Editor's note: This profile of Ray Still first appeared in the Chicago Tribune's "Tempo" section on January 31, 1980. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
The oboe player has a long, pale cheek
His lips are thin, his visage lank and weak.
His hair is curly; on his sad face 'merit unrecognized 'you clearly trace
Crafty and sly, he loves a quiet beer His instrument above all things is dear . . .
Music Magazine: March, 1882.
Oboe players do fight lonely wars in their solitary pursuit of beauty. They've been striving to master this peculiar instrument in its various forms since at least 2500 B.C., and it remains perhaps the most fickle of all.
Essentially lyrical, composers choose its penetrating yet plaintive voice to phrase nostalgia, poignancy, or gaiety. But it reacts to the tiniest slight, emitting hideous howls and screeches as if it were a cat being stepped on.
Its odd name comes from a corrupted Italian pronunciation ("o-bo-eh") of the French hautbois, or high wood. Shorter and slimmer than a clarinet, it consists of a tube, flared at the lower end, studded with silver keys for opening and closing the holes. It is topped by a small, twin-bladed reed that fits directly into the player's mouth without a mouthpiece. The blades vibrate when air passes between them, producing the tone.
The oboe is demonically delicate, and demands daily diddling to hold its adjustment. Serious players also must learn how to make their own reeds, and then do so religiously, because reeds don't last long and tend to die at the most awkward times.
But despite such mandatory dedication even the oboe's greatest masters work under terrible tension. "They call the oboe 'the ill wind that nobody blows good, ' " notes Ray Still, the distinguished principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "We oboe players are generally viewed as high-strung types - nervous, finicky prima donnas always fretting over our reeds. And there's even a myth about how we all eventually go insane because the intense vibrations of the tone soften the brain. Sounds silly, I know, yet is persists.
"But I think it takes nerve to play any principal part in a symphony orchestra, and you must work hard to hold your chair. I've based my career on not making excuses for the oboe, of seeking to overcome its limitations. That's been my ideal since I was a kid."
In many ways, Ray Still is a quintessential oboe player, one of the most influential of his generation. He has filled his Chicago solo hotseat for 26 years, through good times (under the late Fritz Reiner and now Sir Georg Solti) and bad. His musicianship and distinctive tone -- incisive, dramatic, capable of transcendent beauty -- have won him a devoted local following, as well as providing the orchestra with a trademark identifiable to listeners around the world.
Still comes across as a tall, amiable man with an earthy wit and baritone voice enriched by years of vocalizing as he tries to apply singing techniques to the oboe. It takes boldness to be a bigtime oboe player, and Still fills the bill. There's no trace of the pose about him. Reputedly blunt and outspoken, he is a tindery perfectionist when it comes to his art. This sometimes has embroiled him in controversy, though as he warily eyes his 60th year, he says he has mellowed considerably.
When Still plays, he weaves like a snake charmer, and works his forehead into a field of furrows. He looks as if he's courting a stroke, much like the ancient Greek players of the silvery double pipes called the aulos, who strapped their cheeks with a leather belt (or phorbeia) lest they burst. The aulos was so notoriously hard to blow that players developed internal hemorrhages. But Still insists that the modern instrument has just the opposite curse: suffocation.
"The terrible trouble with the oboe is that it doesn't take enough breath. You have to breathe with a very slow, controlled, continuous seep of air. With the tuba, for instance, you can play one short, low note and expend your full lung capacity. The oboe, though, no matter how good or bad the player, requires only three liters of air per minute. I have about a five-liter capacity. That means I can hold a tone a minute and a half without using all my air.
"So you've got a lungful of air and no way to get rid of it by the next breathing point, except to focus it through a reed opening smaller than the eye of a needle. You start to play, and you feel like you're blowing against your lips, and nothing is going out. Your body reacts desperately, as if you're straining to lift some huge weight. Everything gets rigid, immobile, and that's the surest death for an oboe player."
Still spends much of his time busily cloning little Ray Stills. He does a lot of international traveling, playing solos, coaching woodwind groups, recording. His permanent post is at Northwestern University, where students compete to study with him some from as far away as Japan and Scandinavia. (All of the other three Chicago Symphony oboists were his students.)
