I was cleaning out my desk the other day and came across my whole collection of Monumental Reed Notes. The collection is actually just a stack of Post-It-Notes from my years of study with Richard Killmer at Eastman. I thought I would share some of them with you. Don’t worry about the detail… at first. Get the reed playing. Make it a stable, functioning reed and then worry about putting…
It’s always fun to travel to festivals and gigs out of town, but it can make for unpredictable reeds. Planning ahead for multiple scenarios with a case full of gorgeous reeds is the ideal situation, but how realistic is it to make a reed in one city and expect it to be the same somewhere else? I’m back in Chicago now after spending 5 days in Nashville and am headed…
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to have a week long gig with the American Ballet Theatre when they came through Chicago. The ballet was Giselle and it was beautiful. Or so I was told, you can’t see much from the pit. But you can read a review of the production by the Chicago Sun Times. The really special part about all of this is that I got…
I’m in Nashville playing Heldenleben this week. It’s a hectic time for the Symphony since Kenneth Schermerhorn, their music director of 22 years, recently passed away. The oboe section here is Bobby Taylor, Ellen Menking, and Rodger Weismeyer. The season after next, the Symphony will move into their brand new hall, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
If you make a living playing music, you are probably aware of the following points: you are in business (as the sole owner of You, Inc.) marketing can be a major key to your success Music is both art and business, and if you depend on it to keep your lights on and food on your table, you will need to pay attention to both parts. In business, one of…
Recitals can be fun, exciting, grueling and invigorating all at the same time. Here is a short clip from a recital I played a few years back. You can listen to it here. (It is fairly small but might take about 5 minutes to download on a dial-up connection.) What’s your most memorable recital experience?
Rachel Whipple wrote us with a funny oboe story the other day: Today I woke up very early to go to breakfast for Mother’s Day with the entire family. Afterwards, I thought it would be fun to practice my oboe outside for the first time this spring. The birds were chirping, the bees were humming, the dogs were barking, so naturally I thought that I should give my contribution of…
I woke up one Saturday in February to find a huge article in the New York Times about the abundance of available oboe positions among the nation’s top symphonies. As a member of the “next generation” of oboists that was mentioned in the article, I took issue with some of the stuff that was said. In particular, that there is any shortage of qualified players to fill the aforementioned positions.…
Playing the oboe is hard enough as it is, so I try to keep my reed philosophy as simple as possible. I believe there are only a few things that make a good reed. The rest, as they say, is just opinion. A good reed must have: response – if it doesn’t make a sound, what good is it? stability – using words like integrity and down-to-earth seem a bit…