(This interview first appeared in the September, 1986 issue of Chicago magazine. It is reprinted here with permission from Chicago magazine. @ 1986 by Chicago Educational Television Association.)

Ray Still, who is one of the world's great oboists, has sounded the A for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 33 years. He came to the CSO at the invitation of Fritz Reiner during the conductor's first year as music director of the orchestra and almost immediately moved up to the chair of principal oboist, a keystone of the Chicago's celebrated wind section. Since then, hi's distinctive "singing" tone, which some critics have found hauntingly similar to the human voice, has attracted international praise, and oboe students gather from around the continent to learn his secrets.

Ironically, it is only now that Still, at an age when most men are thinking about retirement, finds that his career i's beginning to send forth new shoots. His first recordings as a featured soloist are being released, including a surpassingly beautiful reading of the Mozart Oboe Quartet, and his name is popping up on the programs of European music festivals. At 66, Ray Still is emerging from the relative anonymity of the ensemble to occupy a spotlight of his own.

Even so, it is unlikely that he will join the ranks of the musical superstars, for the simple reason that the oboe has rarely been a star turn. Today's superstars are almost exclusively pianists and string players. Among wind players, only a few have achieved household-word status, notably the flutists Jean-Pierre Rampal and James Galway, with clarinetist Richard Stolzman nipping at their heels. Only one oboist has successfully
taken the solo route without having the economic comfort of membership in an orchestra to fall back on. Heinz Holliger, a Swiss oboist of dazzling technique, has managed to corner the recording market with his prodigious output of transcriptions of pieces written for other instruments and new works commissioned by him from contemporary composers, but even Holliger is hard-pressed to fill a hall on his name alone.

In spite of the odds, is Still tempted to quit the Chicago Symphony, as cellist Janos Starker did some years back, in order to devote his full time to solo work? It was this question that launched a volatile interview with Still that began in a dressing room under the stage
of Orchestra Hall after the Friday afternoon concert and ended two days later in the basement workroom of his century-old clapboard house on Chicago's North Side. "I'm a compulsive talker, " he warned with a twinkle, and proceeded to expand pungently on his future, on what life is like at the center of a great orchestra, and on his 50-year love-hate relationship with the oboe.

Still admits that he probably would not win a sweetness-and-light award from some of his fellow musicians. A hardworking perfectionist, he tends to be critical of the imperfections of others. "I've been known to be brutally frank, acid-tongued, telling people off, " he says. Yet his feistiness came in handy during the orchestra's stormy six-year interregnum between Reiner's death and the arrival of Georg Solti, when he was one of only two first-chair players to lead the bitter battle against the musicians' union and the orchestra's management to protect the rights and wages of rank-and-file players - a battle that ultimately succeeded but only after Still had been symbolically fired for eight months. Today the smoke has cleared but the scars remain. "I'm no longer active in union affairs," he says. "We've got a lot of Young Turks who have come in since then, and us geezers who were the old revolutionaries can sit by and watch them do all the work. But hardly any of them realize what terror we went through, when we were intimidated by the union and the management both. It was hair-raising."

A revolutionary he still is, particularly when mobilizing the orchestra to support a cause such as nuclear disarmament. But "geezer" he's not. A sturdy six footer with a dusting of gray hair, he moves with the determined vigor of a man half his age. His conversation bristles with analogies from baseball and tennis, which he follows avidly. He even sits energetically, as concertgoers know who watch him lunge and weave in his chair like a boxer. In fact, he sees playing the oboe as a strenuous athletic contest between man and the cantankerous, unpredictable reed whose minute vibrations produce the instrument's sound. The struggle to create the "perfect" reed, knowing that the perfect reed is as
elusive as the Holy Grail, and then the struggle to force air through its tiny aperture without risking muscle injury and inducing rigor mortis, require a strong body
and an even stronger temperament. Add to this the constant stress of rehearsal and performance under a succession on of willful conductors, and you have the makings of
a full-fledged neurosis.

Still manages to keep neurosis at bay by his nononsense work regimen and by the warm support of his family. He and his wife, Mary, are edging up on their golden wedding anniversary. They have raised four children, aged 24 to 43, who are making successful careers in arts and letters and producing a respectable crop of grandchildren. It is this ballast of loving normalcy that counterbalances his existence in a hypersensitive profession, where you are only as good as your last concert, your last recording. Still's longevity at the height of his art testifies both to his musical hardihood and to a streak of wry humor laced with vinegar that bubbles up through Chicago's interview with him. Irrepressible, outspoken, generous (to some), impatient (with others), Ray Still stands as his own best witness to his extraordinary life in music.

- Gordon Gould

Chicago: Do you ever wish you had left the Chicago Symphony and become a soloist?

