22 / If You Were An Oboist

And what that might be like.

Can you imagine being an oboist? In your house sits a black case, fastened with buckles, inside of which, resting in specially designed velvet moulds, are pieces of a machine, which, if assembled properly, can make the most beautiful sound in the world. It is the oboe, and not only does it exist, but you have one, and what’s more, you know how to play it. You know which pieces slip next to each other, and with this knowledge you can turn its component pieces into a single coherent object. You even know how to fasten your own reeds — you, like every professional oboist, whittle your own reeds, as the ones you can purchase are of too poor quality, and don’t meet your particular preferences. Once your oboe is built, you know how to play it, which holes to cover, which buttons to press to make the sounds in your mind alive in the world, translated through the oboe’s plaintive resonance.

Oboe Player (2020) by Ryan Louder. She’s really playing that thing! Respect.

Even if you’re not an oboist, it is still possible to buy an oboe. They cost at least two thousand dollars, so if you have money saved up, you could buy it. But why would you? You don’t know how to play it. You can buy a print of a picture of an oboe for about 80 dollars, but that won’t do you much good: an oboe is not so compelling to look at. In fact, it’s partially the gulf between its humble visual form and its transcendent sonic expression that makes it compelling. Without the latter, the former is just pathetic – a print of an oboe will just disappoint you. And anyway, if you really want to facilitate the beautiful sounds of the oboe, you’d need training, and that will cost you several thousand dollars more. It’s just not practical: if you dream of being a conduit for the music of the righteous and sincere oboe and you haven’t already made significant headway, your dream is all but dead. 

Imagine, though, that you do make your living playing oboe – it’s not recreational, nor does it merely supplement your living: it is your living, your livelihood. You play oboe and in exchange you receive enough money to fund your food, your housing, your various whims. You are an oboist. You go to rehearsals; you play in concerts and in recording sessions. Your social world is made up of other musicians. Maybe you’re in a scene, and you experience petty jealousies after being passed up for opportunities that you feel have been given to the undeserving. When someone at a gathering outside the scene asks what you do (meaning, of course, what your job is), you answer that you play the oboe, compressing your life through the double reed of the party into your identity as an oboist. For oboists, as for anyone, I can imagine that can feel frustrating. “I’m more than just an oboist,” the oboist thinks, frustrated, much like a product manager or a magazine editor might be, tired of the routine and familiar questions about their work. “When did you start? How do you make money?” But of all the things to be reduced to, an oboist isn’t so bad.

Maybe – and this is hard to think about – the oboe’s immense significance to your livelihood has dulled or even erased its magic for you. It’s a classic narrative: you pursue a career in a craft you love, but its financial pressures overtake and wither your passion. Maybe it manifests in your career: the oboe projects you are forced to take on for money leave little time for the bold though less remunerative oboe work that really excites you. Your oboe in its case no longer a portal, but a weight.

Or maybe not! Maybe, despite the financial pressure you’ve chosen to place on your oboe playing, you continue to find great joy and solace in playing it. There’s a moment in Amy, the Amy Winehouse documentary, that I often think about, where a young Amy Winehouse expresses gratitude that she’s gifted with an ability to sing: that before she even considered being able to make a career of it, she knew that through her singing she’d always be able to find comfort and joy. Maybe this is the case for an oboist as well. There is a popular narrative about art that you can express and exorcise your feelings through it, like how a dancer might get home after being micromanaged at their job as an office manager for a non-profit organization and say “I need to dance this out.” Maybe, after a taxing day, an oboist reaches for her case, carefully assembles her machine, blows out her favorite little melody, and afterwards feels lighter and calmer, a pressure lifted and an agitation soothed.

I’m just guessing! I have no idea. To play an oboe seems physically taxing. An oboist plays and her neck puffs up like a frog in an effort to force as much air as possible through the tiny double reed. The sound reveals little of that effort: its timbre, though rich, is restrained. To me it sounds human, almost, just without the variability of human speech – like a single moment of human speech stretched into single notes, ordered and refined. Maybe that’s where the effort goes: in cordoning dynamic and disordered human sound into discrete, appreciable, steady notes. In Angels In America, the sound of the oboe is described as "that of a duck if the duck were a songbird" – which is to say, the oboe transcends the banal into the sublime. I’m not an oboist, and I’ll never be one, so now all I can do is postulate what it might be like. But how nice is it to know that a formula like that is possible — that with some time and dedication and money and all of our breath at one moment, we can approach perfection. In this sense, may we all someday be oboists. 

And Cetera

Thanks for reading my essay about what it would be like if you were an oboist. Here’s some other stuff I have going on:

The pilot of Walker Upper, the webseries I made with my friend Caroline, is now out! Watch it!! It’s an NYC home improvement mockumentary. Caroline, beyond being a comic, is a professional fabricator (NOT liar: fabricator means she builds furinture and stuff), so everything in the episode is stuff she actually built! We’re hoping to make more, which costs money, so if you liked it, you can send some cash via Venmo to @cd0yl3.

I got to write a guest issue of Haley Nahman’s newsletter, 15 Things, where I got to write 15 things I consumed. I had a lot of fun and it’s a great newsletter.

Our next Exploration: LIVE! show is August 11, 7:30pm at Union Hall. Tickets are here. Look: I’ve hosted lots of shows and been part of many more and most of them I could not honestly say would be be worth your time, but I truly believe this one is! It’s a great show.

Natalie and I also, as ever, continue to have our podcast, Exploration: LIVE! (same name as our live show, total coincidence). If you haven’t listened, I think this recent episode is a good place to jump in.