JR: I grew up in a little town in western North Carolina, and I guess my biography suggests something of a "Cinderella" story . . . in terms of getting to my present position with the Philharmonic. Actually my small-town start as an oboe player wasn't as primitive as one might suppose, because the public school music program in Lenoir, a town of 8000 people, was very fine and the band was generally best in the state. The program was started over 50 years ago by a man who was a wealthy furniture heir. He invested a great deal of money in a building for the band which rivaled the high school a three-story brick structure with five full-time faculty members. Instruments were free to the students - we had Heckel bassoons, Lorée oboes, 18 Buffet clarinets from Moennig - and because of all that equipment and a kind of "Philadelphia connection" through Moennig, when I first began playing it was on a Lorée oboe with reeds made by John Mack for Moennig. In those days - the mid-50's John was making reeds for Moennig regularly. So I had something of a musical "silver spoon" in my mouth. From one viewpoint, I couldn't have had a more unlikely start; and from another, I couldn't have been more fortunate!
The intensity of that environment was like a conservatory; there were so many students who were very serious about learning, and the standard was first-rate. The woodwind teacher had studied clarinet with McLean in Philadelphia and had somehow found his way to Lenoir, where he stayed for ten years. (Today the tuba player of the Minnesota Orchestra is from the Lenoir High School Band, also the first bassoonist of the Dallas Symphony.) It was usual for me to spend four to five hours a day with the oboe, both in rehearsals and practicing alone - Barret, the VadeMecum, the things the typical young student works at. My predecessor in that band, now teaching nuclear physics at Princeton incidentally, was pulled out of the group by his father to do something more "challenging," and I was "drafted" to play oboe after 2 years with saxophone. Like so many oboists who began playing some other instrument, I was an unwilling convert at first; but I soon began to love it, and of course there were a lot more challenges and rewards as a result of playing the oboe. That was midway through my freshman year in high school. I went to the Cincinnati Conservatory after my junior year, and got my first look at conservatory life and the professional orchestral scene, and didn't like too much of what I saw. The next summer - after high school graduation, I won a scholarship to go to Brevard in western North Carolina and there I found an attractive bridge to the profession beyond the band. John Mack had been there, and Al Genovese, and immediately prior to my time there, Dennis Larson; so these people seemed like fabulous figures heroes of a sort. But most importantly in that atmosphere I found all-day concentration on the oboe a joyful thing to be doing. My college choice had already been made, partly influenced by the Cincinnati experience, which wasn't the happiest, and which probably wasn't the fairest view of the profession. I had decided to hedge my musical bets, and look for a college experience in line with what my parents had had, which was a good liberal arts education; it seemed impossible to find a place where this kind of education was available, and to study the oboe at a serious level at the same time. Perhaps I was handicapped by not having clear-cut ambitions when I was seventeen, because I basically went off to college to find out what was worth doing. At Davidson College near Charlotte, N.C. following my Brevard experience where I had been first oboist and won concerto competitions, working with the good instrument and reeds I had access to, I was cut adrift from the Lenoir band program and up until then I didn't know the oboe was a difficult instrument! I still don't believe it is a difficult instrument, but it can be a very perplexing thing to keep the equipment in a degree of readiness - on a level that a flutist, say, might take for granted. But Hans Moennig fixed the oboe, John Mack made the reeds, and I just played!
DS: That was some kind of Nirvana, wasn't it?
JR: It really was. And you can imagine the trauma that accompanied leaving all that. When I got to Davidson I used an oboe from their inventory, an old ring-key Lorée, much inferior to the one I'd been accustomed to. And my reed source was in jeopardy too, so l wrote to John Mack and explained my situation. He wrote back immediately - a really friendly effusive letter, which is his style. He said there was no way that he would make reeds for me - it was against his principles, and not to my advantage either. But he did volunteer suggestions about where to get cane, knives, etc., and even some advice about the rudiments of reedmaking. From that first letter from John Mack, I got up the courage to start reed work, and I had beginner's luck. My first attempt actually played! I sent it to John and he marked it up - where I had taken away too much cane, where I might have taken more, and sent it back to me. (I still have that reed.) But after that bit of success things changed, and panic set in as I realized that I couldn't be a responsible student in college and a good enough reedmaker to sustain my oboe-playing. John and I exchanged a few more letters, and in the spring I applied to Tanglewood, and to my surprise, was accepted. I wrote John again, explaining my predicament, and how, as a budding "disciple" of his I wanted to represent him as well as I could at Tanglewood. I didn't receive a reply for a long time, but finally a telegram arrived asking me to meet him in Winston-Salem where he was to play the Moravian Music Festival with Thor Johnson. So we met at Salem College in 1959. He was very encouraging and helpful, as he's been for students ever since. At the end of our two hours of work, he pulled out his reed cases and put together a little box of reeds to get me through Tanglewood. So off I went with that old ring-key Lorée, a VadeMecum and my magic box of reeds!