Still: I've thought about it often. But let's look at the repertoire. Not much of really high quality has been written for the solo oboe in the concerto category. There's the Mozart Oboe Concerto and the Richard Strauss Oboe Concerto, a couple of Handel concerti and the Marcello and the Cimarosa and maybe a Vivaldi or two, but after that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. Mind you, I'm speaking of high-quality music. A well-known solo oboist will haul out the Bellini concerto and the Donizetti concerto - he'll even play the Pasculli Variations on a Theme of Donizetti, can you imagine? I mean, that's absolutely the dregs. But when you play in a symphony orchestra as I have over a period of almost 50 years, you have played the greatest literature ever written for the oboe - the symphonic literature. If you want to play the finest oboe music the mind of man has ever put on paper, you'll play the Brahms Violin Concerto and the Mozart C Minor Piano Concerto, the C Major, or the D Minor. It's not so much of an ego trip; they don't send a limousine for you, but you're living like a king. If I really wanted to retire from the Chicago Symphony, I would join some group that plays nothing but Bach cantatas, almost every one of which contains an oboe aria, and Mozart piano concerti, Haydn and Mozart symphonies, the marvelous Mozart wind music, and then chamber music. That would be heaven.

Of course, nobody's ever completely satisfied with what he's doing. I talked recently to Neill Black, a good friend of mine who is the first oboist with the English Chamber Orchestra, and I said, "Neill, I envy you so much being able to play Mozart piano concertos and Haydn symphonies - my favorite music." And he said, "You know, Ray, I'd give anything to play a Mahler or a Bruckner symphony." I would gladly change with him today!

But I still get just as enthusiastic about playing great orchestral performances, even of the war-horses. It's just that I get a little more disgusted with the mediocre performances, when we have conductors who don't quite come up to it, or who have us playing Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and the Fantastic Symphony of Berlioz because they know it'll tear the house down. Of course, even though I'm not a Berlioz fan, I'll have to admit that he wrote some fabulous oboe solos, like the one in the Benvenuto Cellini Overture, or the garden scene in the Romeo and Juliet Symphony. It takes a great musical actor to play these solos and to get into them emotionally. However, all the acting is done in the sound of the oboe, not with the forehead or the eyebrows or by waving the oboe around like one of those soulful violinists who suffer all over the place trying to show you that they feel the music so much more deeply than anybody else.

Having said this, I know that people will laugh and say, "For God's sake, have you seen the wild, crazy look Ray Still gets on his face when he's playing?" It's true that I probably undergo facial changes when I'm playing. Alfred Brendel does this, too. When he's playing the piano, he does this thing with his jaw. Because he doesn't want to have any tension in his body, it all comes out in his jaw.

Chicago: Where does your tension come out?

Still: I tend to lift from the lower abdomen and the legs - I almost rise from my chair. But as I was saying, playing in an orchestra is one of the few jobs, outside of acting in a fine repertory company, where you're actually performing the greatest masterworks of man and getting paid for it. There's also this communal thing. We're a closely knit group in the Chicago Symphony, musically speaking, not socially. You have to get along with your fellow man musically. Even when Donald Peck, the first flutist, and I didn't speak a word to each other for ten years, we played together marvelously. But the second and third trombone players here didn't speak to each other for 20 years. And there are two viola players who haven't spoken for 30 years. But although we may have completely different political and philosophical viewpoints, we have one common interest, and that is to do our damnedest to play great Brahms or great Mozart, and to make our own instrument sound as glorious as the composer intended it to sound.

One gripe that I do have is that people in the orchestra seldom talk about music. Mostly, they're talking about their stocks and bonds and day-to-day parking problems, things like that. On the surface, they seem very cynical about music - it's sort of a New York Philharmonic attitude. But you'd be surprised. You scratch 'ein a little bit and you find a music lover underneath. They wouldn't put up with all the crap we have to put up with if they weren't music lovers - I mean all the stuff you have to go through to be a performer.

Chicago: Does "stuff" include conductors?

Still: Not the good conductors. With the good conductors like Reiner, Solti, Giulini, Abbado, Barenboim, and Levine, when you're playing a prominent solo part, they really give you your freedom - like giving a racehorse its head. They accompany you as they would accompany a singer. The sad thing about a mediocre conductor is that he straitjackets you. He wants you to believe that every note you play comes directly out of his baton. George Szell, while certainly a great conductor, did have that one failing; he wanted to treat the men more like puppets than an orchestra. At times, he would even conduct soloists' cadenzas! The genius of Reiner and Solti is that they want you to have this creative instinct to do it your own way. Naturally, if you don't do it in a way that fits into the whole scheme of what they're trying to create with a work, they'll let you know. "You're pushing it ... .. You're a little behind ... .. I would like to have the pulse keep moving here."

