Unfortunately I couldn't find the Aria arranged for Cor so I bought it for violin, labouriously copied it into Sibelius and transposed it into the appropriate key and then had my "thumb revelation" with the oboe and decided I would stop playing the cor for a while until I felt I had fully sorted out how I was holding the oboe.

Ah. I downloaded that CD for Roussel's Aria which I'm doing for Grade 6. I haven't had a good listen to the rest yet.

I really wanted to go as it's near my Mum's but couldn't get leave then... so the only event I'll make this year is Stalybridge.

I am now in New Zealand with my sister. I got the oboe out for the first time in a few days today. It was very disappointing... I do wish that I didn't feel that I was going back about two and a half years on the oboe when I have to leave it for a few days and/or change environment. I don't think it likes the cold much. My sister was evidently not at all impressed and I can't say that my new niece (6 months) was much either. At least she didn't cry, though. Just not very interested after the first 30 seconds or so. Only the dog got over-excited!

Sorry not to be able to met you this time Katica.
I did take my oboe to a friend's once & her puppy started howling, which was a bit disconcerting! A few days later the same mutt scratched my antique cello, so there's no love lost between myself & said dog!

I think the problem is that siblings and inlaws with no similar experience have no idea what to expect from an amateur. They would (quite naturally) think that you are going to produce the same sound as a pro. Plus they might not be keen on the music you were playing either.

I visited my accompanist for a first run through of exam pieces last night and the sound I produced was dreadful. But at least I was with someone who understood my position and we got some useful work out of it.

My excuse - reed making going badly and waiting for a delivery of new, bought reeds. Or I'm just having a rubbish week! It happens.

Just had the octave boxes cleaned on the XL. Can't believe how much difference it makes!

After all these weeks of seemingly getting nowhere it's now sounding possible

It's good innit? I was surprised when I did mine last year. I cleaned them out again the other day and there was a fair bit of gunge in there again.

We've known for a while it needed doing it was just finding time to take it to be sorted out.

To be honest it's made more of a difference than I really expected.

Katica - hope the oboe playing is going better now. None of my family are that impressed or indeed interested in my playing either...other people just don't seem to get it I think...sigh.

Pushpull - hope your exam preparation is going well, do you have a date yet? Glad your practise with your accompanist was useful and hope reeds are behaving themselves a bit better now.

I've had a low pratice week as I've had a terrible headcold and haven't really felt like playing, and when I did, could only manage about 30mins. Seems to be getting better now though. Our orchestra concert last weekend went really well - though I completely messed up one of the oboe solos and got my fingers completely tied up in knots. Ho hum, the rest of it seemed to go fine though and we had a packed house. Orchestra has now finished for the summer - no more rehearsals till September. However, a couple from orchestra are big chamber music fans and have asked if I would like to do some playing with them over the summer. They've also invited the flautist, so we will have flute, oboe, cello and piano/ harpsichord. Sounds like a lot of fun!

I've (well my teacher and I have) decided that I am going to play the Arioso at Stalybridge, seems to be going Ok so far. I'm also learning Grovlez - Sarabande and allegro. Teacher is getting me to work on vibrato at the moment by really exaggerating it in my pieces, sounds a bit at the moment. But it will be toned down at some point.

Nonmusimum - hope Emsoboe exam prep is going well too. I love getting that step change in improvement when my oboe gets regulated or I have a new reed - and I suddenly realise that it WAS the oboe and not me! Hope she is enjoying her newly cleaned out XL!

It was lovely to meet you Plonkee at Andrew Knights' oboe weekend at Benslow.
The whole weekend was great fun. We were introduced, amongst other activities to a range of warm up exercises, tips on articulation, and assisted with reeds. Course members arrived with oboes oboe d'amores, cor anglais, and a bass oboe, and music was found that would accommodate this combination.
Participants had the opportunity to engage in small ensemble playing, as well as a chance to work on solo repertoire. Learnt a lot as well as having great fun. We even played our oboes in the gardens this morning - felt really liberating!

Sounds like you had great fun!