This was a pivotal point for me, because it was my first experience with a major symphony orchestra, and the Boston Symphony concerts were a great inspiration. My roommate was Peter Hedrick, who had just finished Oberlin and was on his way to Yale to study with Bob Bloom, and he had a room full of paraphernalia that I didn't even know anything about. I was so intimidated at first that I spent the first couple of days trying to blend into the background, but when the audition came up - for Ralph Gomberg and Louis Speyer - I took out one of those reeds, and played first timidly, then more boldly, and I know it sounds like a movie script, but I won the audition and played most of the big oboe parts that summer. That justified, I suppose, John Mack's investment in me, because the reed dependency continued for the next seven years, and I actually never played a concert on a reed of my own manufacture until my first concert as a full-time professional oboist with the Mobile Symphony in 1966.
Davidson wasn't completely a musical wasteland . . . I got to play with professionals in orchestras in North and South Carolina, and perhaps had more chance to perform than some students in conservatories do these days. I played concertos, and chamber music and I found oboe playing the best kind of recreation and relief from my academic work. All through college I managed to play the oboe two hours a day - sometimes much more - and I brought to my practice the same intensity that was a characteristic of classes in that rigorous academic environment. There was something so valuable in being able to use the humanities in a search for identity and value. When I finally reconciled myself to the idea of a career in music, whether it was playing the oboe professionally or teaching, that decision in itself represented a weight falling from my shoulders. I can remember the exact day when I decided this was an acceptable option for me as a person. I planned then to go to graduate school at Yale to study with Robert Bloom, and I would have done that but for the good fortune of having a Fulbright come through after graduation. My proposal to study government support of the arts in Germany in 1962, was a worthwhile project, what with the National Endowment here being founded in 1965. This amounted to another year's postponement of my musical studies, but while I was at the University of Cologne, I spent at least two days a week at the conservatory, so I managed to continue my dual life for another year. I played with the Cologne Chamber Orchestra on occasion, and it was the same pattern basically as at Davidson, in that I performed a lot and worked hard at the oboe, and I still didn't have a teacher.
DS: And yet your major field in college was. . .
JR: English and economics . . . English because I had an affinity for literature and always enjoyed reading and writing, and economics to appease my practical business minded father, who thought my education should point toward future employment.
Going back for a minute, at the end of that summer at Tanglewood, I drove to New Orleans to have some lessons with John Mack and while we were working on the Mozart quartet he discovered that I wasn't touching the tip of the reed with my tongue (John tells me that John deLancie had the same problem when he came to the Curtis Institute). John didn't feel that I could cure this problem; I think he was dismayed. I remember feeling very discouraged - like finding out you need five fingers and you only have four! I have used this experience of rebuilding my embouchure to encourage students who have serious repair work to do. I had performance responsibilities at the time, but I was also confronted with the challenge from Mack to "fix it or else!" So I spent perhaps a half-hour a day working on what was a drastic revision of my embouchure. It was very difficult, and my first reaction was "I'll never be able to handle this." We all at times have to undergo some basic reforms - that's part of the growth process. It's also potentially threatening and has a lot to do with the psychology of learning and teaching. Part of the psychology is recognizing the threat implicit in any change. The revision of my embouchure worked out fairly successfully with a minimum of risk to my self-respect because I tried to invest a certain amount of time every day in a completely radical approach. In the beginning it was all so devastating because I knew that getting my tongue to touch the cane, and doing that with consistency, so weakened my embouchure that I could hardly sustain a note. I think pulling my lower lip out more and placing my tongue higher and more forward caused me to give up some support that I 'd taken for granted. I continued playing concerts during this transition period, still tonguing the roof of my mouth in the wrong way, but always investing at least a half-hour a day in the direction of the overhaul with the thought that I could eventually "stir it in" as I felt more confident and familiar with it. And that's exactly what happened. Within a couple of months my tonguing problem was completely eliminated. I'm sure you and I agree as teachers, that often when we recommend an alternative approach, students are so threatened by that, or else they so water it down, that the new approach has hardly had a chance at all, and what might take a couple of months, sometimes will take years! I believe a radical and separate investment will pay off quicker than one which is a compromise with faulty techniques. This may be one of the critical ingredients in one's potential for success - it's an important index of a student's promise - whether he or she is able to continue to grow - to undergo this kind of metamorphosis, sloughing off the old skin in a way, moving on to better things.