Chicago: Does the orchestra sound different under different conductors?

Still: Oh, yes, definitely. Reiner's orchestra was incredibly transparent. When we played our first concert in New York under Reiner, Leonard Bernstein came to hear us. We were told that Bernstein then went back to the New York Philharmonic and lectured his orchestra for almost half an hour on the extraordinary dynamic range with which the Chicago Symphony played - for instance, the way we used such restraint that when we did lean into a crescendo it was an enormous contrast with what had come before. "You guys," Bernstein said, "just play heavy all the time!" What he didn't say was that Reiner was responsible for that virtuosity with his very, very delicate beat, whereas Bernstein was all over the place with his effusive, schmaltzy beat. What comes out of an orchestra depends on what the conductor does. Now, Solti, it is true, is a forceful beater. Because of that, he has to lecture us quite often about not playing too heavily and too loud. He says, "I know, my dears, that we are famous for playing loud, but we must also show them that we can play soft." What he doesn't realize is that a lot of the time he is conducting energetically and the orchestra forgets and empathizes with his energy. At times, he'll say, "Look, I'm going to conduct very clearly, which sometimes means a big, vigorous beat, but I want you to play pianissimo. " He still has conducted us in many, many great performances.

With Abbado, it's a different attitude, a different sound. Abbado is a very intense, passionate conductor. He demands perfection in ensemble, and he is a great one for keeping the ensemble from getting too heavy, too thick, too much crescendo too soon. Barenboim is marvelous that way, too. This orchestra is very lucky to have had many magnificent guest conductors over the years. I don't think other orchestras have been nearly so lucky. In Cleveland, for instance, after George Szell they had a terrible void. They used to joke that they had Pa Szell and then they had Maa-zel, and Ma was nowhere near as good as Pa. The Philadelphia had to suffer under you-know-who for so many years, and when he finally retired they got Muti, who's a charismatic guy. I haven't heard much of his work yet. And Mehta, of course, is a kind of theatrical conductor. He looks wonderful! I would class him with Bernstein, who is the modern "television face" conductor, the one whose face the cameras love to focus on. A recent telecast showed impressive close-ups of Mehta "feeling" the music, an ecstatic, almost orgasmic look on his face. The music coming out of the orchestra was of secondary importance and not very good. If you focused on Reiner's face, you saw practically nothing -just the eyes shifting a little once in a while and almost no movement of the baton. But, my God, what was happening in the music! Incredible.

Conductors who are really masters know how to use their bodies with great deftness. For instance, Andre Cluytens, the famous Belgian conductor, could conduct anything without speaking a single word. He had to - he didn't know English. We did concerts with him at Ravinia with only one rehearsal that were unbelievably great. It was all in knowing how to use his arms, his body. An interesting thing: The man who produced some of the most spirited and rhythmic sounds out of our orchestra that any conductor has ever achieved is Danny Kaye. And he can't even read music. But he's a mime artist and a dancer. He did it all with his body. I said to him, "You should give a workshop for conductors." "What do you mean?" he said. "I'm not a musician." "No," I said, "but you know how to use your body, and that's what most conductors don't know how to do. They're spastics as far as being able to convey to the players what they want without having to speak." Now, Barenboim is marvelous at this. We did a whole series of recordings with him without even rehearsing, just picking up the music and playing it. And they were very good recordings. Reiner could do this, too. He didn't talk much. Of course, when he did talk you could barely understand him. Solti is many times wonderful and highly efficient in rehearsals and in concerts, especially when he's very tired and uses a minimum of motion.

So we've been lucky over the years to have had magnificent conductors, and I think that's one of the reasons our orchestra is in such a good state right now.

Chicago: How did you happen to choose music as a career?

Still: That's a long story that goes all the way back to when I was ten years old in Leeds, Iowa, a tiny little town northeast of Sioux City, and my mother bought me a clarinet.

Chicago: A clarinet?

Still: Yeah. She got it at Sears, Roebuck at a discount because one of the keys was broken. I hated it. I didn't even like symphonic music then. But when I was 14 years old and we had moved from Iowa to Los Angeles, I was in a miserable little school orchestra that played Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Suddenly, I fell in love with that music. There was more substance to it than anything I had heard before. So I started studying the clarinet seriously. Two years later, when I was 16, 1 switched to the oboe.

Chicago: Why?