It was good. I would say that the most useful bits were the horrible scale exercises with repetitive tonics - I think they'll come in handy for F and F# starting from the top. Plus some interesting reed exercises. My highlights otherwise were, playing Renaissance 'puzzle canons' (from court of Henry VIII) - very complicated rhythmically - and sight-reading the 2nd movement of a new sonata with the composer.

And of course, all the oboists were lovely.

My sis has NO excuse - she used to play the clarinet and sax in her youth and I specially picked music I thought s wouldn't object too. Oh well. Goes with the job I s'pose.

Good luck with those exam pieces. Better to have the awful sound (I'm sure it's not really that bad...) happen sooner rather than later. Hope the new reeds turn out OK.


all good news here - except the cold, which I hope is over soon. The chamber group sounds like great fun. Let us know what you end up playing. Good luck with the Arioso - from what I heard on YouTube it's a lovely piece. You might want to do some marathon training, though - it sounds like you don't get much of a chance to breathe!

notmusicmum, pushpull - that's interesting about the octave box. How often do you think it needs a clean out? Maybe I should get one of those thingummies for removing it?

hardying, plonkee - so envious. It sounds as though you had great fun. Benslow is still a few years off for me, methinks. Something to work for...

Well I managed to scrape a couple of older reeds into submission and they are now behaving well enough. New ones arriving today. Phew.

I've done mine twice in the last year, though to be honest it perhaps wasn't really necessary this time. First time round the 2nd octave had just stopped sounding. Yes get a thingummy if you are going to do it yourself. Apparently you can knock the octave box insert round with the tip of a screwdriver - but that sounds to me like a good way of wrecking the insert and putting a deep gouge in your oboe. You need to remove the keywork too to get at the octave boxes but there is no fine adjustment needed when putting them back on so it's easy enough. Do get some good quality jewellers screwdrivers though. Not the ones that come out of a Christmas Cracker.

Something like this:
http://www.tickintimeworldofwatchtools.co....post-1256-p.asp

Oh and I had an older oboe to practice on before tackling the job on my Howarth. When you take apart a cheaper student oboe and a nice Howarth you definitely see where the money goes.

That sounds like excellent advice. I've got screwdrivers and an old oboe so I just need the thingummy

Pisoni octave box remover:
http://www.howarth.uk.com/products.aspx?id...rl=oboeacc.html

Pricey - but then show me something for an oboe that's cheap!

Frustrating practice today.

On the plus side, my new reed has a more reliable top E and F, this is almost making F# minor scale plausible. On the minus side, I am apparently incapable of rounding off notes - today they all came to a dead stop. And, I'm second-guessing some of my articulation choice in the Marcello. Thirdly, my coordination has all gone to pot.

I'm sure it will be better tomorrow.

I expect so - I have days like that too, but the "better days" do compensate!

I didn't realise until this morning's lesson that my teacher didn't know Bozza's "Conte Pastoral" - I just assumed that because Bozza is a French composer and my teacher is French that he would have played it. Especially as I bought it into my lesson (along with a couple of other pieces) and my teacher picked it after flicking through them quickly.

But today he said that he hadn't realised when he'd first looked at it that it was a really good teaching piece; that he was glad I'd enabled him to discover it and he would be inflicting it on other pupils

This is going to be the most underprepared thing I have ever played in public I'm playing it next week in an almost-end-of-year concert. Most of it is all right, except for the final few bars - a series of octave jumps which, for some reason, I can't get my fingers round. I don't usually have problems with pressing the right keys. I sometimes have co-ordination problems with one finger lifting/lowering quicker than another but in these few bars I keep finding that I'm using completely the wrong fingers and I can't work out why.

Good for you for taking the challenge!
It's a great feeling when you get to expand your teacher's rep, isn't it???

Hope you're back on form tomorrow, plonkee. Sure you will be.


On another subject:

URGENT APPEAL TO ALL OBOISTS

My flatmate is usually only here midweek and we don't have much time together but this weekend he's staying up in town (or we might go up to the mountains) so we'll have a WHOLE WEEKEND and a few nights to muck around together. We decided we need a plan of action of things to do together. Anyone have any duet suggestions (we have the Bach Difficult Passages book, a Vanhal Sonata but J is bored with that and some Salviani duets he's not that fond of...). Any other ideas? For someone who in more ambitious/pretentious moments aspires to be G5-6 standard and a G8+ ... or other things that it's fun for two oboes to do...

