oboeinsight

Tom Service writes about a concert that featured the iPad in an encore. The pianist is reading the music from the machine. I’m okay with that, but I do think that perhaps the soloist just wanted to use it for fun. It hardly seems as if he wouldn’t know that piece already!

That being said, of course people have already been using some sort of computer devices for reading music. The iPad is new, but using some sort of gizmo (yeah, I just used “gizmo” … I kind of wanted to, okay?) for reading music isn’t. Hugh Sung has been blogging about this for a long time now (Hmmm. The blog I used to visit is awfully out of date. I’ll have to look for another!). I seem to recall some jazz singer uses some sort of tablet for his entire band.

Me? I still love sheet music. Mostly because it doesn’t crash.

The pianist playing his encore:

Hugh Sung talks about what he uses:

Of course nothing beats this:

I sometimes talk to my students about the different way musicians play. We talk about different reeds, different embouchures, and we also talk about movement. It seems that we in the US tend to move less than musicians from other countries. In some US orchestras the oboists don’t even seem to budge. I’ve seen videos of orchestras from Europe and all the musicians are moving, and not in any uniform sort of way sometimes. When I explain the differences to my students I show them how stilted we can sometimes look, and how wildly other players move. They laugh at both. Being completely still can look rather odd, especially when we are playing something extremely expressive. Moving around can be a bit crazy too. I suspect they don’t quite believe me when I attempt to demonstrate just how much someone might move around (probably because I don’t sound very good when I do that). I’m a bit of a mover — I’m certainly not completely still. I used to move even more, but I think I’ve toned it down. It could be because I do so much second oboe playing in symphony; I don’t care to move as much or more than the principal, as that seems inappropriate.

I’ve just located an enjoyable video with an oboist who moves quite a lot. Maybe now my students will believe me! (And he sounds great, if you ask me.)