AD
1968
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Me
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Following my success as the primary school's star recorder player, I was
a shoe-in for getting one of the comprehensive school's two oboes and the
attendant weekly lessons from a peripatetic oboist. Choosing the oboe over
the flute, cornet and trombone was easy. As on other occasions, I was influenced
by a chance comment by a prejudiced observer, who, for some reason, thought
that the oboe had the most beautiful tone. Well, I suppose that when played
well, it does have a distinctive, plaintive sound that can be sweetly melancholic.
Despite five years of lessons, I never got that sound. There's something
about the embouchure that I never could never achieve. So I remained in
the class of wailing-cat players (an elite group of failed oboists and
violinists, as well as willing bagpipers and accordian
players). In the City of Sheffield Schools Concert
Band, my oboe was well concealed within a bulging woodwind section,
and the brass were always able to drown the lot of us when necessary.
But in 1969 lessons were just beginning. I was handed the valuable instrument
with instructions on its care and handling. Within the day I had broken
my first reed. This is fairly easy to do: you just plug it into the end
of the oboe, then wave the instrument around distractedly. The reed always
sticks out further than you think. Fearful that the beautiful instrument
was going to be taken away from me, my dad drove me around the music shops
of Sheffield in search of a replacement. The plan was to replace the reed
without the school or my teacher knowing. We eventually bought one for
18/6 (a lot of money in those days, as the saying goes). My oboe teacher
later told me of much cheaper routes to reed satisfaction, and I discovered
that even the world of woodwind has a black market underbelly.
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