Does it have to be things you can get download (ie you don't have time to order)? Off the top of my head (I'll go and look on my music shelves later):

Sellner wrote some quite nice duets for two oboes which I'm fairly sure I've seen on one of the free sheet music websites (but can't remember which one).

Baroque music that ought to be available for download (because out of copyright):
Vivaldi trio sonata for two oboes and basso continuo in G minor.
Handel 6 sonatas for two oboes
Zelenka trio sonatas for two oboes (loads of them)
Albinoni double oboe concerto

Loeillet wrote quite a lot of trio sonatas for oboe and recorder, which work on two oboes. Your grade 8+ flatmate shouldn't mind 3rd octave E and F so he could play the recorder part and you could play the oboe part (which never goes above D).

Thumbs up for Zelenka. Parts available for download from Malcolm Messiter's website
http://www.messiter.com/BCMC/Parts/index.html

Lots of other stuff there too.

So this week past I thought I was doing not bad - struggling with G' but in the scheme of things I was basically mastering G1 repertoire. Got to lesson today to discover oboe has not been working properly so skip to end of the lesson and I am blowing beautifully (although a bit flat as reed like papyrus) and been sent home with a G2 piece!

I expect progress to stall at some point though! What interests me though is that although I am progressing faster on the oboe it does not give me the comfort and pleasure that the piano gives me - even when having to use the piano and staccato!

Hang on in there - you're probably getting frustrated by reeds (as we all do). Once you begin to relax your sound will improve.
Sounds like you're making great progress, so relax & enjoy & you'll become as obsessed as we all are by our oboes (& reeds)!

Well I guess I knew all along that the oboe was REALLY what I wanted to play, even if it did take me years to eventually get round to it. I've always loved the sound. But I understand what you say and for me, the instrument has really come alive and my own enthusiasm even more engaged since I learned to embrace the sheer physicality of it. To make it sound really good is hard, physical work.

On that point.... I'm looking at twitter feeds coming through from attendees at this year's IDRS confrence in Arizona. I quite liked "air support is the difference between blowing THROUGH the instrument and blowing AT the reed".

I think I'm happy to master fingering and speed before really perfecting breathing and dynamics as I would feel quite frustrated trying two notes until I was breathing perfectly. It is only my third lesson so I'll give myself a break...for now!

hmmm I'm not sure we ever get to the stage where we are doing anything "perfectly". I think the trick is try and keep all the different key technical elements (e.g. fingering, breathing, tone, articulation, stamina, dexterity, dynamic range) moving forward at roughly the same rate.

A think a lot of frustration comes when things get out of kilter and you then end up having to go backwards to sort it out before you can move forward again.

Well done MNW - sounds like you are progressing well.

Yes, I think I "advertised" that link a while back. I think the Zelenka might be a bit beyond me but hey, anything's worth a try.

Thanks for the other suggestions, kerioboe. I'll hunt out that stuff and I have an idea I might even have the Albinoni somewhere.

This should keep us busy!

And big congrats to MNW. Sounds like you are doing well (except the "comfort and pleasure" bit - hope you are as oboemad as the rest of us soon )

My teacher is organising his end of the year pupils' concert on Thursday.

I am supposed to be playing Bozza's Conte Pastoral having had only two lessons on it (and although I will have a lesson next week it is the day before the concert so there won't be time to improve anything) As if this wasn't enough, I am toying with the idea of asking him if I can also play the slow movement of the Saint Saens Sonata (which I played for my exam) but this time without the music.

He is convinced that I play better with no music and no music stand and part of me thinks it would be interesting to see what it feels like to play in public without the security of the music stand as a barrier between me and the public. I can play the Saint Saens at home from memory without any problem and it seems like an ideal piece to experiment with as I know it so well but part of me thinks that, although it might seem like a good idea now, the reality of having no music stand might be absolutely terrifying and playing an underprepared piece is stressful enough without adding a second potentially stressful situation.

Go for it! You know you can!
I would love to be able to play from memory but I am completely useless...

Thanks again for all the duet suggestions. We had a fun evening with them. Unfortunately I have had a flu bug and have been off the oboe for a couple of days but hope I'll be OK for run later today...

