So I was reading oboeinsight and came across this post.  And it made me laugh!  Because “It doesn’t become dangerous until it starts playing the trombone” is pretty much true of everything.
If you are an oboist and you don’t read oboeinsight, you should!  Patty is the superhero of oboe bloggers.

I finished my first-ever piece for orchestra, you guys! I am so excited about hearing what it sounds like. It is colourful and sparkling and always in motion and I *hope* sounds original without sounding ugly. I don’t have a problem with ugly music, but it is not what I hope to do with my career as a composer. I have a piece in the new music concert coming up this Wednesday, as well! It is for double reed ensemble; nearly every oboist and bassoonist in the school is playing. 14 of us! It is kind of idiomatic and pretty, but I tried to make it sound a little medieval and modern *at the same time* so who knows!
Sometimes I fear I try too hard to make my music something people will like to play.

Some of you may know about 24-hour comics, or the 24-hour album I wrote in The Cord about recently. I am going to do something similar over Reading Week, which is the Canadian equivalent of March break, but with composing! I am going to write a piece every day–either 7 days or 9 days (with the weekends surrounding the week) for solo tuba, and combine them into a suite. My friend Christopher, about whom I have blogged before, is going to play them for me. It is exciting! In the meantime, I have to write a full, short, piano piece for Peter by next Wednesday, need to get back to work on “Scoot” for trumpet and trombone duet, and have begun work on my aural comic!
That’s right. My aural comic. One day in the semi-near future you will come to the site and all there will be is a play button and you will listen and smile to yourselves. Aimee is going to play it for me live, but I may very well record the version for the site myself. So you will be able to hear my oboing!

Speaking of oboing, I am playing the “Introduction, Theme, and Variations” for oboe by Hummel, and I love it. I LOVE IT. It makes me feel and sound like I can really play. I would try to get it in a noon-hour recital, but it seems like most of them are full.
Do you know what else I love? Schenkerian Analysis with Dr. Swinden. It’s actually a great class for performance application since what we look at is primarily melody-based. Essentially, we reduce music to its most important notes, and then most important notes again, and again, and again, until we reach a I-V-I progression in the bass and  a descending 3, 5, or 8 note passage in the melody. It’s great for performance because it illustrates where the most important notes are, why phrasing is shaped (or should be shaped) certain ways, and where the goals of each section are.

Also Dr. Swinden is my favourite favourite.

In conclusion, Peter has me writing copy for KWS’ bi-yearly convention/festival, Open Ears! So if you read any of the literature, you will be reading some of my writing. He says it will add up to a free pass, and I am so excited.

This is by Nathan the Trumpet, and I absconded with it when I found it lying in the lounge.

Found in the same phrase only in the land of Nico Muhly. Followed by “cut a bitch” no less.

“Anyway, the moral of the story here is that if one more interviewer asks me a question using either the word cross-over or something that implies A on one side and B on the other and me, like, estraddling the liminal space, I’m going to cut a bitch.”

Found here.
I don’t know how I feel about this, to be honest. Because that “crossover” that is being maligned and discounted here is something I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating and writing about and thinking about. I mean, I suppose now I know never to talk to Mr. Muhly about it, but perhaps I should also revise my thinking.

I love Indie music. I finally tried the Wordle Meme Ms. Mussel invented, and the resulting cluster, now residing on my desktop, is heavily skewed towards Indie Rock, with GIANT LETTERS revealing it in the centre of my screen. Now, part of this is because I haven’t gone through and classified much of my other music, but part of it is because I actually do possess a large quantity of Indie Rock and Pop and Folk music–arguments about “what *is* Indie anyway” aside. But I’m a classically trained musician, being trained classically in composition. I just finished studying Ravel to improve my orchestration techniques, my favourite oboe rep is by Handel and C.P.E. Bach, I sincerely *enjoy* analyzing music in a Schenkerian way (it is as relaxing as gouging!). But then there’s this pop tradition fixation I’ve got, too. I spend a lot of time finding ways to reconcile these two sides of my musical person–and I thought “Yes, people like Nico Muhly and Owen Pallett and Bell Orchestre–they do that for me.”

But maybe it’s not a boundary at all, not something that needs to be straddled. MAYBE it just seems that way because people usually only listen to one or the other–or don’t give them the same importance, anyway.

Although that sounds like a cultural boundary to me. I mean…as much as the music I write is inspired by all the music I listen to and I write it without consciously being like, “I am crossing boundaries with this music,” does that really mean it isn’t doing just that?
GENRES, GUYS. THEY HAVE EDGES. SOMETIMES THOSE EDGES ARE CROSSED.

On the other hand, I think perhaps what I’m doing is ignoring the divide between genres, and perhaps this is what Nico is getting at. The music I make perhaps doesn’t have to be one or the other, and maybe can exist in two places at the same time, and maybe if I…
I don’t know. I give up. I’ll just keep on doing what I do and hope I’m not the only bitch in the room when someone next asks Nico about straddling the liminal space.

Why yes, I play the oboe. No, I haven’t met your cousin who played it until he was in the tenth grade, but I’m sure he was very good. No, I don’t sound like a dying duck, except when I’ve had a bit too much to drink.

Why did I take up the oboe? Let me tell you: It was going to be my ticket into university. The teachers at school needed someone to play the oboe solo, and I was one of those little brats who went through instruments like jelly beans, and I was bored of the clarinet and the saxophone. Oboe, I thought. Sure. How hard can it be? And they told me there weren’t a lot of oboists, and I would be able to go to school, and would get all the solos.
But then I got to university, with my oboe Theophilus in tow, and learned that yes, it is easy to get into university on oboe, but no, it is not easy after that. I had to learn to make reeds, and my poor splitter-mangled fingers cried at me, and my bank account wept tears of hundreds of dollars at the news of my cane consumption–hundreds of dollars of cane which turned into shockingly few actual reeds.

You know what, though? It wasn’t even the reeds. It wasn’t the hours upon hours of my life wasted in a small, crowded room with no windows. It wasn’t the endless failure of sharpening my knives. It wasn’t the inexplicably flappy sides, or the broken shaper tip, or the shredded tips and hacked-off corners. It wasn’t finally cracking after hundreds of failures and burning down the school.

Okay, maybe it was the reeds. No, I don’t think I need counselling. I’ve taken up composing, you see. It will be a great relief after the oboe.