Still: I had a pessimistic old Italian teacher who played clarinet in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and I came to my lesson one day with a squeak in my tone. Obviously, there's a physical reason why a clarinet squeaks - the reed, the way you're playing - but instead of analyzing what the hell was wrong, this old guy says, "Ali, my boy, maybe da clarinet she's- a not'a for you. Maybe you take-a some instrument you can make-a more money wiz, like a saxophone or oboe." He broke my heart. I went outside, sat on the curb, and cried for half an hour. But he did plant a seed in my mind. For some time, I had been ushering at the Philharmonic in L.A. in order to hear the concerts free, and I had been listening to their first oboe player, Henri DeBusscher, a Belgian, who was a helluva lot better than their first clarinet player. DeBusscher was a real poet. He sang on the instrument. He was my inspiration. In fact, DeBusscher was the same man who 20 years earlier in London had inspired the oboist Leon Goossens to take up the oboe. Goossens had been 17 then. Now, here I was, just 17, being inspired by the same man. I studied for three years with Philip Memoli, a disciple of his.

My first job was playing in the WPA Youth Orchestra. It was sort of like being on the dole except that we had wonderful conductors like Otto Klemperer and Albert Coates. One day, I got a call from a kind of Central Casting for musicians to go to the Walt Disney Studios to play for Leopold Stokowski in Fantasia. We were on the set, with colored lights behind us, and I thought, "This is my chance to audition for Stokowski! " But the movie people kept saying, "Don't play, don't play! just fake it." So if you look at the beginning of Fantasia, you can see me - in profile, with a skinny neck and a high Adam's apple - apparently playing the oboe, but it's the Philadelphia Orchestra on the sound track. I was just there to be photographed.

But I actually did audition for Stokowski some years later in New York, when he was recording the opera Samson and Delilah. His usual oboist couldn't make the recording session and suggested me instead. Stokowski said, "Who's this young fellow who's going to play the very important oboe part? I'd like to hear him. Would you have him come to my apartment. " So I went to his fancy apartment on Gracie Square, and Stokowski asked me to play the cadenza in the third act. I played it in what I thought was my most beautiful fashion. "No, no," he said, "I imagine it quite differently. I hear a screaming eunuch - quite virile. " I pointed out that a "virile eunuch" is a contradiction in terms. He replied, "A lot of people have that misconception, " and went on to tell me that he had been in the Middle East and made a study of eunuchs and that in fact they were able to do everything to keep the harem wives happy and settled except procreate. It was so strange: A lesson on how to play the cadenza in Samson and Delilah had turned into a historical lecture on eunuchs! Still, I did do the recording, and after that played for Stokowski many times when he came to conduct the Chicago. We became - well, not great friends; I don't think Stokowski was great friends with anybody.

Anyway, when I was 19, 1 got a job playing second oboe in the Kansas City Philharmonic, where I met and married my wife, Mary. Then it was 1941 and the war came. We went back to L.A. and I went to school for two years to learn electrical engineering while working at the same time for Douglas Aircraft in electrical research. The only practicing I had time for was out in my car during lunch breaks. Then I went into the Army Signal Corps as a radar specialist and didn't do much playing until I got out in 1946.

Mary and I returned to L.A., where I was offered a job at a nice salary with Twentieth Century-Fox as a contract musician. It looked marvelous to Mary to have a nice home out there and a dependable income, but she knew what I was after, that I wanted to play in a symphony orchestra. So we turned down the studio job, sold our furniture, and moved to New York, where I enrolled in the Juilliard School.

We had about 90 bucks a month from the GI Bill plus tuition, and I had to scramble for parttime jobs - driving a truck, selling door to door.

Mary was wonderfully supportive all the way through. It's hard enough just being the wife of a neurotic oboe player, somebody who's constantly going from highs to lows depending on the reed situation, and getting terribly discouraged and feeling that he can't go on and play a concert, that it's too terrifying. It's been tough on her. But she's a very strong person. I think it must be very difficult for musicians who don't have that support at home, who have an unstable life. There are so many musicians in our orchestra who, I feel, don't have that kind of support.

Chicago: And so you enrolled in Juilliard?

Still: Right. The oboe teacher at Juilliard wasn't good enough, so I was bootlegging my lessons outside with Robert Bloom, who, like DeBusscher, had a singing style and whom I admired more than any other oboist. Bloom was the first oboist in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Toscanini and later played for some 30 years with the Bach Aria Group. After only a year at Juilliard, I auditioned for William Steinberg, the conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and he offered me the job of playing first oboe (for $110 a week for 20 weeks). I told my teacher, Bloom, "I don't think I'm ready to play with Buffalo." Bloom said, "Take it. That's the only way to learn to play the oboe - by doing it. " So I took the job, stayed in Buffalo two years, then played first oboe with the Baltimore Symphony for four more years, and then Reiner brought me to Chicago for his first season here - in 1953.

