Principal Oboist of the New York Philharmonic since 1978, Joseph Robinson studied with Marcel Tabuteau and John Mack. A former faculty member of the North Carolina School of the Arts, he has participated in the Marlboro, Blossom, and Berkshire Festivals. He is a Trustee of the Brevard Festival, a member of the Board of Directors of the Grand Teton Music Festival, and President of the Grand Teton Orchestral Seminar, an orchestral training program for young professional musicians. In 1975 he established the John Mack Oboe Camp.
In June 1983 Joseph Robinson performed Tison Street's Adagio in Eb for Oboe and Strings at the Philharmonic's Horizons '83 festival of contemporary music. In November 1984 he was soloist in the world premiere performance of George Rochberg's Oboe Concerto, a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and recorded and released in 1986 by New World Records. He performed the solo in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in June 1985 on the Philharmonic's European tour. Joseph Robinson teaches at the Manhattan School in New York City.
Much of the poignancy and communicative power in music comes from its transience. The great Marcel Tabuteau, for 40 years Principal Oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was quoted in a 1944 interview as saying that all music begins from silence, "that most perfect state of music in which everything is implicit." It proceeds according to a curve of energy to its highest point, and then recedes and dies away according to the same rate at which it developed.
Music, therefore, acts as a metaphor for life, whether in the expression of a single note, a phrase, or an entire Mozart symphony. Whatever its style or historical period, music has a beginning, travels through time in a journey, and ends, either triumphantly, tragically, or somewhere in between. Because sound is concrete stuff in motion, to be alive it must move. It should have about it the same lithe, flexible, curvaceous character as the motions of a great dancer. Players who succeed in achieving this are called musical or natural, even by unsophisticated listeners who do not know what those qualities require.
The rate of change in the musical line as it proceeds through time determines the quality of life possessed by it, so it is essential that the sound travel along a variable, rather than a constant, trajectory. "Straight" notes were anathema to Pablo Casals, who would often stop the Marlboro Festival Orchestra in the late 1960s and shout, "Ugly, ugly! You call that music?" Constant tones, like dead limbs on a tree, were to be chopped off and thrown away.
The trouble is that most players who aspire to a flex ible result attempt to achieve it with a state of body that is more akin to a cigar-store Indian than a dancer. By the time I encounter my students at the Manhattan School or at workshops where I perform, most of them have already developed habits that involve such an excess of rigidity or isometric entrapment that the effort of playing is much greater than it ought to be. If these habits are developed early enough, they are perpetuated for many years. If the player is talented and fortunate enough, they ride along like barnacles for a while without seriously hindering the player. Eventually, though, they will curtail even the most promising career.
Habits of tenseness make more difficult the work involved in musical performance. It's difficult for a player to project a sinewy, flexible line when his body is rigid. I emphasize the point because I believe that most oboists are beset by this problem to a far greater degree than they realize. Recently at a master class I heard a parade of accomplished oboists with excellent reeds and instruments who in spite of the highest artistic aspirations strangled their tones to death. Dramatic moments were stillborn, appoggiaturas undernourished, high notes anemic, and the most beautiful phrases as frozen and inert as mannequins. Projection was strangely inverted, with piano passages more winsome and compelling than louder ones. Oddly, the more passionately the player seemed to care about the music, the less it carried.
If proper projection is, as Tabuteau said, "the amplification of the 'dolce' tone, and the 'dolce' tone... closest to zero," perhaps the solution to this isometric dilemma for oboists is to understand the physical efficiency inherent in a relaxed pianissimo and to extend that efficiency throughout the dynamic range. Like peeling off layers of an onion, we must find ways to discard unneeded levels of physical tensions and isometric stress.
The most important element in playing the oboe is control of the wind, because the wind is the power source that generates the tone and propels it. The first component is the source of the wind: how and where to get the air. The second is how to deliver air to the reed. Playing the oboe is complicated by the fact that air does not pass freely enough through the aperture of the reed. There is a backlog, and the pressure that results builds up inside the player's mouth, throat, and lungs. Beginners are loath to accept the internal pressure in their mouths as a fact of oboe-playing life. They substitute grunting for proper support, choking off wind in their throats, and the isometric trap begins to close in on them.
