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Performer Guides: Oboe

Use this guide to find resources for music performance, including LC call number browsing ranges for repertoire, books, and journals..

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Finding Repertoire for the Oboe:

If you're looking for new repertoire to perform, it is often helpful to browse the Music Library's scores. The following call number ranges are for oboe music; individual works within these numbers are arranged alphabetically by composer or arranger:

  • M65-M69, oboe alone 
  • M245-M247, oboe and piano
  • M1022, oboe with orchestra (full score)
  • M1023, oboe with orchestra (piano reduction)
  • M1122, oboe with string orchestra (full score)
  • M1123, oboe with string orchestra (piano reduction)

Excerpts, etudes, and instructional materials are classified in the MT range and housed in the same location as books about music (MLs):

  • MT360, General works
  • MT362, Systems and methods
  • MT365, Studies and exercises
  • MT366, Orchestral studies (excerpts

Digital Score Apps:

The Wilson Music Library provides Blair students, faculty, and staff with free access to nkoda and Henle through our subscription. Follow the instructions below to start using these popular apps today.

Selected Books on the Oboe and Oboists:

Great Oboists on Music and Musicianship

What do the world's most prominent oboists have to say about their musical ideas, performance techniques, and teaching strategies? Michele L. Fiala and Martin Schuring, themselves skilled oboists, undertook the project of asking twenty-six of them about their musicianship and pedagogy. Theresults are collected in Great Oboists on Music and Musicianship, which provides a unique window into how these virtuosi of wind instruments think about their craft.Each chapter paints an engaging portrait of a leading oboist that allows them to share - in their own words - their insights on the performance techniques, learning strategies, and career moves that propelled them to their current stature. The captivating prose chapters that Fiala and Schuringcomposed from the interviews allow each artist's personality to shine through as they convey their hard-won wisdom on topics such as musical interpretation, the relationship between vocal and instrumental music, being a good ensemble player, and warm-up routines. The diverse array of musiciansportrayed in this book includes orchestral and solo performers from across North America, Europe, and Australia. Their practical advice will resonate not just with oboists but also with players and teachers of other instruments as they pursue their own musical journeys.

Oboe Unbound: Contemporary Techniques

After decades of experimentation, musicians have begun to utilize a strikingly colorful palette of sounds on woodwind instruments. Flute, clarinet, and saxophone players, in many different musical settings, regularly use sounds that were unheard of in the middle of the twentieth century. Oboists, in comparison, have lagged somewhat behind their more adventurous colleagues. In writing Oboe Unbound: Contemporary Techniques, author Libby Van Cleve opens up the tradition-bound assumptions of the instrument's capabilities. Not only does she include descriptions of the instrument's standard technique from range and reeds to the use of vibrato, but she also discusses recent techniques, such as multiphonics, microtones, altered timbres, and extended range, to name a few. Van Cleve bolsters this book with numerous music examples and professionally-tested fingering charts, and concludes with basic information about the use of electronics for amplification, recording, and sound enhancement. The book's appendixes include a substantial bibliography of music and literature and a discography including jazz, non-western, and art music recordings. The revised edition incorporates new information about resources now available through the internet and marks the launch of a website that includes examples of all the contemporary sounds as well as audio and video recordings of unreleased compositions.

Oboe Secrets: 75 Performance Secrets for the Advanced Oboist and English Horn Player

Modeled on the brilliant approach first formulated by distinguished professor of music and master clarinetist Michele Gingras in Clarinet Secrets and More Clarinet Secrets (both available from Scarecrow Press), Music Secrets for the Advanced Musician: A Scarecrow Press Music Series is designed for instrumentalists, singers, conductors, composers, and other instructors and professionals seeking a quick set of pointers to improve their work as performers and producers of music. Easy to use and intended for the advanced musician, contributions to the Music Secrets series fill a niche for those who have moved beyond what beginners and intermediate practitioners need. In Oboe Secrets: 75 Performance Strategies for the Advanced Oboist and English Horn Player, Jacqueline Leclair tackles the oboe's reputation as an especially difficult instrument and illustrates how oboists and English horn players can overcome common challenges. Leclair draws on her experience as a performer and instructor, offering practical tips and sometimes revolutionary ideas for rethinking oboe pedagogy. Leclair also looks at performance strategies in the areas of equipment maintenance and management, physical health, and performance technique. Her secrets focus on such matters as how to optimize practice sessions, build endurance, improve use of the body when playing, work with reeds, and apply extended techniques. Oboe Secrets provides oboists and English horn players a quick and efficient path to significant improvement--both technically and musically--in their playing. It is the perfect resource for advanced high school oboists, professional performers, music instructors, and avid amateur musicians.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Oboe Reedmaking

A comprehensive guide to oboe reedmaking covering: scraping and sharpening; cane and reed blank preparation; reedmaking for non-reedmakers. Right-hand version.