Chicago: How did that happen?

Still: I auditioned for Reiner in New York and he accepted me, but for the job of assistant first oboe. That was the only position that was open. My wife and I had made a pact that I would never take a job other than as first oboist no matter where it was. So we had a problem. At the same time, I had auditioned for Dmitri Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic, and he also offered me assistant first oboe, but he said, "Look, the job won't be open for another year, so you go to Chicago and if you don't like it there, come back to New York. "

So I took the Chicago job. But after half a year as assistant, I told Reiner that I had no chance to play here and that I wanted to go to New York. He said, "Don't go, Ray. I'm thinking of making a change. " His idea was for me to switch jobs with the first oboe player. But at that point, the first oboist got a wonderful job teaching at the University of Michigan, and I moved into his chair. So there I was, at 33, first oboe player with the Chicago. I've been here ever since.

Chicago: Do you have any regrets?

Still: Not really. Although I do envy my young students. They're playing all over the world. I've got former students in Hong Kong, Israel, South America, Mexico, Scandinavia. I just sent a kid over to be first oboe in the Seoul Philharmonic in Korea. It's so exciting that when they're young and unattached they can travel to all these exotic places and work, even though they may complain about it - you know, that the conditions aren't exactly ideal and so forth. Their experiences are fantastic. One girl spent two years in Singapore, then two years in Maracaibo, Venezuela, another year in the Canary Islands, and now she's first oboe in the Madrid Opera. I just got a call from Mike Rosenberg, who was a student of mine at Northwestern University. He's first oboist in the Kiel orchestra in Germany, playing a lot of opera, and now he's being considered as first oboist with the Hamburg North German Radio Orchestra. He's one of the first Americans to be accepted in Germany, because most Europeans don't care for the "typical" American style - that style usually associated with the Tabuteau school.

Chicago: What's the Tabuteau school?

Still: Marcel Tabuteau was an oboist who came to this country from Paris in the early 1900s and joined the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski and became a master oboist. He developed a very svelte and controlled style which became known as the Tabuteau school, or, as they call it nowadays, the American school of oboe playing. Tabuteau taught a great many oboists, including Robert Bloom. As recently as 15 years ago, I was the only oboist in a major symphony - the major symphonies being Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago - who had not studied directly with Tabuteau. Even today, the other first-chair oboists are all disciples of the Tabuteau school. In fact, just before Tabuteau died, he is said to have remarked, "The only one who didn't study with me was Still - but he did a right anyway."

Chicago: What's the difference between the American school and your style?

Still: You talk to most European musicians, English and German particularly, and they just throw up their hands at what they call the American school. They say it's so stiff, with such a stingy vibrato. But if I say my playing is accepted in Europe, right away the American oboe players chuckle and say, "No wonder he's accepted; he has that cockamamie un-American school of playing."

I try to play the oboe as a singer sings. I was very flattered when a reviewer in London last year compared my playing of the Cimarosa Oboe Concerto to Montserrat CabaIIe, the Spanish soprano, and my Strauss Concerto with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her prime. I like to be compared with singers, not oboe players. And another review, describing my playing of the D-major "happy aria" in Bach's "Wedding Cantata, " said that you don't usually hear such expressive woodwind playing outside of jazz, and the reviewer compared my playing with Louis Armstrong and Ben Webster, who are among my heros.

Of course, my hero of all heros is Lester Young, the saxophonist with the Count Basie Orchestra for a long time. I've worshipped him for 45 years. For me, Lester Young's playing epitomizes the absolute total coordination of all forces to project a sound which tells a story. He truly talks on the instrument. He makes it say exactly what he feels. I first heard him during the war when I was working at Douglas Aircraft. I'd get off the swing shift at 12 o'clock at night and I'd stop by the club where he was playing and I'd just sit there and worship him. I've collected his records for all these years.

I tell my students never to listen to oboe players, but always to model themselves, as I do, on the noblest instrument of all, the human voice, or after great violinists and cellists, or great jazz artists. They must listen to fine singers like Fritz Wunderlich or Elly Ameling, and learn to make their bodies looser in order to free their playing from the limitations of the oboe. The typical mediocre oboist sits like this [Still sits braced like a West Point plebe, with his chin wrinkled into his neck]. But I make my students loosen up so that they can bend in any direction and still play, even Benny Goodman-style with the oboe high in the air. It's not so much a position as a mental attitude - the same attitude which Maury Wills and the later big basestealer used to have when they were getting ready either to steal second or dive back to first base. You're constantly poised for action, but free to move in any direction.

