Oboe

• 1. Introduction

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  The oboe is the instrument that tunes the world's great orchestras. Every night, in concert halls from Vienna to New York, the musicians fall silent and wait. A single note rings out: a concert A, played by the first oboist. The League of American Orchestras explains why: the oboe's pitch is secure, and its penetrating sound cuts through the noise of a warming-up orchestra in a way no other instrument can match. But the oboe is far more than a tuning fork. It carries one of the longest lineages in all of Western music, stretching back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, filtered through the deserts of the Middle East and the courts of Baroque France. It has a reed so temperamental that professional players spend hours crafting their own by hand, and a tone so distinctive it has been compared, in the same breath, to a duck and to a songbird. How did this slender wooden pipe become the linchpin of the modern orchestra? And why do even experienced players sometimes call it "invented by a sadist"?

• 2. A Sound Unlike Any Other

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  Henry Playford published an instruction book called The Sprightly Companion in 1695, and he described the oboe as "Majestical and Stately, and not much Inferior to the Trumpet." Three centuries later, the playwright Tony Kushner offered a different verdict in Angels in America: the sound is like "that of a duck if the duck were a songbird." Both descriptions are, in their way, correct. The oboe's timbre comes directly from its conical bore. Where flutes and clarinets use a bore that is more or less cylindrical, the oboe widens from its narrow top end toward a flared bell at the bottom. That shape amplifies the odd harmonics and produces a richness that players call "bright and penetrating." The result is an instrument that can be heard over an entire large ensemble. Its range runs from B3 at the bottom to roughly G6 at the top, spanning more than two and a half octaves. Music written for the standard soprano oboe requires no transposition; what is written is what is heard, a quality shared with the piano and the flute but not with many woodwinds. The pitch, though, is never entirely stable. Temperature, humidity, altitude, and even the age of the reed can shift it. Skilled players use small adjustments of embouchure and air pressure to hold the note true.

• 3. The Reed Problem

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  Most professional oboists make their own reeds, and this practice sets them apart from almost every other musician in the orchestra. A clarinet player buys a box of commercially made reeds. An oboist spends hours at a workbench with gougers, pre-gougers, guillotines, shaper tips, and knives, shaping two thin blades of cane and tying them to a small metal tube called a staple. The cane itself is Arundo donax, the same species used for bassoon, clarinet, and saxophone reeds. By controlling every stage of the process, an oboist can fine-tune tone color, intonation, and responsiveness, and can compensate for their own embouchure and the angle at which they hold the instrument. Beginners rarely attempt this. Novice players buy medium or medium-soft reeds from a music store and work from there. Even experienced players prepare several reeds before any given performance, because a single chipped reed can wreck a concert. The most common preparation method is simply soaking the reed in water before playing. Plastic reeds do exist, made by brands such as Legere, but they are uncommon and far less available than plastic reeds for other instruments. The reed is widely considered the reason the oboe has a reputation for being the most demanding of the woodwinds.

• 4. From Zurna to Hautbois

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  Centuries before the Spanish and Portuguese reached the New World, an early version of the chirimia had already traveled from the Middle East into Europe. The Crusades brought Europeans into contact with the Turko-Arabic zurna, and that encounter was one strand in a much longer thread that includes the ancient Egyptian reed instruments, the Greek aulos, and the Roman tibia. The instrument nearly vanished in the West during the Dark Ages. It returned in the 13th century with the Arabic zurna, evolved through European bagpipe traditions, and by the 17th century had become the French hautbois. Before 1770, English speakers called it a hautbois, hoboy, or French hoboy, a word borrowed from the French compound haut (meaning "high" or "loud") and bois (meaning "wood" or "woodwind"). The Italian spelling oboè was adopted into English around 1770. The hautbois itself was derived from an older instrument called the shawm, but the new design split the instrument into three jointed sections for more precise manufacture, and removed the pirouette, a wooden ledge that had let shawm players rest their lips on the instrument. Circumstantial evidence from the memoirs of flautist and composer Michel de la Barre points to members of the Philidor and Hotteterre families as possible inventors, though the exact origin remains unclear. The hautbois quickly became the main melody instrument in early military bands across Europe, including in Great Britain, where it appeared under a half-dozen variant spellings.