Many people who read this will be familiar with the recordings that were made from tapes that Marcel Tabuteau produced in the last years of his life. On the first side of the first record he says something that is widely misunderstood: "First, and most important for the attack, get rid of the air in your lungs. Say 'ah-ah-ah-ah' and play with the pressure left at your command against the resistance of the reed. "
This flies so directly in the face of common sense and conventional practice that most people don't have any idea what he's talking about. They dismiss the comment, or they're bewildered by it. For many years I believed that this was a pedagogical overstatement, that Tabuteau was really trying to say that the player has the greatest control over the flow of the wind when there is the least air. Yet I already knew that the explosive over-inflation endured on the other end of the spectrum was uncomfortable and inhibiting, so I took the comment literally. In the beginning I exhaled and played short, melodic fragments with my lungs nearly empty. The idea was to wring out of myself the last cubic centimeters of air, in order to increase my control over short episodes of the melodic line.
Nowadays I have a more moderate view of what Tabuteau meant. This moderate view is that the player who has taken a breath should relax and let the air go, and so arrive at the comfortable state of equilibrium that we take for granted when we're sitting around, completely at ease. I challenge anyone to discover a friend who, during casual conversation, prepares for a remark by taking a breath. The fact is that we go along, communicating very comfortably with one another without intentionally doing anything at all.
A mistake that many oboists begin making from the first days of playing is to attempt to fill their lungs with air before sounding the first note. Other instruments that consume a lot of air (such as the tuba) require players to develop their lung capacity to the maximum. Because the oboe uses only a small amount of air (though delivered at high pressure), it is really not necessary to exploit the full potential of the lung capacity, or even to take a breath before playing. We should prepare by sitting erect, by taking the reed in our mouths, and by doing nothing that is contrived or unusual other than to be in a state of relaxed readiness.
From this point of view the best way to perform is to imagine that you are a great tennis player waiting to receive a serve. Think of that cat-like dancing around in the receiver's court. Because the response to the ball has to be instantaneous, with the direction and degree of force determined at the last minute, the best matrix for response is a state of complete relaxation.
For an oboist any preparation ritual that involves planting feet, setting the rib cage, elevating the elbows, and so on, is a problem. Even a dramatic solo like the one in the third movement of the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony can be delivered from a state of complete relaxation, so that the energy involved in presenting the note is delivered almost simultaneously with the sound itself; and for a longwinded solo such as the one in the Brahms Violin Concerto, the only preparation needed is a complete sense of ease. The physical involvement of playing should be from nothing to something to nothing: from relaxation to physical vigor and back again to relaxation. Many players who get their bodies set in complicated ways and then take a full breath invert this process. They go from a state of considerable tension to a state of greater relaxation, because their work is not in delivering the wind but in withholding it. For them, playing is easier than waiting to play, and forte is more relaxed than piano.
My favorite analogy for correct breathing is a sponge that is removed from a tub of water and hung up. In the beginning it produces a stream of water and drips for a while. When the dripping stops, one may take the sponge and wring out an enormous amount of additional water. To replenish the supply of water, one need only return the sponge to the tub of water. Oboists should use only the "wrung-out" air in their bodies, not the part that would escape of its own accord as a result of the force of gravity or because of the elasticity of over-inflation. We need only to relax the muscles that have been wringing out air to replenish our supply of wind for the next phrase. In this way, blowing is an active process, and inhaling is completely passive.
Tabuteau explained
the process of breathing with this diagram. One arrow measures
the work involved in blowing and delivering the wind. The other
arrow measures the work of biting (closing) the reed shut. These
activities do not require equivalent amounts of energy; it's much
easier to bite the reed shut than it is to blow our brains out
at maximum energy. For the player to keep the pitch constant at
every stage of the dynamic continuum from pianissimo to fortissimo,
there has to be a readjustment of the relationship between biting
and blowing.