So many people play the oboe badly all over the world, mainly because they've been taught from the very beginning to harden the muscles underneath their diaphragm so that they can't breathe freely. They lock the glottis at the back of the throat. Then they push the upper part of the chest down in order to squeeze the air out. That's like squeezing a tube of toothpaste from the top while all the toothpaste stays in the bottom. So they always sound like their tone is being pushed out through a very tiny hole. I have a student at Northwestern right now who has a Dizzy Gillespie syndrome, a muscle rupture, with one muscle in his neck sticking two or three inches out on one side like a goose egg. With the more efficient use of the blowing apparatus, his neck should become more normal soon. I've corrected several types like this one.

Chicago: What do you mean when you say that you try to free yourself from the limitations of the oboe? What limitations?

Still: From the very first moment a kid takes up the oboe and blows into it, he feels an enormous resistance from the instrument. He thinks that playing the oboe takes a tremendous amount of pressure. But what he's feeling is the effort to blow air through the opening of the reed, which is very tiny, no bigger than the eye of a medium-sized needle. The problem is not that it takes so much breath to play an oboe, but that it takes so little.

Depending on the register you're playing in, you blow out only three to five liters of air per minute. For example, if you're playing double forte in the lowest register, it would probably take five liters of air per minute. Now, compare that with the tuba, which takes up to 300 liters per minute. In fact, to play one very loud note on the tuba in the low register, you deplete five liters of air in only one or two seconds. If you're playing a flute or singing, you use up a fairly normal amount of air, say 15 liters per minute, but on the oboe, even if you've played a very long phrase, you've used up only a very small amount of air. You've still got maybe 80 percent of the air in your lungs. And this is stale air, carbon dioxide.

If you want to take a meaningful breath, you first have to expel from your lungs all the dead air before you can take a completely fresh breath. When a flute player has finished a phrase, he has exhaled most of his air. On a normal instrument like a bassoon or a trumpet or horn, the player simply takes in air quickly to replace what he has blown out. But with us, we have to get rid of the dirty air before we take in clean air, so it takes us twice as long to breathe as it does anybody else in the wind section. And if we don't let the dirty air out, carbon dioxide begins to build up in our blood, and when that happens, a substance called lactic acid starts forming in the body which makes the muscles stiffen, as in a corpse - a stiff. So when you see an oboe player looking, and sounding, rigid on the stage, what you're seeing is rigor mortis setting in! This is absolutely true. To avoid this, when I come to a place in the music where I can take more than a quick gasp of breath, I fully exhale and inhale up to seven or eight times. That way, I not only catch my breath; I store up oxygen for what's ahead.

This breathing thing, this really strangulating excess of air that you have inside you all the time, becomes one of the biggest problems of the oboe. Once you learn the breathing, everything else is simple. Of course, that's like saying that pitching is 90 percent of baseball; pitching is terribly important, but you better have the other eight guys out there, too. What I do when I play the oboe is lie to myself. I tell myself that this is not a small reed that I'm blowing through - this is a tremendous open cavity through which I'm blowing reams of air quite effortlessly. I'm psyching myself not to get this bottled-up feeling that could put me into throes of agony when playing, say, the slow movement of the Strauss Oboe Concerto, which Strauss wrote for somebody who wanted to show off his circular breathing.

Chicago: Circular breathing - what's that?

Still: It's a method of inhaling through the nose while you blow out through the mouth. It's also called glass blower's technique. I don't use it.

Chicago: Why not?

Still: Because it makes the audience nervous when they don't see you breathing. They worry about you instead of listening to the music.

Chicago: Doesn't Heinz Holliger use circular breathing?

Still: Yes. He's a very skillful performer; he has a great finger control and an amazing sense of rhythm. But what he doesn't have is the main thing an oboe is supposed to have, which is an expressive sound. His sound is shallow and one- dimensional, the typical nasal oboe sound. He's unable to really sing on the oboe, to change the color, the vibrato, the character of the sound the way a great singer, violinist, or cellist can do so well. And yet critics call this great oboe playing. I suppose they've learned to accept an ugly, thin, hard sound on the oboe because that's the sound available on about a hundred recordings by this famous soloist. If you listen to my recordings of the Mozart Oboe Concerto and the Quartet with Perlman, Zukerman, and Harrell, or the Schumann Romances with John Perry, the "Wedding Cantata" with Kathleen Battle, or the Poulenc Trio with Perry and Milan Turkovic, and then compare the performances in every aspect with those of "The World's Most Recorded Oboist," you'll see a vast difference. I'll give him his avantgarde music - there the strident nasal sound seems to be universally accepted - but you can see why I want to do more solo and chambermusic recording. God forbid that if this world exists a hundred years from now, future generations would think that his playing represented the state of the art in 1986!

