Editor's Note: I am happy to reprint this article from the Buffalo Evening News in which it appeared on September 12, 1977. Nora Post is a most active performer, specializing in music of the baroque period and avant-garde literature as well. A list of recent first performances follows the article.
Nora Post is completing requirements for a doctoral degree but a year ago, she says, she didn't know the meaning of words like "lathe" and "solder."
Ms. Post is a musician, a Creative Associate in oboe at the State University of Buffalo. But now she's also so at home in a machine shop, she's even had orders for her handiwork.
As a Creative Associate, she plays 20th-Century music but it was her personal interest in 18th-Century works that first led her into the machine shop. The modern oboe, she discovered, is a step too high to recreate properly the music of Mozart. But any 180-or 190-year-old oboes still in working condition are too expensive for her to buy.
SO, ON A TRIP to Europe two years ago, she set out to find a good reproduction. She couldn't. There were good reproductions of the older Baroque oboe of Bach's time but none that she felt measured up to the boxwood instrument used in the initial playing of Mozart's oboe quartet.
So Ms. Post decided to build her own, undaunted by the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about tools or woodworking.
She visited a Westchester County collector of rare instruments and measured the late 18th Century oboe that he owns. Then she attempted to buy European boxwood.
"It was common in Mozart's time but now it's rare," she says. Through a friend, she obtained boxwood from Thailand.
HER NEXT STEP was to enroll in a machine shop course at Buffalo State University College, the first of three such courses she was to take there.
"On the first day, the instructor gave us a pre-test to see what we knew. I got zero. By the middle of the term, I got an 80 and felt fantastic."
Both Ms. Post and her instructors worried about her hands. "An injury could be the end," she says. All went well.
"Many musicians build their own instruments," she adds. "That way, you know what you're getting."
Ms. Post has now built two oboes, both of which meet her sound specifications. Only the second, however, meets her perfectionist's demand in regard to outer appearance.
WHETHER SHE'LL make more oboes to sell, is still uncertain. She has received some orders but she's not sure she'll fill them. She will continue to make some for herself, however.
"It's a great hobby," she says. "It's completely different from my work in one way but in another, it's all tied together."
After she'd finished her Buff State courses, she was given permission to use the shop in the basement of U.B.'s Parker Hall of Engineering. Several of the men working there praised her new capabilities and suggested she make salad bowls for friends.
That is not her thing. "It's too time-consuming," says Ms. Post who's happier spending her time practicing oboe. It's been her instrument since fifth grade, when she asked her school band director what was the most difficult instrument to learn. He said "Oboe."
She was already playing violin, French horn and piano but she grabbed onto the oboe, too.
SHE MAJORED in music at the University of California where she received her bachelor's degree and at New York University where she has received a master's and is a candidate for a doctorate.
On Sept. 21, in Baird Hall at the University of Buffalo's Main St. Campus, she will give a Creative Associates recital during which she will use her hand-crafted oboe to play the Mozart oboe quartet which started it all. She regards that as "one of the most virtuoso pieces in all 18th-Century music."