Marcel Tabuteau: How Do You Expect to Play the Oboe if You Can't Peel a Mushroom?

Laila Storch is a world-renowned oboist in her own right, but her new book honors Marcel Tabuteau, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century music. Tabuteau studied the oboe from an early age at the Paris Conservatoire and was brought to the United States in 1905, by Walter Damrosch, to play with the New York Symphony Orchestra. Although this posed a problem for the national musicians' union, he was ultimately allowed to stay, and the rest, as they say, is history. Eventually moving to Philadelphia, Tabuteau played in the Philadelphia Orchestra and taught at the Curtis Institute of Music, ultimately revamping the oboe world with his performance, pedagogical, and reed-making techniques. In 1941, Storch auditioned for Tabuteau at the Curtis Institute, but was rejected because of her gender. After much persistence and several cross-country bus trips, she was eventually accepted and began a life of study with Tabuteau. Blending archival research with personal anecdotes, Storch tells a remarkable story in an engaging style.

The Oboe

The oboe, including its earlier forms the shawm and the hautboy, is an instrument with a long and rich history. In this book two distinguished oboist-musicologists trace that history from its beginnings to the present time, discussing how and why the oboe evolved, what music was written for it, and which players were prominent. Geoffrey Burgess and Bruce Haynes begin by describing the oboe’s prehistory and subsequent development out of the shawm in the mid-seventeenth century. They then examine later stages of the instrument, from the classical hautboy to the transition to a keyed oboe and eventually the Conservatoire-system oboe. The authors consider the instrument’s place in Romantic and Modernist music and analyze traditional and avant-garde developments after World War II. Noting the oboe’s appearance in paintings and other iconography, as well as in distinctive musical contexts, they examine what this reveals about the instrument’s social function in different eras. Throughout the book they discuss the great performers, from the pioneers of the seventeenth century to the traveling virtuosi of the eighteenth, the masters of the romantic period and the legends of the twentieth century such as Gillet, Goossens, Tabuteau, and Holliger. With its extensive illustrations, useful technical appendices, and discography, this is a comprehensive and authoritative volume that will be the essential companion for every woodwind student and performer.

The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy, 1640-1760

The Eloquent Oboe is a history of the hautboy, the oboe of the Baroque period. It reflects recent interest in this instrument, which was the first of the woodwinds to join with strings in creating the new orchestra, and had by the end of the 20th century again become a regular presence on theconcert scene. Between 1640 and 1760 this type of oboe underwent dramatic changes in both function and physical form, and the majority of its solo and chamber repertoire appeared. Haynes examines in detail the hautboy's structure, its players, makers, and composers, issues of performing style andperiod techniques, how and where the instrument was played, and who listened to it.

Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to performing with the orchestras of "Les Miserables and "Miss Saigon, oboist Blair Tindall has been playin g classical music professionally for twenty-five years. She's also lived the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth, trading sex and drugs for low-paying gigs and the promise of winning a rare symphony position or a lucrative solo recording contract. In "Mozart in the Jungle, Tindall delves into her own life and the lives of the musicians and conductors show inhabit the insular world of classical music. After having an affair with her forty-three-year-old teacher at the age of sixteen, Tindall graduates from the North Carolina School of the Arts to the back-biting New York classical music scene, a world where classical musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in musicals and orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions--in the cramped confines of a Broadway pit, the decibel level of one instrument is equal to the sound of a chain saw. "Mozari in the Jungle offers a stark contrast between the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars and those of the working-class musicians who schelp across the city from low-paying gig to low-paying gig, without health-care benefits or retirement plans. For lovers of classical music, "Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the Broadway pit.