Chicago: I'm told that you have studied singing to improve your own oboe sound.

Still: About 27 years ago, I started experimenting with my vocal cords, much to the chagrin of my wife, who believes that if I spent that same time on the oboe I'd be a much better oboe player today. I had a teacher in Aspen for a few lessons, but I've pursued my vocal studies almost entirely on my own. As a merciful thing, I do this almost entirely in the car so that I don't clutter up the house with it. I have done an enormous amount of experimentation on my physical and mental capacities through making sounds with my voice - vocalizing. I'm a great one for experimenting. I feel that these investigations, parallel to my practice on the oboe, are absolutely necessary, because we develop harmful conditioned reflex patterns on the oboe which are very difficult to change. And yet you can't do without certain conditioned reflex patterns, because playing the oboe must be as automatic as driving a car.

If you think about what you're doing, you really can't do it. You can't think and play the oboe at the same time. You can only imagine what you want the sound to be and then make damned sure you are listening to it as you play, so that you'll know objectively whether you're getting what you want. Negative, distracting thoughts are bound to creep into your consciousness, and to avoid them you have to mesmerize yourself into almost total concentration on the sound, its rhythm and emotional content. Like tennis star Bjorn Borg did. He had an incredible ability to concentrate. He put the crowd out of his mind and focused on just one thing and that's the ball, where he wanted it to be and when.

You know, what we do with the oboe is as athletic as playing against John McEnroe, even though the only muscles you see us using are the tiny movements of the fingers and minute movements of the jaw. That's all you see, except perhaps for my eyebrows going up and down. But what incredible athletic coordination is taking place unseen! - the subtle, invisible fluctuations of the muscles below the diaphragm and in the muscles of the tongue; the minute and indescribably quick changes that are happening in the mouth to alter the nearmicroscopic aperture of the reed. McEnroe and Borg would be bewildered by the kind of timing we have to have. And like an athlete, you have to keep yourself in condition. I work out on one of those little trampolines in my basement; I always take stairs two at a time, to strengthen the lower gut muscles and improve body alignment. Every part of the body has to be trained to serve the music. It's a tough thing.

Chicago: And on top of all this, you have to make your own reeds, don't you?

Still: Oh, yes. I spend an enormous amount of time at this. I'm sure the reason oboe players are considered slightly crazy is that they're paranoid about these temperamental reeds. I frequently place a vindictive curse on all musicians who do not play reed instruments, because while we sit at a reed board for hours whittling out these reeds, they practice. I even took part of my summer vacation a few years ago to travel through the cane fields in Spain and the French Riviera searching for the ideal cane. Dealers had brought in a harvest of cane, from which I would select. They had it lying out in huge piles. To test the quality of the cane, I'd take out my reed-making equipment and cut a reed right there and play an informal "recital. " My basement is filled now, with six-inch lengths of cane, waiting to be split, gouged out, bent double, and shaved to a fine tolerance. No two pieces are alike.

You ask an oboe player how much he practices, and he'll say, "Oh, I worked six hours today." But those six hours are mostly spent whittling on the reeds and adjusting them. He'll play for a few minutes, for only a few seconds sometimes, and then he'll immediately go back to adjusting the reed. It's ironic, though; my reeds always seem to get a helluva lot better when I just do more practicing and let the reed alone for a while.

Chicago: How much time do you devote each week to making reeds?

Still: In one desperate week, I've spent as much as 20 hours gouging cane and whittling on reeds. But that's way too much time to spend. An average week would be six to eight hours.

Chicago: Do you make different reeds for different types of music?

Still: A good reed will play anything. But, of course, you don't always have good reeds, so you make reeds that specialize. If you have especially difficult low-register stuff to play, you'll make a reed that leans toward the low register. Or if you have something incredibly long and pianissimo to play, you'll definitely find a reed that's well broken in, that isn't fighting you. A new reed always fights you, because cane has a memory. When you take a piece of cane and bend it, it remembers the shape nature gave it and is obstinate about adopting the new shape. Also, reeds behave differently at different altitudes. If I'm playing in Aspen, say, or Mexico City, I have to make special reeds that are wider and longer than what I use in Chicago. And you should never play a reed when it's dry. It doesn't respond properly. Some oboe players take a cup of water onto the stage to soak their reeds in, but I figure a reed's got to get used to my spit, so I wet my reeds in my mouth while driving down to Orchestra Hall.

A reed will last for perhaps ten hours of blowing, although it might last for 20 or even 25 hours, but it's seldom that I can use the same reed for two weeks in a row. I trade them off, trying them out in rehearsals and practicing on them at home. Usually only one makes it to the concert level each week.

Chicago: It's no wonder the first oboe is said to be the prima donna of the orchestra.

