Proof.

Hey everybody! Today marks Obohemia’s birthday. Today we are 2!

Thanks for sticking with us, guys.

Party time for Danie and Gwen! They both made the National Youth Orchestra this year. Perhaps this means Danie will stop freaking out, and that means it is party time for the rest of the oboe studio, too!

Jim has cracked his Kingwood, plastic-lined Yamaha, and I am sad and bewildered and a teeny bit amused because apparently Jim can crack anything.  I suspect he’d even be able to crack a plastic student oboe, that is how far his skillz reach. But I really, really like that Kingwood oboe! Jim is obsessed with finding the perfect oboe, and is a Yamaha rep (”they consistently have a dark, stable sound”) while moonlighting on the side with Lorées. If he has a new oboe in his possession, he will bring it to our lessons and have us listen to its sound and compare it to our oboes’ sounds. He seems to almost always prefer my Yammie’s tone, and I always struggle to describe the difference (I can hear it, I can’t describe it), or to say one or the other is better. But I really really like that Kingwood oboe. It felt like my oboe, but like I could push more air through it and like it resonated more.  I want one! Someday, when I have some money/my oboe dies, I shall get one. Or maybe someday when I am famous and Yamaha is like, “We should give this lady an oboe, it will be Good Press,” and I will be like, “Yes please, I will have  a Kingwood Custom oboe, thankyouverymuch.”

And there is my advertising pitch. Buy a Yamaha Custom Oboe, they are Very Sexy.

My composition prof, Peter Hatch, wrote an oboe concerto a few years ago, and he has asked me if I would transcribe it for oboe and piano. I have put it on my List of Summer Projects along with “write a medium-length piece for the Laurier Orchestra’s brass section.” Peter sometimes visits this site, and he is a bassoonist (and therefore an ally), and so I shan’t make any comments about his website.**

Also, you guys, I woke up this morning to find TWENTY-SIX spam comments, and I just deleted a bunch last night. 26 in a night! Do they never go away? It is just bewildering! What are they hoping to accomplish with those giant lists of links? GAH.

Also also, my English prof played Sigur Rós for us this morning, and wore the most fantastic pair of glasses I’ve ever seen.

Finally, my latest article in the Cord Weekly was an interview with Edwin Outwater.

**Except to politely suggest he find someone to make it less blue and more website-y.

Click the picture to embiggen! Patty, Cooper, all of you, tell me about your profs and lineage so I can add them, please?

Also note: this chart came directly from the memory of Dick Dorsey, so if there are any errors, let me know and I’ll fix ‘em.

So once a year, Dick pulls out his “oboe mouthpiece”–a teeny tiny mouthpiece with a teeny-tiny single reed–and tells us about how he used to bring it on tour and tell the other musicians it was “just in case” or whip it out and warm up on it to scare the pants off them (because it sounds reed-iculous). But it’s adorable, as all tiny inanimate objects are, so I went on a hunt to see what the internet had to say.  Every post I found was filled with scorn and derision and none of the “Awwww, lookatthetinymouthpiece” that I first felt.  Philistines.

I also discovered that you can still buy them for bassoon. Jesus. Lizard. What.

I have also heard tell, in my wanderings of “emergency reed tape” and can’t for the life of me wrap my head around it. Does anyone know more?

And I know it’s mean to laugh, but this site makes me giggle.