Editor's Note . . . Robert Bloom is one of the world's leading oboists and teachers whose pupils occupy important positions in orchestras and universities across the country. This interview, originally for radio, is with Eugene Cook, a former editor and photographer for Time-Life magazines Mr. Cook is presently concert coordinator at the Yale School of Music. The interview - on the occasion of Mr. Bloom's recent retirement from Yale - first appeared in the Music Journal and is reprinted here in a somewhat modified form at Mr. Bloom's request and with the permission of the editor of Music Journal.
Robert Bloom studied with Marcel Tabuteau and became a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra at an early age. He has also been first oboist of the Rochester Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony, and played first oboe on the many Columbia recordings of Leopold Stokowski's orchestra. In more recent years, he has performed with great distinction with the Bach Aria Group and has taught not only at Yale but in master classes at Sarasota, Florida and at the Aspen Festival in Colorado. He continues to teach at the Juilliard School in New York and will do master classes, ensemble coaching, and conducting at schools across the country. For information on available dates, please contact Sara Lambert at 395 Orange Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511. Mr. Bloom is also well along on a book devoted, of course, to the oboe. He promises that it will include many anecdotes from his unique career. It is a pleasure to present this interview with a great artist and a good friend.
Eugene Cook: Last season when discussing with conductor William Steinberg soloists who might be engaged to perform with him, I asked him about the idea to have Robert Bloom as soloist. He broke in and said "He's the best!" How does it feel to be the best?
Robert Bloom: Must we talk qualitatively? I'm sure some people would argue about that. I would like to say, with a certain amount of modesty, that I am one of the better oboe players. Someone once told a well-known conductor that he was like a God, and said, "How does it feel to be a God?" The conductor said: "It is a great responsibility."
Cook: I used to hear mad anecdotes about mad oboe players and the comment was: "That's the way oboe players are." There is something about all that air, I guess. An oxygen "high."
Bloom: Among oboe players there is a funny saying that the fellow was crazy to start with and all he had to do was learn the fingering! But I don't know where this started. Playing the oboe doesn't take lots of air, it takes great control of the air. For instance, if I were to try to blow a flute, which requires a faster release of air, I would be dead! The few times I have tried to sing I ran out of air very quickly because I am accustomed to releasing what I take slowly and with pressure. I don't know where this could have started because certainly the Baroque oboe was played with much less pressure and less air than we use today. Somewhere in the dim past I heard that the Aulites, as they were known in ancient Greece, played a double-reed instrument. It was a crude instrument and took lots of air. They would make a leather collar so that they wouldn't break blood vessels. If you kept that up for very long, I guess you would end up with some brain damage.
Cook: So it goes back to the Greeks?
Bloom: Yes. Certainly from the 17th Century on, oboe-type instruments were not played with that kind of pressure. They were played with much less pressure and, in a way, less tonal fluctuation than we play with now.
Cook: Is it a sign of poor oboe playing if one sees the oboist turning red and purple?
Bloom: Don't let it alarm you. If you watch a singer or brass player, when he gets to the end of a long phrase, the first thing he does is to inhale. If you watch an oboe player, when he gets to the end of a long phrase, the first thing he does is to exhale. Because he has air trapped in him. Every time we breathe, we have to release air first, and then breathe in; we have to get rid of old air and fake in new oxygen. So we do a double thing. So many times I have thought, "Wouldn't it be great to play and at the end just take a nice big breath and start all over again!" But we need time to do two things--to exhale and then to inhale.
Cook: Why isn't the old air good enough?
Bloom: You deplete the oxygen supply and not being able to release the carbon dioxide in the lungs you force it to enter the blood stream causing fatigue and in some cases even faintness. There is not enough oxygen to nourish the circulatory system, so you have to renew the air. Imagine a man in a small room with all the doors closed and limited access to air. He could breathe in and out as much as he wants to and at a certain point he wouldn't get any more oxygen. So he is getting something that is entering his lungs but it isn't oxygen.
Cook: And you have to replenish that constantly with real oxygen. In addition you have the problem of pressure.
