April 30, 1985
Dear Dan:
I too studied oboe with Henri De Busscher. In the article written
by the Lehrers, his name was consistently misspelled. Would you
please set the record straight.
Sincerely yours,
Donald Leake, D.M.D., M.D.
Professor and Chief
Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
University of California, Los Angeles
Harbor/UCLA Medical Center
Box 19
1000 West Carson Street
Torrance, California 90509
(To Dr. Leake and many other readers who called this error
to our attention, our sincere apologies. The Editors.)
9th April, 1985
Dear Sirs:
In the article on Monophonic Sound Resources for the oboe, reprinted
in Volume 7, No. 2 of The Double Reed, Nora Post remarks
(p. 45) that "explicit requests for muting the oboe did not
occur until the twentieth century" and that "one of
the earliest examples is found in Petroushka, where Igor
Stravinsky marks all three oboes con sord". It is
however admitted that "oboe muting was, in fact, fairly common
in the eighteenth century" and Johann Christian Fischer's
claim to have invented the oboe mute late in the century is referred
to.
It may be worth mentioning that in the St. Luke Passion, formerly attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, in the aria, "Lasst mich ihn nur noch einmal kussen", there appears the instruction "Piano, und zwar die Hoboen mit Papier gedampft" (piano, in fact the oboes muted with paper) (Bach Gesellschaft, Vol. XLV(2), p. 101).
The original attribution of the St. Luke Passion to J. S. Bach is now generally considered to have been incorrect. For a time it Was thought that the entire autograph was in his hand. It now seems that Johann Sebastian himself only copied out part of the score. But at least the marking referred to shows that the practice of muting the oboe was known in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was explicitly called for by at least one composer.
Yours faithfully,
J.W.F. Juritz
University of Cape Town
Department of Physics
Rondebosch 7700, Cape,
South Africa