Actually the next time it happened for me was much more drastic! That was when I met Tabuteau in France in the spring of 1963. At that time he had yet to accept an oboe student in the ten years since he'd left the Philadelphia Orchestra. I was in Nice to look for cane, en route to Spain, and I had his address and went to see him. He wasn't at home so I left a note for him with the maid, explaining that I was an oboe student who had worked with John Mack and Ralph Gomberg, and that I very much wanted to meet him. I said I would come back that evening at 8. I chose the hour thinking that would be after dinner, and yet prior to an older man's bedtime. My traveling companion and I had already eaten a huge meal in the old quarter of Nice when we showed up at Tabuteau's apartment. He opened the door, and there he was in a white apron, smelling of Scotch and garlic, making dinner for us! And not only that, he had been making dinner all afternoon. He said in response to my greeting "You don't look like an oboe player," and then noticing my friend, he said "My God, there are two of them!" A loud discussion in French with his wife followed, and then he said that we'd just have to divide up dinner, which came as a terrific relief to us, as you can imagine! So that was the strange beginning of my relationship with Tabuteau, and of course I was so naive about the profession, there was so little I could tell him about what his students were doing, that he seemed to lose interest in me rather quickly. At the critical moment just as Tabuteau's head was touching his plate that evening, I remembered a list of cane growers that John Mack had given me which I had in my pocket. I intended to be John's emissary over there with French cane growers, and as I showed Tabuteau the list he read it with great interest, then began to laugh as he said "This one's been dead for twenty years," "That one's now in the furniture business" . . . I remembered I had some tube cane in the car from Deriaz which was hard to get then. So I ran down to the car for the cane and the evening magically began again - now in his studio! I'll never forget Tabuteau's excitement working with this cane - feverishly preparing, twisting and admiring it - "see that - it cuts like butter!" He seemed as thrilled as a youngster with a new present. He'd just been told by his doctor that he couldn't drive and it was harvest time, just before the cane was sent to the dealers in Paris, and he'd run out of cane, and there I was with a car. He'd never taken anyone cane-hunting, but he agreed to go with me. So the next day three of us set out together. My companion and I were instructed by him at every stop to speak German - to pretend to be German students because he thought if we were recognized as Americans it might jeopardize his chances, and so we put on a little charade in each of the four places we visited. In every case the grower would give us a certain amount of time in which we could "attack" a hundred-kilo sack of cane. Tabuteau had a wonderful time, away from the apartment and sort of "out with the boys" again - I think it was a rejuvenating thing for him. By that time our relationship was so convivial that he insisted I help him prepare spaghetti for supper that evening. He said to me at one point "you remind me of myself when I was young". . . but of course, he had never heard me play a note. We just hit if off, with me in the role of a grandson or something like that. As I was preparing to leave for Spain he agreed to teach me during the following summer. When I came back to Nice in July, Tabuteau had actually spent time with Don Baker and David Dutton, so to be really accurate, they were the first ones to study with him there. But then I stayed about five weeks; and that was in the summer of 1963.
The first lesson I had with him was so friendly and low-keyed that I was amazed. I would play something, then he'd take his oboe out and play for me . . . and my memory of the orchestral excerpts we were playing wasn't so good then; I remind myself so much of my own students who want to play some very difficult work when they should perhaps be revamping their embouchure. We played together that way for about three hours and when I left that afternoon, I remember feeling somehow let-down, with the idea that if this is Mecca, it doesn't really amount to that much. A paradoxical, unexpected feeling of disappointment. But he had asked me to come back the next morning. And when I arrived, he had already been working, though he was still in his pajamas and robe. I came into the studio where he was gouging cane, and he virtually ignored me. It was an entirely different mood from the day before. Finally he turned around and said over his left shoulder, "Robinson, you are a very sick oboe player!" And then he gouged another piece of cane while I thought about that. When he looked back at me again, this time, thank heavens, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, he said "I think I know the cure, but you're not going to like it." He was throwing down the gauntlet! My feeling was that I had a safeguard, an "out," and I must confess that the kind of schizophrenic life I'd led saved me in a way, so that I didn't feel my self-respect entirely depended upon him. If he destroyed me as an oboe player, I could stand it. And so the mood changed and we never regained that convivial grandfather-grandson relationship, and I realized that that was a sacrifice on his part too. Then he took my oboe away and told me to put the reed into a tube of cane, and to practice 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 for hours a day. I sat under a palm tree at the summer academy where I was staying, like some sort of an idiot, peeping on this tube of cane. Something that seemed so simple in concept was very difficult in practice, which was to play 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 on a monotone as he did, keeping the pitch constant and making those discrete levels of volume sound alike on both sides of the center. All of us who've worked at this sort of thing know how much harder it is to do than it seems when it's described to us. He held me to that for a long time, and what I learned from that - was that the most basic fundamental relationship in oboe playing has to do with the reed opening and wind speed. For Tabuteau the most important significant variable for the interpretive musician was the dynamic shape of the phrase, and I think that's why he emphasized his number system - at Curtis I hear he went up to 13, a very sophisticated level. Changing the wind speed has implications for the pitch. If you don't believe it, just try it with a reed stuck into a tube of cane. I tried to play a little louder and the pitch went up, or softer and it went down, so it became very clear to me what I only intuitively had dealt with before, namely that the size of the reed opening must compensate for the amount of air. Since then I 've learned that at a pianissimo the pitch is almost totally sustained by the embouchure - the aperture of the reed is virtually closed down to nothing. At that point I bite the reed closed with my jaws. I'll interject that this is an analytical approach to the most fundamental aspect of tone production. I think there are a few players who make diminuendos without closing the reed appreciably because they play reeds that are stable enough not to change drastically with the wind speed, and because the reed is sophisticated enough to allow for more reed to be taken in as an alternative to closing. But in any case there has to be compensation for the change of wind.
