oboeinsight

… and I’m too old in any case. Oh well. ;-)

American Idol, The Sing-Off, The Voice — there’s no shortage of over-the-top, glitzy, ratings-driven music competitions on TV. And now Aretha Franklin is getting in on the singing contest circuit, but she’s turning her searchlight on the world of classical music. That’s right — the Queen of Soul is searching for the next great opera singer.

“Some of the older classical singers like Jessye Norman, Leontyne [Price] and Barbara Hendricks are retiring, they’re not singing anymore, and I’d like to see some younger singers come along and take their place,” Franklin says. (Actually, Price retired from the opera stage in 1985.)

If she likes what she hears, Franklin will sign one, two or maybe even three performers to her label, Aretha’s Records, and help them get established in the world of classical music.

The competition itself is decidedly low-tech. Franklin is asking interested 18- to 40-year-olds to send their demos — via CDs or cassettes — to her directly. There’s no studio audience and no toll-free number for you to call or text your vote. Just your demo, an 8-by-10 head shot and a resume. And no original songs allowed.

If you’re interested, the address is:

Aretha’s Records
c/o Thav, Gross, Steinway & Bennett
30150 Telegraph Road
Bingham Farms, MI 48012

RTWT

Alex Klein, former principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has been appointed music director of the Paraiba Symphony Orchestra in his native Brazil with a mandate to put the state – bigger than Switzerland – back on the musical map.

RTWT at Lebrecht’s blog.

Okay, bassoonists, you get some more notes!

The principal bassoonist at the New York Philharmonic got some good news recently: The bassoon part in Maurice Ravel’s “Mother Goose” ballet (“Ma Mère l’Oye”), which will be performed on the orchestra’s program for three consecutive evenings beginning Wednesday (and reprised Jan. 4), just grew by four full measures. “She was tickled pink,” says Arbie Orenstein, the Queens College musicologist who, while examining the work’s original manuscript, came across a musical line that, strangely enough, had never made it into the score that has been performed for the past 100 years.

Ravel originally composed “Mother Goose” in 1910 as a set of duets, for one piano and four hands, for the children of friends. A year later he orchestrated that piano suite for a small orchestra, subsequently expanding that orchestral transcription into a ballet based upon the same children’s stories he’d previously adapted. Ravel, who died in 1937 and is, along with Claude Debussy, considered to be one of the two most important French composers of the first half of the 20th century, once said that he considered “Mother Goose” and his 1912 ballet, “Daphnis and Chloé,” to be his most significant works. (Many associate Ravel with “Boléro,” the one-movement, 15-minute orchestral work that the self-critical composer famously described as a piece consisting wholly of “orchestral tissue without music.”)

I read it here.

Read Online:

Help! I sound like an OBOE!!!
As the title suggests, I’m having a problem with the way I sound on soprano. I play on a selmer series 3 and, on the recommendation of my band teacher, play on a selmer c*. I am fed up with sounding like an oboe with a really nasally tone. Some people have even said it sounds like a duck. Can anyone help me?

Of course the problem isn’t’ that he/she sounds like an oboe when playing soprano sax. The problem is that he/she chose soprano sax in the first place! ;-)

This piece kills me. Go away, stupid oboist. With your stupid ridiculously gorgeous melody/counter-melody-thing. Yes, this isn’t even actually an oboe solo (he/she has a flute doubling the part), and the bassoon deserves equal props for laying down some ridiculously beautiful whole notes. There is also like a 5% chance that this is an English horn, since sometimes the two can sound so similar that I get disoriented. Or maybe I’m disoriented by all the prettiness…

This was in reference to this music:

So gee, what do you think …?

From an interview with Gregory Vajda:

What is the size of the Huntsville Symphony?
Vajda: The orchestra has 15 core members who have a yearly salary and play all of the services, including classics and pops concerts. This orchestra has a rule that if you win the blind audition, you have the job, but you don’t have to live in the area. So outside of the 15 core members and some, most of the orchestra doesn’t live in the Huntsville area. They fly in from all over the place. Last month we just had an audition for violin, and the person who won the position lives in San Jose, California.

… so of course I’m wondering who it is.

Ninety-year-old Edwardsville resident Vivian Raffaelle’s fingers have been keying the oboe for 80 years — but they’re just as limber as ever.
“Most people say, ‘Why do you have to practice, you’ve played so long?’” Raffaelle said last week. “You have to keep it up or you lose it. You have to keep moving. I’ve never been one to sit still.”
Raffaelle proves that by playing the oboe in the municipal bands of three cities: Edwardsville, Troy and Granite City, practicing for and participating in dozens of concerts a year.
“I guess it just keeps me going and I enjoy it,” she said. “I never feel like I know enough. I’m always learning more so I just keep practicing and trying; you always feel like you can improve on something.”

Do read the whole thing!

Research conducted at the University of Portsmouth has revealed that loud music makes people drink more alcohol and at a faster rate.

The study, undertaken by psychologist Dr Lorenzo Stafford, claims that alcoholic drinks taste sweeter when loud music is playing and that this also makes it hard for people to work out how much they are drinking.

I read it here.

Did you know?

Concert attire is tax-deductible for orchestra musicians. (No wonder they have a whole closet full of black clothing!)

Hmm. This is from a Canadian paper, and is about orchestra attire.

Truth is, in the United States anyway, black is tax deductible IF it is used only for work and can be referred to as a “uniform” (believe me, I’ve studied all this stuff over the years!). The black I own can be worn elsewhere. It’s not a uniform. It’s just black. I realize some of my colleagues might disagree and even argue with me about this, but I don’t take a deduction for my black clothing unless I can truly say I will only wear it while working. That’s never happened!

New York City Opera has declared an impasse in contract negotiations with unions for its musicians and singers and is threatening to present its abbreviated season without them.

Well gee, what opera company needs “musicians and singers” (their words, not mine!) for opera anyway.

And don’t you love how “singers” are separate from “musicians”?

I read it here.

I actually didn’t know that strings were made with cow gut. But then “fishskin” is actually from the intestines of a cow. Yuck and double yuck.

Regulations which tightly control the use of certain types of animal tissue are unwittingly threatening the centuries-old technique of making musical instrument strings out of beef gut.
The craft is covered by the same strict controls on raw materials from cows, even though campaigners say that to catch Creutzfeldt – Jakob disease, (CJD) – the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy – from violin or cello strings from an infected animal you would need to eat several metres of them.
The musicians warn that regulations are threatening the industry and could force gut string manufacturers to close, with disastrous consequences for the ‘period orchestra’ movement, which aims to recreate every aspect of music as it was first performed in the years 1650-1750.

I read it here.

I just read this:

A study just published in the journal Poetics suggests art forms such as literature and classical music “are becoming increasingly more irrelevant for most students’ cultural lives.” This points to “an increasingly precarious position for traditional highbrow culture,” according to a trio of researchers led by the University of Bergen’s Jostein Gripsrud.

So know what bugs me?

I hate the term “highbrow”.

Maybe this is just my problem. I do have a lot of problems, after all.

I read it here.

Twice, when I mentioned to friends that I would be hearing Honegger last night, they told me that the holiday wasn’t until December.