Bloom: As you know, last year I had a slight heart attack. There were complications and I didn't play for quite a while. Then when I finally got well, my cardiologist said (knowing that I played a wind instrument) "I would like you to come to my office and bring your oboe with you." At first I thought he was joking. But he meant it. So I practiced for a few days, because I didn't want to disgrace myself in a doctor's office. We got going and he took the cardiogram with me just breathing normally. He also took my blood pressure. Then he said, "Can you play with all these wires attached to you?" It was a rather strange picture if you can imagine someone sitting on a doctor's table playing without a shirt with all the wires attached. He said, "I want to see what happens when you play." I deliberately played some long phrases because I wanted to test the extremes. He timed the phrases and took a cardiogram and timed my pulse rate and all that. He said, "Can you play with one hand, because I would like to take your blood pressure while you play." Well I did, but since all you can play with the left hand is G. A, and B. it was pretty boring even with all the permutations possible. "Amazing!" said the doctor. "Do you know that you played some phrases of almost a minute?" I learned that when I play, my blood pressure goes up, but to a safe level. My pulse, which is normally around 60, goes up to about 75 which is also safe. In other words, my body has adapted itself to the demands made upon it just as an athlete's body adjusts itself. I've heard recently that our champion long distance runner has, when at rest, a pulse in the 30's.
Cook: When you were performing with the Philharmonia it looked to me as though your breath was what singers might call a "high breath."
Bloom: Absolutely not. We get our breath right down to the bottom of the lungs, support it with the abdominal muscles, and push it through the instrument with pressure and speed. Otherwise the tone lacks life and vibrancy. I tell my students to accept the fact that we play a wind instrument and that they must blow. I've heard some oboists make the statement that we must feel as though we are inhaling while we're playing. Nothing could be farther from my way of playing. I've noticed that my beginning female students have a tendency to breathe high.
Cook: Some women look good taking high breaths.
Bloom: (laughing) Yes, but unfortunately oboe playing is not a spectator sport.
Cook: This may also be women's vanity. Breathing low may develop what seems to be called a "pot-belly" because of the developed muscles around the area of the stomach.
Bloom: I wonder! I used to do the "Bell Telephone Hour" program for many, many years. I remember Maggie Teyte, the well-known English singer of French songs. She came as our guest a few times and she was a rather exuberant woman. We were standing backstage getting ready to go on for a broadcast. We had rehearsed all day and were playing some piece that had a long, long introduction by the oboe. It was a line that had to be played on one breath. She said to me "That's wonderful!" And without any notice she just punched me in the stomach. My first reaction was a very unconscious one. I tensed my muscles. She said, "That's good. It should be that way when you play or sing." Of course, I am glad that I was ready for it. The voice and oboe are very similar in a way. I pattern all my playing after singing. I try to get students to do the same thing because to me the greatest way of making music is singing
Cook: Absolutely!
Bloom: It is the greatest human expression in music. A pianist may play six octaves and have at his command great finger dexterity, but a singer or a good wind player playing a beautiful phrase of five or six notes will often move an audience more.
Cook: And the great pianists who can play the lovely, long, legato line can hit you amidships simply because it is identifiable with song quality.
Bloom: But very few of them do it. Few see the value of it. I remember as a young man my first job was with the Philadelphia Orchestra with Stokowski and our first soloist was Ossip Gabrilovitch. He played the d minor concerto by Mozart. The slow movement has a slow, rather song-like melody in the right hand. I said, "My God, that man is almost making glissandi!" He was actually making intervals, which is the whole secret in music making. You don't really sing the notes; you sing what is in between the notes. And he was doing that on the piano. You see that is very, very difficult to do on the piano. There were not many in those days who could do that and it was such a revelation. I've heard some do it but I have heard many who don't.
Cook: Is your instrument a specially manufactured one?
Bloom: No, it is a modern instrument manufactured in France by F. Lorée. Until recently the oboes played in different countries were quite dissimilar. When I say that the German oboe was built differently, I don't mean the key structure, I mean the bore which makes the sound different. The French were the first to make the instrument which is now played by the majority of oboists. Today the French style oboe is made and played in almost all the countries of the world.
Cook: I can't resist asking, "Which is the biggest bore among oboes?"
Bloom: (Laughing) I could answer that question many ways, but if you are talking about the instrument itself, I would have to say the Viennese oboe.