DS: In this discussion of dynamic levels, how much of this has to do with changing the shape of the inside of the mouth?
JR: That's not a major element in my own thinking. In making diminuendos, my manipulation is mostly with the embouchure, in that I definitely close the reed by biting. It of course depends on the particular reed and its own tendencies where I have to go on it. I don't consciously change the configuration of the inside of my mouth simply because I'm getting softer - I don't feel the need to do something with my tongue or with my soft palate although I do make some subtle change back there for different pitches and registers. With regard to the open-throat sensation that some people speak of - I started out with that idea - the half-swallowed egg or whatever, which I now think is a big mistake. I think the whole idea of the throat that's open in a way that pushes the larynx down is an intolerable one - people who start out with the larynx down invariably squeeze air out using the larynx to recover its normal position.
DS: Did Tabuteau talk about physical things like this in regard to controlling dynamic levels?
JR: He said - in a very strong, emphatic way at one of my last lessons - that I should blow toward the bridge of my nose and keep the focus of the windstream as high as possible. That's always meant to me the opposite of the throat orientation. I try to keep the feeling of compression as high and as close to the reed as possible. Tabuteau never talked in terms of the abdominal musculature, but I myself am so convinced of the importance of an unimpeded, efficient airflow as a starting point, that I spend a great deal of time helping students get around to breathing abdominally - and freely, eliminating feelings of constriction - and I think this is one of the most difficult things we have to deal with. Abdominally the feeling of support is often confused with an isometric, and futile, kind of tension and the perception is almost identical for the right kind of support and the wrong kind if you're thinking of signals from the abdominal area. I would say the most helpful indication of a proper use of the abdominal musculature is a free expansion and contraction in that area. Displacement of the musculature is one key to its proper use. It would be possible to chart the level of dynamic in a passage I play by using a stylus similar to what's used for an EKG, charting the motion in and out of my gut. The effort of the abdominal musculature is definitely related to the speed of the wind. High speeds of course cost more effort than lower speeds - I make a diminuendo, my stomach comes out. I feel a pulling inward of the abdominal musculature for a breath accent - up and in. I involve the muscles from far below my lungs - even those below the belt line, pushing the air up from the bottom. When I'm blowing like that my chest comes up - a rebound from that force of the stomach underneath. Concern about controlling the wind was underlined by Tabuteau's interest in this subject - he commented that violinists who could control the left hand were dime-a-dozen, the ones who can really handle the bow are the great ones. He was concerned about the fact that not many wind players try, as a regular discipline, any exercises which are designed to help train the wind itself. I think of one of the first things he says on his record - that as a young man he trained his wind by blowing the flame of a lighted candle - almost blowing it out. I used to have the feeling of flexible support on the crescendo side, but on the diminuendo side I didn't. On the back side, so to speak, the pressure and tension would suddenly be in my gut, but the note would sound unsupported. I realized that my stomach muscles moved in in proportion to the wind speed on the crescendo side but didn't return on the back side. So I was concerned about why I didn't feel the same at "1 " on the back side as I had at "1" on the front side. An exercise that proved helpful was to take a note and to allow the pitch to move without any compensatory adjustment in my embouchure, using the least embouchure that would keep air from escaping around the reed . . . blow slowly, then faster and faster, allowing the pitch to go up and down as kind of a barometer of the wind speed. I realized through that, that the pitch and density of the note were exactly proportional to the wind speed and to my effort. Then I felt I was on the road to recovery, because I realized I'd been working much too hard on the diminuendo side, and fighting myself, because the effort in my gut was not related to the wind speed. The pitch will show a lot, but people with good ears don't like this exercise because they just don't want to hear the pitch moving around like that. Getting back to my first lessons with Tabuteau and all that peeping on the tube of cane, the relationship between reed opening and wind speed relative to pitch seemed most important. As far as I'm concerned that's such a basic thing - like an XY equation. The one variable, the wind speed, has implications for the pitch which have to be counterbalanced by changes in the reed opening. That means pianissimo levels for the same pitch are supported almost entirely by the embouchure, which is "biting," because you can't close the reed opening with your lips alone. For the softer dynamics as far as I'm concerned, the embouchure does become more like lip-covered teeth. And I use my jaw muscles, and Tabuteau did too whether that's representative of his playing as a whole, I don't know, but when I was with him, he did that. The pitch is supported at the other end of the dynamic spectrum almost entirely by the wind, with teeth pulled apart as much as lips will permit. Tabuteau's image for that was a fish coming up out of the water after a bug! A word of warning to students about that, because it depends upon the reed. Some reeds respond much more drastically to opening and closing than they do in response to the wind. I believe students should have conscious manipulative control of the variables relating to tone production, and that means practicing changing the pitch with embouchure alone - by biting they'll find that a pitch curve created by the embouchure, like a roller coaster curve, will have parameters almost the same as the pitch curve created by blowing fast and slow. Once those two variables can be manipulated separately, then they can be spliced together so that they compensate for each other in a crescendo-diminuendo trade-off.