• 5. Baroque, Classical, and the Narrowing Bore

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  The standard Baroque oboe was generally made of boxwood and had three keys: a "great" key and two side keys. To reach the higher notes, a player had to overblow, pushing extra air to jump to the next harmonic. Notable makers of the period included the Germans Jacob Denner and J.H. Eichentopf, and two generations of the English Stanesby family: Thomas Stanesby, who died in 1734, and his son Thomas Jr., who died in 1754. The comfortable Baroque range ran from C4 to D6. As the Classical period arrived, instrument makers began narrowing the bore and adding more keys, including keys for D, F, and G, along with an early version of the octave key called the "slur key." The narrower bore made the upper register easier to play, and composers responded by writing higher and more demanding parts. Mozart composed a solo concerto for the instrument in C major (catalogued as K. 314/285d), as well as the original of a Sinfonia Concertante in E major (K. 297b, though that original is now lost) and a fragment of an F major concerto (K. 417f). Haydn also contributed both a Sinfonia Concertante in B and a concerto in C major, and Beethoven sketched an F major concerto, Hess 12, of which only fragments survive. The 19th century brought the Triébert family of Paris, who used the Boehm flute as a model and developed increasingly complex key systems. Minor refinements to bore and keywork continued through the 20th century, but the fundamental character of the modern oboe has not changed substantially for several decades.

• 6. Two Oboes, One Orchestra

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  Vienna occupies a singular place in oboe history. The Akademiemodel Wiener Oboe was first developed in the late 19th century by Josef Hajek, drawing on earlier instruments by C.T. Golde of Dresden, who lived from 1803 to 1873. Makers today include André Constantinides, Karl Rado, Guntram Wolf, Christian Rauch, and Yamaha. The Viennese oboe has a wider internal bore, a shorter and broader reed, and a fingering system quite different from the conservatoire oboe used almost everywhere else. Geoffrey Burgess and Bruce Haynes, writing in The Oboe, noted that the differences are most obvious in the middle register, which is "reedier and more pungent," and in the upper register, which is "richer in harmonics" on the Viennese instrument. Guntram Wolf described the Viennese design as "the last representative of the historical oboes, adapted for the louder, larger orchestra." Alongside the Vienna horn, it is considered one of the most distinctive instruments in the Wiener Philharmoniker's arsenal. The conservatoire oboe, by contrast, reached its modern form through F. Lorée of Paris. In its full conservatoire configuration, it carries 45 pieces of keywork, with possible additions including a third-octave key and alternate fingering keys. Professional models used in the UK and Iceland often combine the conservatoire system with a thumbplate, a feature that eliminates many of the awkward cross-intervals that players and listeners alike find the hardest to execute cleanly.

• 7. Family Matters

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  The oboe is not a solitary instrument. Its closest relative in the modern orchestra is the cor anglais, known in English as the English horn, which is pitched a perfect fifth lower than the oboe, in F. It is a transposing instrument; what the player reads is not what the audience hears. J.S. Bach made extensive use of the oboe d'amore, pitched a minor third lower than the oboe in A, as well as the taille and the oboe da caccia, both Baroque ancestors of the cor anglais. At the lower end of the family sits the bass oboe, also called the baritone oboe, which sounds a full octave below the standard instrument; composers including Delius, Strauss, and Holst wrote for it. Similar to the bass oboe but more powerful is the heckelphone, which has a wider bore and a larger tone. Only 165 heckelphones have ever been made, and competent players are hard to find because of the instrument's rarity. At the opposite extreme, the musette or piccolo oboe is the sopranino member of the family, usually pitched in E or F above the standard oboe, and the contrabass oboe sits two full octaves below it. Composer David Stock drew on this whole range in his concerto "Oborama," in which the soloist switches instruments between movements, playing the oboe d'amore in the third and the bass oboe in the fourth.

• 8. Beyond the Concert Hall

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  The oboe's path into jazz was slow and never fully arrived. Paul Whiteman's band was among those in the 1920s and 1930s that included it for coloristic effect, but the instrument rarely moved to the foreground. Garvin Bushell, a multi-instrumentalist who lived from 1902 to 1991, played the oboe in jazz bands as early as 1924 and eventually recorded with John Coltrane in 1961. Bob Cooper was the first musician of the modern jazz era, in the early 1950s, to solo extensively on the oboe and the English horn. Yusef Lateef, primarily a tenor saxophone and flute player, was among the first to use the oboe as a solo instrument in modern jazz performances and recordings, also in 1961. Charles Mingus gave the oboe a brief but prominent role, played by Dick Hafer, in "I.X. Love" on the 1963 album Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus. Jazz fusion brought the instrument a little closer to prominence: the Welsh multi-instrumentalist Karl Jenkins used it in his work with Nucleus and Soft Machine, and Paul McCandless, a co-founder of the Paul Winter Consort and later Oregon, made it a consistent voice in his work. In rock and pop, Peter Gabriel played the oboe while a member of Genesis, most prominently on "The Musical Box." Sufjan Stevens, who studied the instrument in school, features it in his geographic tone-poems Illinois and Michigan. Ennio Morricone's "Gabriel's Oboe" from the 1986 film The Mission stands as one of the most widely recognized film uses of the instrument, and the oboe appears as a solo voice in Nino Rota's love theme for The Godfather, released in 1972.