Cook: Is it a different instrument in Vienna?
Bloom: Yes. It has a bigger bore and therefore a different sound. When Richard Strauss went to Paris to conduct some of his works, (By the way, he was a great conductor.) he remarked that the French oboe had a much more refined tone than the German and Viennese oboe.
Cook: Your career has been so rich and so full, so rewarding to you and to your audiences, has anything in these long years changed in the approaches, in the teachings, or in the standards of your instrument?
Bloom: Quite definitely. When I was studying the oboe with my great teacher, Marcel Tabuteau in Philadelphia, there were perhaps two or three really fine oboists in this country. And the difference between those two or three and the next level was extreme. When I came along, by the way, I was not an oboist; I was a cellist.
Cook. I didn't realize that.
Bloom: I didn't start the oboe until I was 19. Three years after that, I was in the Philadelphia Orchestra. I had a wonderful teacher and was in a wonderful atmosphere at Curtis and in Philadelphia, plus a certain natural talent for the instrument. If I had to buck some of the competition that I see today, my career might not be what it has been. Tabuteau taught me, I taught other students and he, of course, had other students who were very good and they taught other students. So now what we are getting are grand-students of Tabuteau. We have each added to this school and have evolved and "standardized" it. We learned something about cause and effect. If you do certain things, certain things are going to happen. There is always room at the top for a few outstanding oboists. The greatest goal of a wind player was to get a job in a good orchestra. Unless it was the Philadelphia Orchestra where we played a lot of contemporary works, the orchestras played the good old meat-and-potatoes-Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Wagner. But now, an awful lot more is required. Contemporary composers have enlarged the scope of the instrument. They have made demands that in my day would have been called outlandish. But now these things have to be done. The players have developed techniques that allow them to do these things and so it is an ever-expanding field.
Cook: I can't imagine anything more stimulating to the performer than to tackle the works that seem almost beyond the instrument, almost beyond the imagination, except of the man who is the creator, the composer.
Bloom: It is possible to write serial music that sings. Also some very interesting music. But some composers just want new effects. That's fine in a textbook, but when you really start making music, the music has to come through. It doesn't have to be Bach or Beethoven, but somewhere along the line there has to be communication. Some composers lose track of that. But I do have some very fine new works written for me and I am proud of that.
Cook: Is the oboe adequately provided with solo literature?
Bloom: We have a wealth of material in the Baroque period, let's say the 18th century. But in the whole 19th century, outside of three oboe pieces by Schumann for oboe and piano, there are few Romantic works written by any famous 19th century composer. At that time they had started getting very introspective, and the oboe was not thought of as being a vehicle for this kind of music. Now we've come past the 19th into the 20th century, and composers are thinking of new sounds. They've taken the available instruments which haven't been exploited for a whole century and have started writing for them. So today we have some very fine pieces for wind instruments. Some are communicative and some are hard to grasp.
Cook: I was just thinking of some of the works by George Crumb who will take, say a row of trombones, and instead of having them play in the traditional way, will have breaths or gasps through the mouthpiece creating a curious communicative effect. And, of course, he has achieved a good bit of popularity.
Bloom: It is very interesting music.
Cook: And it is more than sound effects.
Bloom: Oh yes! These things are integrated in music. I am fascinated by it. I enjoy quite a bit of his music and I am very impressed .
Cook: You're busy with the Bach Aria Group and use the instrument in your teaching and your solo work. Roughly, how long does one reed last you?
Bloom: Gene, I've had reeds that last me five or six months when I have them in a case and switch them off . . .
Cook: Is that regarded as indecent by your colleagues?
Bloom: Yes. A friend of mine makes a reed almost every day because that is what he is accustomed to doing and he wouldn't trust anything else.
Cook: What could happen to a reed when it gets old?
Bloom: Well, a reed might close up and not give you the response you want when it gets older. But it is like target shooting. If you step up to a shooting gallery some place and they give you a gun to shoot and you take a few shots and miss the target, then you say, "Well, look I'm not hitting anything. Maybe I should just aim a little to the right or to the left." Playing a reed is a matter of making the same kind of adjustments. I would rather do the work playing the oboe than do the work sitting at a reed table. Most people think that all we have to do is press keys and we get a note just where it is supposed to be. But there is a tremendous fluctuation that we can work with. For instance, I can take the reed without the oboe and get quite a bit of fluctuation of pitch. I can even play tunes without the oboe.