There is a third variable in the tone production equation, and that's reed placement The only thing on Tabuteau's lesson records that is addressed directly to a technical problem is the business of making a tone brighter and darker, and he says specifically to move one's embouchure toward the string and back again. That means that the color of a note is a function of the surface vibration of the cane, the superficial vibration of the cane. The more cane that is exposed in the mouth, the brighter the tone. A third pitch curve can therefore be created by moving the reed in and out, as any student can quickly see. This can be done in two ways: by either moving the lips with the reed, and I think that's preferable, by changing the vowel from, say EE to OO, or by slipping the cane in and out with the lips in the same place which makes it very hard to recover the tip of the reed once you've moved in. I try to have my students practice manipulating all three variables, and so now I guess we have an XYZ equation - very complicated! Tabuteau said the numbers are not just dynamics, they're also color. I think he DID mean dynamic, I'd be adamant about that - he meant volume of sound, but he also meant color, and the fusion of the two, it seems to me, is a natural outgrowth of the tendency for there to be more potential for flatting from opening than there is potential for sharping by blowing. At some stage in the search for a maximum dynamic limit, the reed must be taken more into the mouth to compensate for opening, and the tone will therefore be brighter. So you do have a practical fusion in the middle range of a crescendo-diminuendo which creates not just a quantitative change but also a qualitative change. Student players often think - going back to my XYZ equation - that what comes out is what is dictated by their equipment or their embouchure, as though there's only one F# in there, but we know that there are hundreds of possibilities. Students who do learn to manipulate these variables consciously realize that tone production is sort of like baking a cake - it's a complex thing; any note is a complex creature made up of elements which they can control in terms of proportions. Once I can say to a student "a little more pressure" or "a little more reed in your mouth" or "a little less wind speed" and have a response which is immediate and direct and well-understood, and once the student can discern these things for himself, then problems can be fixed up and solved right away that otherwise might persist. Tabuteau said that every note has a different place - that was the bad news I got in France! We have to be oboe players in the same way great athletes function - doing difficult things from a posture of relaxation, so that anything is possible at any instant. The only security comes in flexibility. Some players learn to play with a pressure level that might be appropriate for only three notes out of twelve say, and everything else sounds forced or saggy. Most of us get into rigidity out of defensiveness. Most of us play reeds - or have at one stage - that are so unstable that the pitch implications are drastic and at times intolerable, so we bite flat reeds up and the teeth never come apart. Or there's a sagging tendency because of weak sides, and then the wind speed never varies. Sometimes it's the best players who have the biggest problems because their musical standards are high enough not to tolerate these pitch discrepancies. And then it always comes back to whether the student has the courage and the capacity to make big changes. Flexible control of wind, reed opening and placement is the "basic technique" Tabuteau said every player should master before trying to imitate great performers. It's the heart and soul of correct tone production, and it's much too complicated to discuss thoroughly here, unfortunately.
DS: Should we get back to your biography? You studied in France - then when you came back to the States did you immediately go into professional playing?
JR: We talked some about catabolic experience. It really took me a couple of years to feel "healed" because Tabuteau was so severe, and he said pedagogy was like a grain of sand to the oyster - it takes a while to make a pearl. He was deliberately abrasive - even ferocious at times - and I must say, inescapable - and I suffered a good bit under his heel. But what he did for me was to absolutely revolutionize my thinking about playing, because until I went over there my approach was like that of every "all-stater," every high school player with some ability. I'd played just about everything I'd heard of; I was looking around for the next hard piece to learn. And what he had to say about my "sickness" as an oboe player meant that I just didn't know ANYTHING about the interpretive art, per se. So what he did was open my eyes to the infinite creative possibilities that exist playing a musical instrument in an artistic way, so that what had seemed limited to me suddenly became boundless. And I realized that here was a man of magnificent gifts, who would have succeeded at anything, who still loved experimenting with an eight-note phrase of his own invention, turning inflections and dynamics upside down and changing the colors, playing with all these variables to produce something spontaneous and fascinatingly new. He would take a particularly favorite melody, like the Schumann piano concerto, and spend two weeks fooling with it. This whole idea, that there is infinite treasure to be mined from old familiar notes, gave me a keener appreciation of the interpretive artist and greater respect for our profession. Then when I went to Marlboro, Casals reinforced many of the same things Tabuteau stood for, the idea, for instance, that the music is just a blueprint, and the musician's goal is to project the architecture of the piece, developing its symmetry in an understandable way for the audience. I just remembered an analogy that occurred to me when we discussed ping-pong balls earlier - Tabuteau said oboe tone should be like a ping-pong ball on a fountain of water, buoyed and constantly renewed. He used that expression all the time, and his tone had something about it that I think was unique, a kind of buoyancy and vitality that was just like that, like sunlight reflected off a lake. There was a dazzling, shimmery quality on the top - at the same time, it was deep and complete, on the bottom. I must tell you it feels as if it was only yesterday that I heard that sound, and the search for something like it is what compels me still as a player.
