All things Oboe
In this section:
Same Job - different seat
Through my career to date I have sat in every seat in every type of orchestra. Principal, second, Cor Anglais in symphony, ballet, opera and chamber orchestras. I might be playing the oboe (or Cor Anglais) but the skills needed in each seat are very different!
Being a Chameleon
I spent 10 years playing mainly second oboe in a large opera orchestra in Germany (Anhaltische Philharmonie). Some people think that playing second oboe is boring, or not challenging, but to do it well can be immensely rewarding and requires a vastly different skill set to playing principal oboe or Cor Anglais. As second oboe you are the link between the front and back rows of the woodwind section and often find you are alternating your focus of attention between front and back rows, playing with the clarinets as much as the principal oboe. You need to develop Chameleon-like tendencies. You need to be able to change the colour and feel of your sound to blend and support the style of your principal player. Learn to move and breathe with them and do not be a shrinking violet. Yes, don't lead them either, unless you definitely don't want a call-back, and absolutely do not practise their solos in the break but give them a strong, secure and absolutely safe place to sit on and strut their stuff. There is nothing more uncomfortable for a principal player than someone who tries to play as quietly as possible all the time. You have to be able to match, blend, respond and know when to really shut up.
Putting on the Principal hat
Even in a contract job, you sometimes need to sit up and play first or there might only be 1 oboe and you are scheduled to play. I have known second players who refused to play principal - either saying it isn't their skill set or because they aren't paid enough, but most like the different challenge and change of scenery that moving up a seat gives you.
I now play principal oboe for Sinfonia Viva and have moulded my mental attitude probably more than my playing to fit the role. I am still a Chameleon but to a wide variety of other instruments, although often the flute. The physical technique is also somewhat different as you are playing up in the second octave most of the time and generally have more notes so it is more tiring. The skill is to know when you are a soloist and when you are part of the woodwind section - or indeed another section of the orchestra.
Of course, the job is different in different types of orchestra. I feel most at home in a chamber orchestra as I feel this best fits my style of playing and personality although I do enjoy the challenge of a big symphony orchestra at times. Sitting in a pit is an entirely different vibe and you would be surprised just how quietly you need to be able to play even in the principal seat. Here, as in musical theatre, your moments as a soloist are few and far between, but can be huge when they arrive - think of all those big opera solos you learn for auditions. You play two acts of Tristan and Isolde only to then have to move backstage (or indeed onstage) and play that great big solo before returning to the pit to finish the opera with some super quiet low notes. The mental challenge of changing hats is often greater than the physical challenge.
Doubling is of course yet another different type of playing. The technique of playing oboe and Cor Anglais are different enough that you need to be sure you can adjust from one to the other quickly. Plan where to swap in order to warm up both instrument and your internal Cor Anglais mode.
Working Back to Front
playing the oboe and riding a horse
I enjoy horse-riding and am often surprised just how many ideas I can cross reference from oboe playing to horse riding and vice-versa. Both need core strength and both are physically and mentally demanding. Both involve unpredictable beings (yes, I am comparing a horse to an oboe / reed here) and both are weather and environment fussy. But a lot of the technique is the same as well. For example.....
Working back to front
The main control centres of the human body are the head and the hands. We have a brain in our head that pretty musch controls everything we do, we have eyes to see, a nose to smell and breathe and a mouth to talk. Our hands enable us to do many things and so are an equally important part of human control. But what we need for control over a horse or an oboe is strength from back to front or bottom to top. You can't get a horse to respond well unless you have good motion in the hind legs - do what you like with your reins, but unless the power is there at the back end, nothing is going to work well. The same applies to oboe playing - lack of strong, low core support for the air means too much reliance on the embouchure and again, nothing works smoothly. It might be natural to want to use our human control centres of head and hands but for both disciplines it is the base that is most important. Where does a speed boat have its engine? It's the same principle.
The Four Stages of Competence
How do we learn? What processes do we go through when learning? If we were sports-people, we would have a whole team of people around to ensure our nutritional, physical, medical and psychological needs were being met. As musicians, we are pretty much left to our own devices. So, thinking about how we learn and developing a teaching strategy based on our psychology is essential to effective learning.
Four Stages of Competence Theory
The theory was originally published in the 1960s as a management training tool and has been amended and developed ever since.
Unconscious Incompetence: We aren't the greatest musician to walk the Earth and we don't recognise it. Often, successive failure in concerts and auditions enable us to move onto the next step.
Conscious Incompetence: We still can't do it but at least we now know we aren't the greatest musician to walk the Earth and begin to ask the right questions in order to begin to improve.
Conscious Competence: We start to get the technique, we open our ears to hear and begin to figure out how to play really well. We start to get some success and recognition but given a slightly stressful situation, lack of preparation time or an unexpected event, we can still lapse.
Unconscious Competence: We have honed our skills - technical, analytical and musical to such a degree that they become part of who we are as a musician. We can rely on our technique in order to allow the music to flow. We can now also teach these skills to others, having gone through the process of identifying incompetence, analysing why and how to improve, putting that into practice and then reaching the point of knowing we can rely on our skills.
I have worked through these four stages throughout my career and use the concept in my own teaching methods.