Cook: Is there no way that progress could relieve the burden of reed-making?
Bloom: We use cane that is grown in the south of France. There is a mystique about it, like wine. It has to be aged and nurtured. There are so many variables. It is like a tree. One side will get more sun than the-other side, so if you try to make a reed out of one side of the stalk, it will be different from the other side. People have come up with the idea of using plastic substitutes for the cane. They thought it would be more stable or more predictable. The possibility is there--they've come up with some good materials. If I had the time, and I were younger, I would like to work with some chemist or scientist, take the material and figure out ways of making a reed in the way I think it should be made. But I'll leave that to the younger ones--that's their problem. I'll go along with the change. But there is no doubt in my mind that the materials are available. Loree, who for years made nothing but wooden instruments, is now making plastic instruments. A lot of manufacturers have tried plastics because wooden instruments have a tendency to crack and are not as stable. However, plastic is much more difficult to "machine." The material an oboe is made of is not nearly so critical as the bore.
Cook: Do you feel that the oboe sound is a pertinent sound for our times?
Bloom: It's a very strange thing about the oboe-it's a very personal experience. It's like singing. It is your own sound. People have come to me and said that it sounds very human. One woman said it had a "sexy" sound. It means something different to many people because it is very personal. The oboe is personal. You take three oboe players and they'll have three quite different tones, just as three singers will not sound the same.
Cook: So it's the body? The air? The resonating area?
Bloom: The mouth cavity-the sinuses-how you blow into the instrument is very important. If you choke off the sound in the throat, you're going to have a different sound. If you open your throat and blow, it's going to have a certain sound. If you have the proper support, it will be different from someone who plays from his chest and squeezes it out instead of letting it push out. There are tremendous differences in tone.
I've taught a lot and my students are playing in some of the finest orchestras in the country and so I have to feel that I've done something right. But we don't sound alike. There is another thing, too. Most important is not the sound, it's what you do with the sound. And this is the difference. I know very fine players with what you would call a beautiful tone but it gets boring. The oboe should be able to be colored light and dark, besides loud and soft. There are different colors and for various emotional reasons and various harmonic reasons, you want to be able to color it.
I approach my teaching strictly from a musical standpoint. What I do is challenge the student musically. To do the things I want him to do he is going to have to develop certain techniques. I'll help him very subtly or maybe not so subtly sometimes, if I think he needs it, but the end result is a musical result. If he gets the musical result, he is willy nilly doing it right.
Cook: I have to ask you if there is one or more than one work for oboe which really could be regarded as the most effecting, the most plaintive, the most sensuous. Which are the works that are, let's say, the heart of the oboe repertoire.
Bloom: Well, as I said before, the main body of our music is Baroque-18th Century. And, in that category of course there are some wonderful things of Bach-the concerto for violin and oboe, the double concerto, and the way he uses the oboe so plentifully in his church cantatas. I feel very rich in these things, having been with the Bach Aria Group for about 30 years now and played all these arias and found how rewarding they are. Bach is my favorite composer. Mozart wrote a beautiful oboe concerto. Beethoven didn't write for the oboe as a soloist, although there are fragments of an oboe concerto that he started. In fact, somebody claimed not long ago that he found it. Maybe he found it, maybe he reconstructed something--I don't know. But Beethoven did write two charming works for two oboes and English Horn. One is a trio in C major and the other one is a trio on the La Ci Darem la Mano theme of Mozart from Don Giovanni. Then we skip to those works of Schumann that I mentioned before--those three pieces--beautiful pieces. Schumann didn't know the first thing about our instrument, but he experimented, and he tried to write studies for his first symphony--his works for different wind instruments. There is the amusing matter of Clara writing to him saying, "I hope you're working on those oboe pieces because you have to learn to write for the oboe before you write your symphony." She was rather bossy. Then we get to the more contemporary composers. I love the Vaughan Williams oboe concerto. It's lovely, haunting, beautiful. (I don't know if you've ever heard--it's a funny old saying--English music is either hunting or haunting!) This is much more. It's very expressive, very subtle, and it makes great demands on the player. Of course, Strauss has written an oboe concerto--we should be thankful that somebody like Strauss wrote an oboe concerto, but it's nothing I can get terribly excited about. I can get excited about the Vaughan Williams because it has a lovely quality, and it's demanding. In its unobtrusive way, it's far more difficult than the Strauss which is much more flamboyant.