No matter how accomplished they are, Still finds that generally he has to reteach them basic breathing techniques. One student simply couldn't handle it. He passed out. His worried teacher sent him to a doctor, who pronounced him fit. But at the youngster's next lesson, he promptly vomited and passed out again. He went on to a less strenuous job - as a Chicago fireman (and part-time oboist).
"Many of my students are what I call reverse-breathers. As they blow, their tummy pops out, and their chest compresses. The more efficient way is to start with the muscles under the ribs and work your way up. Stupidly, a lot of teachers tell them to stick out the gut and lock it.
"Most of my kids hyperventilate at first, " Still says, "especially when I force them to expel their air quickly, like blowing out a candle. Oboe players are so unaccustomed to doing this that the shock makes them lightheaded. You can always tell because they look at you bleary-eyed. But fairly soon, they learn to breathe correctly.
"Then I teach them tricks to con themselves into playing more freely. Oboists must do this. For example. I may tell myself, you're not blowing out, frantically trying to get air through the oboe, you're actually pleasantly drinking in air.' This calms me. I don't feel so bottled-up."
Still's result is a free and open tone with what he calls pure vowel sounds and many colors, as opposed to the stereotypical European style, often dubbed the "wild duck and bagpipe school."
It also hinges on the reeds, "the most important part of the instrument, by far." Still says it takes about 30 years to really learn to make oboe reeds, and even then he discards 9 of every 10. The chore occupies about 20 hours a week.
Still's cured bamboo cane comes from special fields in France and Spain. He splits a six-to-eight-inch stalk into three parts each of which will become a reed.
He first places a segment in a planing device that scoops material from the inside. Then he folds over the gouged strip, shapes and binds the ends together on a metal shaft with a cork bottom, and pares down and clips off the tip, making two reed blades. These he shaves down until paper thin - he estimates the tolerance at .0023 inch. At that point, the pitch is fixed, which is why orchestras tune their instruments to the oboe's "A, " and not vice versa. Still keeps his a precise 440 vibrations per second, otherwise the oboe distorts its low tones.
Ancient Greek aulos players kept their reeds and gear in special bags, and when Ray Still walks onstage at Orchestra Hall he also carries a satchel. Oboists are permitted the baggage because quick adjustments may be required at any time. And while Still has at least temporary confidence in his No. 1 reed, he also brings along 12 others, 3 of which are kept "wet-ready" in case he needs them fast.
Like many oboists, Still came to the instrument obliquely. He grew up in Los Angeles, a minister's son. His mother first handed him a Sears Roebuck clarinet, but that left him cold. While ushering for Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts, he became fascinated by the playing of Henri Debusscher, the orchestra's solo oboist. At age 14, Still knew what to do with his life.
By 1940, he was playing in the Kansas City Philharmonic, had married (he and Mary soon will celebrate their 40th anniversary), and was working toward a degree in radio engineering. When the war intervened, Still enlisted and served in a radar unit. Afterward he took the GI Bill to Juilliard for some formal musical training. By then, the family had two of its four children and was squeaking by on $90 a month. So when he wasn't practicing, Still took a job driving a truck. Mary Still never has forgotten how poor they were. She says all she ever wanted Ray to do was earn $5, 000 a year.
Still's talent and tone quickly led to stints in the Buffalo and Baltimore symphonies. Then in 1953, Fritz Reiner, the Chicago Symphony's incoming music director, brought Still to Chicago with him as assistant first oboe. Within a year, Still was in the first-chair.
Reiner was a precisionist renowned for the impeccable clarity of his orchestral textures. He was known equally as an icy tyrant, a sadistic genius who made his men shiver in their sleep. Still doesn't remember him that way, though.
"He treated me like an adopted son, almost. Reiner denied that all musicians were terrified of him. 'Just the bad ones, ' he said. Oh, he tested me that first year, scheduling many exposed pieces for oboe-- things like Rossini's 'La Scala di Seta, ' Ravel's 'Le Tombeau de Couperin, ' the Schubert 'Unfinished' Symphony, Brahms' Violin Concerto, 'Iberia' of Debussy. But I remember when I was hospitalized a week, he told the press 'Mr. Still is sick. We will postpone our recording of 'Iberia' until he gets well.' I knew I'd arrived."