Now I know we should say more about vibrato, and I found myself joining all those people who are coy about it, and you know, Tabuteau was too. He would not touch the subject, except to say that if the tone is produced correctly vibrato will take care of itself. There was a discernible overlay of undulation in his tone, which of course we'd call vibrato. He was careful not to move the pitch around, and I think we'd all agree with the importance of that. But how he produced the vibrato, he never would say. What vibrato I have I developed consciously by doing on the oboe what I did when I sang, so I'm sure it's largely a throat vibrato. I think my throat vibrato is inhibited under high pressure, so sometimes when I need it most, it's least obvious. That's when I supplement the throat with a diaphragm vibrato. For me, the vibrato is generally an easy and permissive thing. When I'm backed to the wall because of a high dynamic situation I then have to get my gut into the picture. But my vibrato is usually a function of relaxation and freedom, rather than the opposite. It seems important to inform the student whose vibrato is out of bounds, that the limits of undulation are quite circumscribed. In other words, the student needn't be too permissive. Sometimes it's a problem getting people to calm down a little bit. Other times vibrato is like the pursuit of happiness, it's better not sought directly! I've had students with vibrato problems, and the more anxious they become about the subject, the more tied in knots they become. Most of my students can sing a vibrato - that seems almost irresistible; and a relaxed approach to playing the oboe almost invites that kind of undulation in the tone. Other students may have to create a vibrato by using a series of breath accents, and if all else fails I tell my students they can always pump something like that into their tone. For a long while, the only kind of vibrato one could talk about was diaphragm. Admitting to using the throat vibrato was like confessing to some kind of sin. Vibrato is a very personal sort of thing, and happily, thinking on the subject isn't quite so polarized now as it once was. However, one still hears poor playing discussed in most complimentary terms for the vibrato, while other players who have impressive professional skills worry all the time about it and feel as if they don't have enough vibrato, or a good one.
To fill in some of the gaps in my "biography," I came back from Germany to attend the University of Maryland because John Mack had just written to tell me that he was going to the National Symphony job in Washington, and I thought this might be a good place to concentrate on oboe study with him. It didn't work out so well because the University hired a faculty oboist whose orientation was quite different from Mack's, and I was obliged to work with him as part of my graduate fellowship. My time was spent doing theory assignments, piano lessons, term papers on Hans Leo Hassler - and going across town to see Mack for oboe lessons on weekends or whenever we could arrange them, but hardly actually playing the oboe at all. The irony of all this is that when I finally got to a music school, I was less involved with oboe playing than I'd ever been. In the middle of that disappointing year, a friend told me about the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and when I applied and got in Mack wrote to Nicholas Harsanyi, and said "here's a good oboe player - put him to work!" So I was once again a student rather than a musician, but playing constantly - in the Princeton Chamber Orchestra - very much encouraged and appreciated for my oboe playing. I finished at Princeton in 1966 and received a job offer from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, but during a visit with my parents in North Carolina I received a call from James Yestadt, whom I had known at Brevard, asking me to play first oboe in the Mobile Symphony. There it was - just like that, fallen from the sky, every young oboist's dream come true! So I went to Mobile in the fall of '66, to be a professional oboist, and John Mack cut the umbilical cord. It was finally time to "sink or swim" - "you're on your own now," he said. I played the first week of rehearsals on his dying reeds, and stayed up till 3 a.m. every night, frantically trying to scratch something out to replace them. The pace was so slow that I could make one reed out of 25 work. This was where the price began to be exacted for my years of "high living" on the oboe! I had to go through hell to even begin to catch up. I'm surely not king of the reedmakers now, but I do think I came out ahead for going through those torments.
Let me explain about the reed business. When I was with Tabuteau in Nice, I asked him one day what made him so great. Of course that was a silly, immature question, but Tabuteau didn't hesitate or bat an eye. He had a ready answer. He said the difference between him and the other oboe players of his era was that he knew when he was getting off the track and he knew how to get back on the track.
He didn't tell me how he knew he was off and how to get back, but I've thought about his answer a lot in the 16 years since I heard it.
We oboists are almost always forced to overcome instrumental deficiencies when we make music, because our reeds are not as good as we would like them to be. Over a long period of time, the compensations we develop to overcome these deficiencies become like Frankensteins - monsters that are our masters. Without realizing it we are making reeds and adjusting our oboes to serve our compensations, and we are, in Tabuteau's words, "off the track." Rattly, unstable, flat reeds become necessary in embouchures of steel, so that reed tendencies that once caused grief in the beginning are actually desirable to players who are "on the wrong track!"