Still: To say that would probably offend a lot of the other first-chair players. But it's true. Oboists always consider themselves very important. Historically, the first two instruments to be added to the string orchestra were the oboe and the horn, but the horns could only play certain notes and so they were used more or less as accompaniment while the oboes were given all the tunes. In the Classical period, the two oboes and the two horns constituted the whole wind section. Then a flute was added, and other instruments, but in the Baroque period, the oboe and its immediate family - English horn and oboe d'amore - were always there.

In the Romantic period, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner used the oboe prominently as a solo voice, probably because composers considered it the closest thing in the wind department to the human voice. The oboe even has the double reed, which is the equivalent of the two vocal folds that produce the human voice, whereas the flute, you know, is played basically like a Coke bottle. I say that to bug flutists - but there are great artists on the flute. Still, it's more difficult to make the flute sound like a singer. It just sounds "flutey. "

Toscanini felt that the key to setting the tone for the whole orchestra was the first oboe and, strangely enough, the principal double bass. The oboe certainly sets the tone for the woodwind section because its color and texture are always audible. The first oboe sits prominently right in the middle of the orchestra, and it performs the very symbolic act of giving the A at the beginning of a concert.

Chicago: Why does the oboe get to set the A?

Still: Partly because everybody else is fiddling around and tuning their instruments and the oboe penetrates with a distinctive enough sound for them to hear it through the din. And partly because oboists used to design their reeds to play at the standard pitch; they couldn't move the tube in and out so easily. We still don't pull our reeds in and out to change the pitch. Once we make our reed, it's a little tricky to change the pitch. The flute and clarinet players have an easier time of it, but they don't like to screw around with the pitch either.

Today, to avoid arguments, I take the pitch from a little electronic device the size of a cassette that I carry in my pocket. I don't actually give the A with this device; I play into its microphone and it tells me my exact pitch. Musicians don't like to tune to a non-musical sound. In fact, they don't like to tune to an oboe whose tone is ugly. I try to play the A as if I were playing the beginning of that beautiful oboe solo in the second movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

Also, I know that the orchestra always plays two or three vibrations above where it tunes. That's why, if I'm tuning the orchestra before a piano concerto is played, you'll see me go over to the piano and check its exact pitch with this scientific device. Then, when I give the A to the orchestra, I give it at precisely two vibrations under the pitch of the piano. If the piano is tuned to 442 vibrations per second, I give a 440 A. Most musicians will tune above it. With the string players, it's to protect themselves against the brasses, especially the French horns and the trombones, which tend to push their pitch up during the performance. The trumpets are not so bad, but the trombones... ! The trombone is the only instrument in the whole orchestra which theoretically can play exactly in tune, and yet it's probably played more out of tune than any other instrument. They're always way above the pitch. Thank God the trombone doesn't give the A, or we'd be up to 448 right away. Anyway, what I never do is play the A on the piano for the orchestra to hear, because of their "knee-jerk" reaction of always tuning a little higher.

Chicago: You're 66 years old. Do you have any thoughts of retirement?

Still: Not specifically. It's a question now of whether I'll stay until we make our world tour in 1991, the orchestra's hundredth anniversary. I'll be taking a sabbatical from the orchestra soon to catch up on solo recordings, writing my book on oboe playing, and performing with chamber groups. But if I do retire, it certainly won't be to rest. I'll probably be even busier than I am now, and doing even more of the kind of things I want to do.

I get a big kick out of coaching wind and brass players, and I've been doing a lot of it in the summertime and early fall. I've been playing and coaching all over Scandinavia for several years now - in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland - and I've been appearing more often as a soloist. Last year I made my solo debut in Salzburg, and recorded a big Bach G-minor Sonata for oboe and harpsichord, with my older son Tom at the harpsichord. He's the one who wrote the oboe cadenzas for my recent recording of the Mozart Concerto which I'm so proud of. They're stunning cadenzas. When Dale Clevenger heard them - he's our first horn player from Tennessee - he said, "Mah God, that oboe cadenza in that first movement is worth the price of the whole record! " He's trying to get Tom to write some cadenzas for him, for his Mozart horn concerti.

Anyway, this part of my life is expanding every year. And as far as age is concerned, I feel that my recent recordings of the Mozart Concerto and the Bach Sonata are by far the best playing I've ever done in my life.

Of course, I love teaching and I'll never give that up. I've got a lot of great students from all around the country. They play so much better than I ever did when I came to the Chicago Symphony, and I hope it's the result of my teaching. They're going to be super oboe players. Within a few years, the whole scene of oboe playing will make us oldies look like cave men by comparison. The art of playing is getting better all the time. You can just hear it!

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