oboeinsight

Read Online:

If you have ever had an interest in the symphony, but were embarrassed to ask your pretentious friends about it, this app is for you.

Of course once you purchase the app and know all about it you will then be pretentious. Because that’s what happens to anyone who knows about the symphony.

Right?

(The app can be found here, but if they had the “pretentious” line there it’s been removed.)

Update:

I downloaded the app. It’s not perfect … have to hold the iPad vertically, for one thing. Reading an oboist Michael Pisani’s “meet the musicans” page, they list his “Key Repertoire” as:

Richard Strauss – Oboe concerto Mozart Oboe Concerto Benjamin Britten – Six Matamorphoses

Yep. Listed exactly as I typed it above. I wonder if a musician was asked to proof this stuff? I’m going to guess they have some corrections to make.

I’ll be investigating the app more before I remove it. (Somehow I doubt I really need to learn about the orchestra, but it IS fun to read about the various players they’ve listed. (They currently don’t have many, but I’m guessing they’ll add more eventually.)

… have you?

Just read this online:

GS: What are some of the strangest things you’ve done to get a sound that you want?

YI: I was in a student orchestra for just one year, and one day I was listening to the tape of our performance Pictures at an Exhibition. While I was listening to it over and over in loops, I suddenly was attracted to the tuning part that took place before the performance. I edited the tape and cut out just the tuning portion and listened to it carefully over and over. I noticed a lot of phrases I have never noticed before. Usually orchestra tends to tune to an A provided by an oboist. The concert master adjusts the A based on this, followed by string instruments, woodwind, and brass. This is the standard procedure, so you might think all tuning sounds the same, but that is not the case. The timing of the sound played or the timing of the tuning to complete per string differs, which leads to unique “phrases” being born every time. Enlightened by this, I started collecting live CDs of orchestra around the world, which some included tuning and some not. I managed to find a few that did have tuning and searched for phrases that inspired me, cut them out, connected with other phrases I gathered, changed the pitch, controlled the keys, and created a piece of music out of this. Maybe this is not that strange?

I am guessing some live performance recordings must leave the tuning on and I’ve just never heard those.