I am wondering what do do about getting my oboe serviced. It is nearly a year old and could do with a visit back to Howarth when I get back to the UK. I was thinking of handing it over and seeing if I can rent a replacement while they look it over. However, my only week in London is the first week, as is the Stalybridge concert, and I don't really want to be attempting that on an unfamiliar instrument.

Had my Oboe lesson today and now have my G3 exam date - 1st July

Very Best of Luck


The Gloucester Adult Learners concert last Saturday was great fun. My pieces went very well & we all received written feedback from each member of the audience & the comments were so encouraging. I want to frame them! It helped to make up for a disappointing oboe lesson the night before where I got very frustrated with myself!
Have already volunteered to play in the next one in Nov!

Good luck

I had an interesting (from a psychological point of view) lesson this morning. I am playing a woefully underprepared piece in a pupils' concert tomorrow (underprepared because I only started working on the piece three weeks ago). The music school accompanist has "disappeared" and so my teacher is accompanying me. It is a piece which I chose and he didn't know and as he hasn't had much time to practise the accompaniment he kept making mistakes. He kept apologising for playing wrong notes and potentially putting me off but in fact the more mistakes he made, the more relaxed I became and the better I played The only explaination I can think of is that the fact he was making mistakes took the self-imposed pressure off me to play perfectly. At the end of the lesson he promised me that he would have time to work on it tonight and tomorrow morning and that he would play it better tomorrow. I almost said that I would rather he didn't practise but then thought that he no doubt has his own self-esteem issues and probably doesn't want to appear as a hopeless pianist in front of the head of the music school and his pupils' parents.

I decided in the end that I will play the Saint Saens with the music but at a greater distance than usual so that I can play from memory but glance at the music if necessary. I am having a particularly stressful time at work at the moment and came to the conclusion that my mind is too preoccupied to concentrate entirely on the piece.

At the moment I am feeling very calm about the whole thing but no doubt nerves will kick in tomorrow.

And Katica, concerning memorising, I have always thought of myself as a hopeless memoriser but I noticed that when I supervise my daughters' practice I end up memorising their pieces without having played a single note. A couple of weeks before my exam I had a 4 hour invigilation in which we're not allowed to read books and so I usually get incredibly bored but I decided, as an experiment, to use the time to memorise the piece without the instrument. (I decided that no one would notice if I had the music open on the table as long as I wasn't looking at it all the time). I memorised it by singing the notes in my head and then by discreetly moving my fingers as well as singing in my head. I found that doing this forced me to analyse the music in much greater depth than I usually do (noticing when and how, in what look like repeated passages, there is one note different for example, or the relationship between the last note of one phrase and the first note of another). The following day when I got out the oboe I had successfully memorised the whole thing. It's something you could try the next time you are on a long flight somewhere.

Good Luck with the concert, Hope you enjoy it.
Great idea about memorising music - it remined me that I used to practice the Piano silently as a teenager. I can remember practising the fingering on long bus journeys!

I'm finding that as I get better (honestly, I am ) I have tended to want to have the music further away and lower down. It just feels right somehow.

As I have just posted on another thread I made a complete mess of the Saint Saens but to my surprise the Bozza went really well - lots of applause and some very nice comments on it afterwards by people who were listening.

Sorry it didn't all go as well as you hoped - it's a mystery sometimes why that happens. I've played the same pieces 3 times recently at different events - twice they went very well & the 3rd time I was so disappointed with myself & still don't understand why that happened. Glad the Bozza was successful - hang on to that!

Well done, Hardying!

I would really like to have been able to make that event, especially as my Mum lives near Gloucester so when I am on leave in the UK I usually spend a good chunk of time there. I'd love to meet more Forumites from the area...

Who accompanied your pieces? I'm planning to play at the Stalybridge AL concert and am very lucky to have flobiano on the piano ( ). I'm very nervous, though, and am wondering how we're going to get our act together with presumably a very short practice spot in the morning... Well, everyone who has been through this sort of experience seems to come out very happy with it so I suppose I should just stop worrying...


That's funny, I had precisely that idea for the long haul flights too and from NZ. But I was so exhausted I knew I couldn't concentrate and ended up not even taking the music out of my hand luggage... UK trip coming up next month so I'll get a another chance...