To get back on the right track, it is necessary to keep one's musical compensations in perspective, and to have some independent frame of reference for judging reeds. I have my students check their reeds by playing them as if they were whistling, testing for responsiveness, intonation, and quality with the least effort of wind and lips possible. The difference between what one hears from such a reed test and what one would like to hear, is the REED DEFICIENCY GAP. The efforts needed to subdue and civilize a bad reed can then be judged and measured, and the extent of these compensations can be perceived by the player.
It can be argued that my use of Mack's reeds for ten years was risky and even dishonest, since my playing did not completely reflect my own creative efforts. It is true, on the other hand, that I developed mature performance skills with a minimum of compensatory defects, and that, when I did finally begin to make my own reeds, I had the clearest possible idea what the "right track" was basically all about.
In 1967 I auditioned for Robert Shaw in Atlanta and got the job, and I stayed there for six years. At that time the season was much like Mobile's - thirty-six weeks, with only one concert a week. The next season the concerts tripled - three a week, and I was doing all the playing, no co-principal to help out, so I had about a seven-fold increase in work load in one year. In the meantime, I'm afraid I had underestimated the severity of reed-making, and the gouging machine as far as I'm concerned is the most perplexing part of it. I have a gouging machine fetish. I was so impressed by Tabuteau's having gouging machines all over his studio, and by the fact that if in five minutes a reed wasn't working out, he'd change machines or change the blade. He really had the idea that the gouge could do it all. I use a Graf machine, but it's been so adjusted and readjusted and patched, you wouldn't believe! I don't think now that I could be as consistent, even though I change the gouge around all the time, if I were to play on commercially gouged cane. I have control over some variables that I don't trust anyone else to take care of . . . selection of cane from the tube for instance. I take every tube and roll it around a radius gauge for a 10 1/2 mm diameter and pick the piece that fits so I can take the outside curve for granted. Tabuteau gouged 100 pieces of cane for me in 1965 - I didn't appreciate then what a chore that was every single piece was arrow straight and perfectly flat, and the curve was regular. Much commercial cane has to be thrown away. Careless preparation in the gouging process often results in open sides near the tip, and I luckily don't have that problem, although you see many people who do. I still remember a time with Eric Barr when, with a dramatic breakthrough with a blade, we both knew that we'd hit on something special. Mediocre cane became good, and Eric's reeds were all better - not all equally good, but all better, than before, and the best ones were super, I'd say his reedmaking became big league from that time. Last spring something like that happened for me - just by accident, and unfortunately that seems to be the way it happens. The thickness of the cane measured from the center to the sides surely is important - and Tabuteau said something about thin sides being the curse - but he also said his teacher, Gillet, gouged cane .55 in the middle. Maybe the cane back then was better. .58 to .60 is where I stay in the middle but the dramatic development for me came when I went to much thicker sides than I'd ever thought acceptable. I'd assumed that .45 on the sides was just the limit, but I started gouging around .50 on the sides and voila! The most important thing regarding the strength of the opening and the spring that's in the cane, whether the gouge encourages or discourages vibration particularly in the middle, depends more on the curve of the blade than the cane's absolute thickness. The strongest place in the gouge is where the curve is the most accentuated, so that you can have too much displacement of the gouge when you turn the cane if you use the double radius gouge that most people nowadays are using. Squeezing the reed in the back should cause the tip to close eagerly from the sides to the middle - and it seems that this is a good indicator of the reed's good health. The worst, of course, is if the middle closes before the sides - or anything flat. I think reeds tend to vibrate down the sides-down the rails, and the hard thing is to get the reeds to vibrate eagerly across the arch into the middle, with the feeling that the reed is secure on the sides and active in the middle. After all, that permits you to be most free with the embouchure. Sick reeds want to vibrate down the sides - so the big search for me has been how to get the reeds to vibrate more in the middle, less on the sides. Any irregularity in the gouge can also cause the reed's pitch to be lower than if the gouge were perfectly straight, and sometimes the gouge measurement isn't the same from end to end. . that's disaster! If I can't get the pitch up and my reeds are coming out consistently short, I begin looking right there . . when things are healthy I guess my reeds average 70 mm long.
Alliaud has been the most successful source of tube cane for me over the years but the best reeds I've ever made have been on Guatemalan cane that I cut myself some years ago. I spend at least 20 hours a week making reeds, and often more than that. The best way to learn to make reeds, it seems to me, is to try to make reeds do certain minimum things objectively and dispassionately, free from that gut-wrenching fear "Am I going to have something for tonight's concert?" And so I'll gouge 10 pieces of cane all the same way, shape them, tie them up, scrape them to do certain minimum things, and for me that means respond easily, crow C, and be relatively free of rattle. Now if it gets the octave in proportion that's even better. Most students make reeds for what they look like, and it's hard to resist that. I did that for years. But the important thing is to scrape the reed for what it does rather than the way it looks. The real raw material in reed-making is the reed's vibration rather than the cane itself!
