's where we want our reed to be, right sandwiched in there so it's stable. My teacher told me many years ago the reed must be flexible. So I thought to myself "of course the reed must be flexible. How else can you come close to playing any of the notes in tune?" I found out later that he didn't mean that at all - not whatsoever. He was not talking about that kind of flexibility - fishing the notes up and down. The flexibility he was talking about was in and out flexibility, not up and down. In other words, to make a quick comparison - think of a television camera that is stabilized on a giant tripod. It doesn't move, it doesn't shake, the wind blows, it still doesn't move, but you can point it here, here, here, and it's got a zoom lens on it. See - that's a combination of stability and flexibility that is greatly worth working for. That's a concept that you can carry over into reeds. Try to make a reed that has great pitch stability. Now of course if you do that, you must go into the subject of your instrument, its registers and its bad notes, because obviously if you have a tremendously stable reed and your instrument has some notes that are badly out of tune, then you're stuck with them! So then you must tune your instrument, which is something that should be done anyway.
In order to have a reed which holds itself up well and does all these lovely things I've talked about, there are some things that are of the utmost importance. The sides must press tightly against each other all the way down the reed. As a matter of fact even if it leaks at the tube it wouldn't be so bad - you could put a little piece of skin on it, which I don't particularly espouse myself - but at the top part of the reed the sides must press tightly against each other, because if they don't, you will never be able to play the reed with the mouth open. How to make the sides tight? The way to make the sides tight is a half-way decent gouge; careful shaping with a decent, symmetrical shape, that doesn't have any odd bumps or flat spots; careful cutting when you shape - use a good sharp razor blade, use a continuous motion down the side, and then from my own standpoint, I overlap my reeds slightly. As a matter of course I do this. If you try to tie a reed to perfection - edge meeting edge making one edge meet the other all the way down - it is practically impossible to have the other one do the same thing at the same time - one in a million! However, if you tie your reed ever so slightly overlapped, what happens? You're tying an edge against a surface - simple - and there's an available surface; wherever that edge comes down there's a surface waiting for it right there. You have a very good chance, and if you tie evenly and nice and tightly, then there should be no problem in making that work. There are such potential dangers in the sides of the tip opening slightly. My advice to you reed makers and to your students is try to fight back the tears, but when you have a reed that's open on the sides, just make a tube out of it and start afresh.
In this country, we seem to use what we call the long scrape, but the overriding purpose of the scrape is to scrape the reed for what the reed does, not for how it looks. I myself feel that we have a tip and we have a back and the back I divide into two parts, the plateau and the back behind that. As far as I'm concerned there's a relationship between the tip and the back which is very important - it is, as I tell my pupils - like a marriage. The tip has its own life in the reed; the back has its own life - but they must not act independently. If the tip is too thin for the back, the tip vibrates and nothing else happens; and if they are too connected, if they don't have their own personalities, the reed doesn't work either.
Just a word about knives; I like a very sharp knife myself. I start all my students off by giving them two reed secrets for free 1) an extremely sharp knife, I mean extremely sharp - even if you ruin a batch of reeds until you learn to use the knife, because a sharp knife will do things for you that another knife can't do. With a dull knife, you have to press too hard - if you press too hard you flatten the cane. You can't take a narrow swathe with a dull knife. You can't do the necessary things with the tip - the sides of the tip - with a dull knife. The corners of the tip must be very thin - you can't do that with a dull knife. That and 2) learning to clip an infinitesimal amount off the tip of the reed I would call these bona fide reed secrets, that's all. Clip the tip five times before you get anything - then you'll be on the right track, because that tiny bit will easily be enough to put the reed where you want it to be, where the normal clip that most people take puts you so far past you have to start scraping your way back down. I also believe the order of things in scraping a reed is in this direction: tip, back, tip, back . . . and scrape, clip, scrape, clip.
I do want to say something about instruments. I don't want to get in Dutch with anyone, but as I said before, this is personal opinion over my name. I use a Loree. I haven't found anything else yet that I would consider for myself to play on. I don't like the heavy instruments, like the Gordet for instance. To me the Gordet is an instrument that was manufactured specifically to disguise a very bad, noisy reed. It can only be played with a very bad, noisy reed. It reminds me of those movies of the old West - the old store front, you go around back and discover it's a prop, that's all. The Laubin is a very lovely instrument; I can't play it myself. I feel like a dancer trying to dance with his shoes nailed to the floor. As far as I'm concerned, Loree is the only playable instrument that I've found. Now many people play other instruments they're perfectly happy; wonderful for them. As far as the other American oboes are concerned, I have not yet seen anything that I care for. This is a personal opinion - as long as every instrument that is made and put on the market is sold and bought, what possible indication can there be to the manufacturer that the product could and should be upgraded? I love this country, but I do wish there were some better things going on here - sorry, that's the way I feel about it. Especially with the change in the value of the dollar, it really hurts. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I have anything against American products, and am only for European products, because I don't like any of the other instruments over there. I don't like the Cabart, I think the Marigaux is awful - Rigoutat - ugh! ! It's just opinion, that's all. Somebody likes bourbon and somebody likes scotch!