I am still trying to find out how my memory works. I did have the rather odd experience a while a go when I was just warming up to find myself playing the first two or three lines of the third Schumann Romance, though I had in fact never actually studied it! I'd only ever run through it once or twice on my own but there it was, right in my head. As soon as I became really conscious of this, though, it faded completely! Obviously far more registers in my sub-conscious than I realise but sometimes the conscious mind seems to be more of a hindrance than a help. I can never remember the first lines of anything (words or music) either, which is a serious impediment to karaoke and general party/jamming sessions. Though no doubt I'd find another pretext for getting out of those...



(I'm sure no-one here doubts it, though )


with your exams, pianophrase and pushpull? When's your G6, pushpull? What pieces have you finally picked? (Or haven't you yet?)

"[quote name='katica' date='Jun 11 2011, 08:04 PM' post='1065184']
Who accompanied your pieces?"

It was SueHM - she did a grand job.
I sent her the parts a couple of weeks beforehand & we were lucky as we were able to run through them 3 times together on the day before the concert.
When are you coming to the UK & how long will you be here for?

[quote name='Hardying' date='Jun 11 2011, 01:34 PM' post='1065188']
"[quote name='katica' date='Jun 11 2011, 08:04 PM' post='1065184']
Who accompanied your pieces?"

It was SueHM - she did a grand job.
I sent her the parts a couple of weeks beforehand & we were lucky as we were able to run through them 3 times together on the day before the concert.
When are you coming to the UK & how long will you be here for?
[/quote]
Arriving 17 July and leaving 22 August, I hope. Which should allow me to attend the Stalybridge Adult Learner Concert (23 July) and the 4th week of the Dartington Summer School. I'll spend the first week in London/York and the last at Dartington and the rest between the Forest of Dean and New Forest.

5th July.

Boni Sonata
Roussel Aria
Jacob Elegy and Limerick from Seven Bagatelles.

Had a good mock last week. Some scales are still a bit though.

I don't know any of these but good luck

Does anyone know Henri Dutilleux's Oboe Sonata? My teacher said that this would be a good piece for me to work on over the summer but I have become somewhat wary of what he thinks is "good for me" and wondered how hard it really is

Wow, you ended up with quite a different selection than last time we checked in - except the Jacob, which you were considering. I bought the Boni Sonata and it's very pleasant. I don't know the Roussel at all. I hope it's all fun and good luck with the scales!


It sounds quite a challenge to me - probably would be "good" for you! I'm not a massive fan of the French school but I do have a recording of this - on Though Lover's Be Lost, played by the wonderful Emily Pailthorpe. From OboeClassics.com - you can hear an excerpt here.

I've got the same CD What I haven't got is the sheet music and as it costs over ?30 I don't really want to buy it just to have a look (and if I ask my teacher to bring his in I will be committing myself to it ).

It is part of his plan to have me develop a more powerful sound and more stage presence . He said I have a lovely ethereal sound which suits the pieces I choose very well but he wants me to play something more "solid" and he said the Dutilleux won't work if I try and play in my usual way.

Any suggestions for "non-ethereal music" would be welcome. I had been thinking of the Molique Concertino but am not sure if this is "non-ethereal" enough for him.

I don't know the Molique. I would think that there are quite a few modern sonatas that might want something other than "ethereal": Howells? Rubbra? Then there's the Martinu and Yano concertos...?

How nice to have a "lovely, ethereal sound" though!

On a more mundane note...

My search for repertoire continues. Now I'm after oboe trios and quartets! Would be easier if we could beg, steal or borrow a cor but looks unlikely. Again, me being the least advanced of the bunch. As usual.

Thank you SO much for the previous selection, from which we now have a two or three pieces with which we may even risk recital.

And my flatmate wants to know if anyone knows of any works for solo oboe and symphonic wind band. He has found nothing except a Weber piece. There is a soloists' concert coming up and most of the main instruments will be featured in a solo piece, except the oboe because of lack of repertoire.