One of the funnier Reiner stories concerns Still's rehearsal playing of a deceptive little country tune in the third movement of Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony.
"It almost sounds like, 'Where, oh where, has my little dog gone, ' but it comes out of nowhere and you almost have to catch it by radar. Anyway, I played it, and Reiner didn't like it. He mumbled, 'no-no-no . . . again.' It starts out, 'pa-Pa, pa-Pa diddledeet, ' and I was probably going 'da-Da, da-Da, diddledeet, ' not sparkling enough. So I played it once more. Nothing doing.
"Again, Reiner stopped the orchestra and said, 'No, R-R-Ray (he rolled his R's) . . . Haff you played this piece before?'
"I was very indignant. 'Of course, I have!' But he was baiting me. 'And where did you play it?' . . . He raised his eyebrows and peered slyly out at the orchestra. . . 'It must have been in Baltimore . . . mit the Orioles.' "
When Reiner died in 1963, the orchestra plunged into hard times. It was a turbulent era of management feuds, corrosive labor strikes, and personality clashes centering on the late Jean Martinon, a French conductor of debatable prowess whose tenure as music director reportedly sparked near-mutiny from the orchestra.
Still never has been one to call anybody maestro unless he felt it was deserved. He also long had been an underground labor organizer, an unusual activity for a first chair player, who normally has separate contracts from the rest of the musicians.
But the symphony men had tired of what they viewed as sweetheart deals between their union leadership and management, so in 1962 they helped put up a rebel slate that successfully ousted America's music czar, the fiery James Caesar Petrillo. Still was among those slated.
"Some very slimy things had gone on. The men had no dignity before we organized and were fearful of their jobs. Petrillo could tear up your union card with no questions asked. Then you couldn't work anywhere in the country."
The orchestra then challenged its management. Still believes a blacklist resulted, and he was on that slate, too.
"Martinon and I just didn't get along. I thought he was ruining the orchestra. He even accused me of playing wrong notes during a concert. A perfectionist like me! There were a lot of little things . . . Once I was reading a book in rehearsal, during a movement when I wasn't playing. He ordered me off the stage. I put the book away . . . Well, to make a long story short, I got fired . . . "
Despite any stereotypes surrounding first-chair oboe players, Still's sudden firing in 1967 split the orchestra. Most players agreed with him, others backed Martinon. Still characteristically fought the dismissal, and after arbitration, won back his job with full seniority rights. His colleagues promptly elected him head of the orchestra's audition committee. He had been out eight months, and says he lost $10, 000 in salary.
When a new management broom finally finished sweeping, Martinon had been succeeded by Georg Solti and Carlo Maria Giulini. A new heyday dawned. But some grudges endured for a long time. Still, for instance, sits next to principal flutist Donald Peck, a musician whose work he esteems, and the two play duets on practically every piece. Yet they didn't speak for 10 years.
"Oh, we do now, " Still says with a laugh. "We're very friendly. After 10 years, I figured it was long enough. I think I've mellowed. I'm much happier now than I used to be. The orchestra is very healthy under Solti. He's one of the great musicians of the world, and he collaborates with an orchestra instead of conquering it."
These days, Still is trying to do as much solo recording as possible. "When a wind player reaches 60, the handwriting's on the wall. Over Christmas, I recorded the Mozart Oboe Quartet with violinist Itzhak Perlman, violist Pinchas Zukerman, and cellist Lynn Harrell. That's probably the most expensive string 'accompaniment' in the world, and it was very exciting for me. I always worry about how records will sound, because they seldom measure up to the playbacks. So I'll be in a state of shock when that one comes out (on Angel). I don't want any nasty surprises."
Still keeps fit by teaching, jogging, and playing racquetball. His secret mania is listening to old jazz records. But like any oboist, Still must work constantly to stay on top of his ill wind.
"Despite the pressure, oboists tend to be long-lived, and I hope to be playing into my 80s and 90s, " he says. "I'd like to end up like Marcel Moyse, a fine French flutist who became an elder statesman. He has a farm in Vermont, and musicians come there and live and play together and make recordings. It's all very peaceful.
"That's not a bad way for an old oboe player to end his days. I'm looking forward to it."