Tabuteau said that playing pianissimo requires maximum work from biting and minimum from blowing. He meant that to play a quiet note one need only close the reed to the appropriate small opening and deliver approximately the amount of air that's required for speech. In other words, there's almost no work at all necessary to blow pianissimo on the oboe. For many players this is radical thinking. More commonly accepted is the notion that the tone has to be supported as much for piano as for forte, which means to students that they must push just as hard when they play piano as they do when they play forte. That's translated into straining abdominal muscles, even flexing buttocks and legs.
It is impossible, though, to produce a tone that has the right center, in terms of overtones and quality of sound, and it is impossible to play in tune along the dynamic continuum from piannissimo to fortissimo if the wind is constant. Would you ask someone to use the same energy to whisper as to shout across the street? The fact is that it's the force and energy of wind that generates volume. If the objective is to go from something very quiet to something very loud, then the wind has to change dramatically; and there must be an accommodation of the reed opening to keep the pitch constant.
I have my own students practice these variables separately. The exercise is to blow from zero through the reed until it begins to vibrate and then continue to blow alternately faster and slower, regardless of the pitch and with no corresponding change of embouchure. The pitch line moves like a roller coaster; depending on the force of air, it oscillates up and down. Nearly everybody these days has an electronic tuner or access to one. Watching the needle move up and down as the wind speeds and slows is a good exercise for gaining control over the wind flow alone.
The second thing to do is to manipulate the "chewing" variable alone by blowing slowly through the reed until it speaks, then, keeping that slow airstream that barely makes the reed vibrate, to bite the reed almost shut and release it open again. In this way another kind of roller coaster pitch curve is defined only as a result of biting. The student can also watch the tuner needle go up and down as a result of biting. It is important to discover the full range of this chewing potential: to open as far as the lips permit and to be able to bite the reed completely closed.
It is imperative to find the most efficient way to exchange these two variables so that pianissimo is made the nine parts biting and one part blowing, and fortissimo is made of nine parts blowing and one part biting. The dynamic continuum, which has an infinite number of these exchanges, is best served by the most flexible and efficient tradeoff. Most players are so hung up with their embouchure or their wind that they either have a stultified range of air flow trapped in their throats or they have what Tabuteau called the "crocodile bite," a lockjaw-like syndrome permitting almost no alteration of of the reed opening.
The second aspect of breathing, wind control, is the manner of delivering air to the reed. Most people inhale under the rib cage, which means up, so that their shoulders are elevated when they inhale. To exhale, they relax and allow gravity and the elastic potential of their lungs to expel the air. The best way to manage control of the wind, though, is to inflict upon ourselves a controlled Heimlich maneuver, using the muscles of the abdominal wall. I throw my stomach, beginning in the region of my navel, up and in, so that my viscera are thrown underneath my diaphragm against my lungs from below. The more forcefully I do that, the more air comes out and the more my chest is elevated.
This is contrary to the popular tendency, which is to have the chest sink as blowing increases. Players who use this method generally tighten their abdominal muscles to create a floor to push against. That tightening can become an isometric trap in itself. When flexible leverage is provided from below, the rib cage produces the containment needed for the lungs. The whole point is to try to make the amount of physical work exactly correspond to the amount of tonal output and to supply wind from the source (somewhere down around the stomach) in direct relationship to the amount of sound. Then the musical objective is mirrored in the physical action, and the curved, flowing musical line that is characteristic of the oboe at its best is reflected in a flexible, free-flowing physical energy in the musculature of the body.No rigidity anywhere: that's the objective.
About three years ago I addressed a medical conference in Denver, one of the first ever held for the purpose of considering musicians' special health needs. My argument was the same as in this article: oboists should avoid the physical problems that come from stress. Throat involvement begins when the 12-year-old student prepares to play the first note on the instrument by taking a breath. Tabuteau was right. Exhale before playing!
@ 1987 by The Instrumentalist Co. Reprinted by permission from The Instrumentalist, May, 1987. The Instrumentalist is published 12 times per year. One year subscriptions are available for $18.00 from The Instrumentalist Co., 200 Northfield Road, Northfield, Illinois, USA.