I'm not over keen on the more modern sonatas. He has already suggested the 2nd movement of the Martinu to me but I tried it for a week and turned it down (despite him telling me that he wasn't expecting me to sound like a CD), he has also talked about the Howells but wanted to keep that until he is sure there will be a decent accompanist to play the piano part. I have the Rubbra (picked up cheaply on ebay) but I can't see it really grabs me and I don't know the Yano.

There are several recordings of Molique on youtube if you're interested.


If you're willing to buy music try Phylloscopus - both courses I have been on have used music published by them. Here's a link to the oboe trios but they also have oboe quartets (with or without a cor)
http://www.phylloscopus.co.uk/spweb/public...?categoryid=392

You could also try June Emerson's website - they have a category for oboe trios and for oboe quartets. And I think (but someone may correct me) that if you can find an arrangement for three identical saxophones they will also work on three oboes.

Otherwise, if you have the Evelyn Rothwell Bach "difficult passages" book there are a couple of trios in there. I'll have a look in my music downstairs later in see if I can find anything else.


I'm fairly sure a similar question was asked on the oboe BBoard recently - might be worth doing a search.
Edit: Have just remembered that the IDRS site has a whole list of oboe solo + concert band pieces mainly (or exclusively) by American publishers but this is presumably not a problem for you.

Gregson sonata.

Now that's one I don't know

As I didn't quite know what to play today I decided I'd have another look at the Vivaldi which I haven't played since I started working on my exam. To my surprise it was better than when I last played it. It is far from perfect but bits have definitely fallen into place and overall stamina has increased (obsessively playing two pieces one after the other with no gap between them has obviously had some effect).

Ah, yes. I'd vote for that too!

Thanks, kerioboe, for your excellent suggestions. I'd forgotten about Phylloscopus, even though I do have one or two of their publications. They're good for lesser known stuff. And it's been a long while since I checked in with the Oboe BBoard, so I'll do that...

Found the IDRS list - that's perfect. Just what the oboists needed!

EDIT: Since writing the above I have another repertoire choice to make: which Albinoni concerto to play in my teacher's annual double reed recital (September I hope but August if I'm unlucky...). I had hoped the double concerto that my flatmate and I tried and looked promising would do but no - it has to be solo . I think I will have to choose between Bb (op.7 no.3), D major (op.7 no.6) or D minor (op.9 no.2). Any advice?

FURTHER EDIT (Have I bored everyone off this thread? ): Albinoni D major it is to be... turns out that the recital is practically an Albinoni recital and the other folks had already picked theirs.

Lesson was a whole hour and a half today... which would have been great if everything hadn't been completely off (including teacher's mood) - sound, intonation, breathing, fingering, muscle memory, biting, etc etc and especially the things I had most practised (where have we heard that before?), so extra especially tense and therefore unmusical into the bargain. So it was pretty well 90 mins of TORTURE. What ever made me think I might be able to play this beast!

Followed by two hours of band rehearsal during which things improved very slightly. I didn't escape unscathed but slightly less scarred and bleeding than some.

No need to be nervous Katica, we will definitely get our act together in the morning. It's my job to follow you! So if we don't fit together it will be my fault not yours! It will be fine I'm sure!

Sorry you had a difficult lesosn, I think they sometimes go that way, and so often it is the things we have practised the most that sound the worst. So frustrating.

I actually had an enjoyable lesson today but teacher has sent my mind into a bit of a spin by asking if I'd thought about upgrading my oboe to a professional model. I think it was partly prompted by her having another pupil wanting to upgrade to a semi professional who could be interested in buying my oboe, but she also said she thought I was at a level where I'd notice the difference. To be honest I hadn't really thought about it and had assumed that my S45 would last me a few years yet. Really there are other things I could spend my money on, but I did have a go at her model today.....and I could definitely tell the difference.... It is too tempting..... need to have a good hard think about it.

Kerioboe - Glad to hear you can hear the difference in the Vivaldi, it is always encouraging to hear improvement. Sorry I don't have any other suggestions for an alternative "non ethereal" piece, I've had a look through all my old syllabuses to see if the Dutilleux Oboe Sonata is on any of them, but it only seems to make an appearance at LRSM level.

Pushpull - good luck in your G6, sure the scales will come together in the end. I only know the Jacob pieces (love Limerick ). Hope all goes well.