Of course, you know I played for many years with Toscanini. He is my God. That man was just wonderful. I learned so much from him. He had some ideas about music that he wasn't articulate about but you knew what he meant--he'd start yelling if you didn't!
Cook: He got his ideas across, and the thing I loved was invariably, his ideas were the composer's ideas.
Bloom: I was playing first oboe in the NBC Orchestra which was billed as the finest orchestra in the world, the most expensive orchestra with the greatest Maestro, but I was only about 25 years old. It was a great challenge to me and I was scared to death, playing with the great Maestro. I refused the job because I very honestly said I didn't think I was good enough. Well, you know when people hear you say "I'm not good enough," they think "Aha! We have a genius!" Finally I went there and started working with him. He'd ask me to do certain things, and I'd think, "That doesn't seem right." But you know, the next year, I'd realize that he was right. He was always a year ahead of me at least. He was a fantastic musician. I've never met anyone like him. He was a wonderful musician and he was, as you say, right from the floor up. There was no hanky-panky. I always like to tell my students when we talk about dedication that at one time there was some trouble at NBC and the Maestro was disturbed. He called one day, and asked if I'd come to lunch. We concluded our business and as I was talking to him, I said, "Maestro, you look tired." "Yes, Caro. I woke up so early this morning-at 5:30 I was studying the score of the symphony." The symphony was Beethoven's Fifth. I said, "Maestro, how many times have you conducted that?" He said, "Many, many times." I said, "And you're still studying it?" He said, "Yes Caro. I'm always afraid I've missed something."
That kind of dedication is something you don't find very much. He tried as much as possible to make music out of what the composer wrote, within the framework of the composer's ideas. He would be frustrated to find something that was not very well written. He hated to change anything, so he would just force the thing. It was like forcing a fat woman into a size-10 dress, but he somehow got results without distorting the composer's ideas.
Cook: Without doing violence to it. What a contrast to certain conductors!
Bloom: Yes. It's so easy to say, "Well, I don't like it that way! Let's do it this way."
I'd like to say something about the career possibilities for young oboists. I have former students playing first oboe in many of our major orchestras and that doesn't count second oboe and English horn and the ones in lesser orchestras. They are very fortunate; they have their jobs. But I don't know what is going to happen to the many very fine young oboists who are coming out of our schools. If you have one first oboe position open, you have about 60 people trying out for the job. I can't help but be worried about the future. There is no reason why every fair-sized city in this country shouldn't have a symphony orchestra, or some kind of live music.
Cook: Yes, something has to happen. It is bitterly ironic that in this stage of our musical development, when this kind of talent is available--at this very moment the funds are the most restricted. And we have not yet done what so many of the European countries do where the music tradition is so much older than here, which is to entwine music into the economic life of the country so that government subsidizes it.
Bloom: We have privately sponsored orchestras. I think it is just as unreasonable to expect an orchestra to make a profit as it is to expect a famous art museum to make a profit. It is basic and important to our cultural life. You can't equate it with dollars and cents.
Cook: The greatest fear of government support for the arts is that the politician will have his mistress in there performing. And, of course we've heard a little about such things in the opera in Paris.
Bloom: This has happened before, and will happen again. This whole idea of the fear of government-the fear of Bureaucracy-it has no basis in fact. For hundreds of years now, most of the orchestras and musical organizations in Europe have been government-sponsored. I'll admit that there is a sort of rigid seniority that takes hold. But we have that in most of our orchestras now. If a man is brought to an orchestra and he makes good, in two or three years he is given tenure-just as we do in the University here.
Cook: And- the contribution to the public well-being is something that cannot be appraised.
Bloom: Let's hope that the situation will be bettered soon.