This truth became clear to me when I went to Blossom one summer and John Mack was scraping only two-thirds of the reed, with at least one-third in the back untouched. These short-scrape reeds felt the way Mack reeds always had, despite their extraordinary appearance, they did all the same wonderful things I was used to. So I spent the next whole year trying to make shorter scrape reeds. When I came back the following summer, John was scraping back almost to the string! The reeds continued to act and feel the same to me despite subtle distinctions in tone and response and despite the dramatic change in their appearance. I've seen John Mack reeds with long tips and others with very short ones, reeds with thick sides and with thin-the thing they all have in common is that they work! My first breakthrough with reeds came when I learned that scraping cane was not the same thing as woodcarving but was rather a manipulation of the vibration of the cane. Considering what makes the cane vibrate, and where, has become my constant preoccupation.
DS: Why don't we get back to your chronology . . . when you left the Atlanta Symphony?
JR: In 1973 I left Atlanta to join the faculty of the University of Maryland. That was following two disappointing auditions for the National Symphony. For years I had thought that Washington would be the perfect place to make sense of my sort of schizophrenic background, a place where I could be a politician "incognito," lobbying for the arts as an oboe player in the Nation's Capitol. But that was a romantic notion, and not very practical when I put it to the test. After one year I went back to North Carolina, to join the faculty of the N.C. School of the Arts. It is an extraordinary institution that had interested me from its beginning, when I had even arranged for Tabuteau to spend time as an artist in residence there if he had not passed away early in 1966.
DS: I gather, from my visit there, that it was a successful tenure there for you, at least from the standpoint of high-quality students?
JR: Yes, going to Winston-Salem meant returning to my old "briar-patch." It was a good place to start a family, surrounded by friends and relatives, and there was a stimulating mixture of academic and performance responsibilities in that position. I never dreamed, of course, that I 'd move from Winston-Salem to the New York Philharmonic, four years later, and in fact my wife and I said long before the audition, thinking about these things, that New York would be definitely "out" as a professional possibility.
DS: Now that you're actually here, do you feel that it's having an effect on your family's life?
JR: I should emphasize that I'm very grateful to be back in the symphony orchestra business . . . and of course I'm older and wiser than when I first got into it, so l don't have the same kind of idealism about the profession that I had in Atlanta. I don't feel jaded, but I don't feel quite so naive about it either. My feeling is mostly one of gratitude for being back with this repertory and I can also appreciate better than some who've only been involved in orchestral work, the tremendous amount of work involved in the alternatives! We did not have an easy life down there in North Carolina! Teaching at that pace, and still having to maintain performance standards at a high level is hard,- because even in the most remote outpost, the music is still just as difficult! The Mozart quartet is the same piece whether you're in Kalamazoo or in New York! To tell the truth, it's now a relief to be concentrating upon performance. Of course, I do have many students, but my life is now much less fragmented than before. The performance pace here is intense, but committee meetings, what have you, all conspire to produce 60-hour weeks in Academia and then one must squeeze in time for practice and performances after that.
DS: Your magnetism as a teacher will surely increase . . . how do you plan to allocate your time, in line with what we discussed about family considerations earlier?
JR: This is a tough question . . . everyone has to make his own choice about these things. There's a Faustian dilemma at the heart of this business, and I'm not ready to sacrifice EVERYTHING for excellence as a player for fear that that might be a hollow victory down the road. Art has to be enlivened by experience outside itself, and one must have a broader experience in life than one's own performances. My two daughters and my wife - our family life together-probably means more to me than anything else, but daily decisions, with all of the concert and student pressures crowding in, do not always reflect that priority.
DS: Finally, what about the subject of auditions in general . . . and how to prepare for them?
JR: In Atlanta, preparing each concert as it came along exhausted me- (true confessions time!) - I don't know whether you've done that or not - but when I left, I began to practice every day in a fixed routine. You know - a pattern of long tones, scales, arpeggios, trills, and a whole sequence of things chasing up the metronome, than regular etude study. At Maryland for the first time in maybe ten years, I was practicing in an indirect way, rather than trying to master some difficult passage for that week's concert. This kind of practice - indirect - made it possible, to my surprise, to master some difficult excerpts, that had frustrated me when I tackled them head-on. That had a good deal to do with my being better prepared for the Philharmonic audition than for earlier ones. I spent probably two hours a day in basic training, not counting the other playing I was doing, for 32 straight days prior to the Philharmonic finals. I was so weary of preparing for the audition that I was eager to play. The nerves disappeared and I really kept my mind on the music. So as advice to people preparing for auditions, I'd say don't spend a lot of time trying to make a perfect reed . . . and of course, you have to go into training as though you were going to run a marathon. Weariness decimates the crop. In the first round I played alone for 50 minutes straight, with the last excerpt the slow movement of Tchaikovsky 4th, then for thirty minutes with the wind section, so the audition was an endurance ordeal as much as anything.
As a last word, by way of summing up, I suppose my case history proves that unconventional paths sometimes lead to success, and that failure can be father to victory. Students with talent, discernment and discipline, whatever their pedigree, always have a chance for a fulfilling career!