Her mouth had a feline-minus-the-whiskers look to it, and I was always a little afraid that she would nibble her reed to bits. I would drop little warnings all the time: don’t bite, be gentle, oh – careful with that, it’s fragile! But there would always be some sort of mini-accident, clipping the tip on her pointy cat teeth, biting down instead of not biting at all, crashing her reed into the bookcase and destroying it entirely.
Reeds are crucial to oboe playing. They have to be strong and agile enough to handle the airstream, they have to vibrate just right to create that beautiful sound. If there’s any minor deficiency, the ability to play at all ranges from squeaky awful to not at all. They can go from functioning to destroyed in a flash.
My catlike student Pammie never warmed up to the reed thing. There are so many instruments that stand up better to the rough and tumble kids. Brass instruments can take it. Maybe Pammie should play the trumpet? I wondered about this, thinking maybe so.
One day, driving along Baseline, I saw her out on the streetcorner near her middle school with a few of her classmates, instruments out and blatting at passing cars. The trumpets and trombones, of course, were best at this. Her clarinet friend got in some good screeches. I didn’t actually hear a peep from Pammie, but she gave a good show of aiming her bell at the traffic. I ask her about this at her lesson.
“We were yelling!” she says, “through our instruments! We were protesting fossil fuel vehicles! With. Our. Instruments! We thought it up ourselves. Like a flashmob.”
“Ok.” Could they get in trouble for this? “And what were you saying through your oboe?”
She looks at me like I’m speaking Swedish. “Stop fracking. Stop hurting Mother Earth like that.”
“Ok,” I said. “Can you play it for me? What you were yelling with your oboe?” Do I really want to hear this?
She plays a series of long, low Cs in exactly the rhythm she just spoke in. Well-articulated, mournful. I feel moved in a peculiar way.
Pammie’s playing improves. Her reeds last a little longer because she figures out how to care for them. She develops a pretty, dark sound that is rare in high school students, much less 8th graders. She becomes fond of baroque music, which is great repertoire for the oboe. And on her own, she tracks down information about how oboes are made. “Endangered African Blackwood,” she slumps down in the chair. “A lot of it harvested illegally by colonialists.” How does she know what colonialism is? Was. Continues to be.
“I know,” I say. I don’t tell her that I’ve had my own angst about this for some time.
“My oboe should still be a tree growing in Tanzania.”
“I know,” I reply. We sit there in silence for a few minutes.
“But since it’s already an oboe, I should honor its life by playing it. Right?”
Who is this kid? I tear up. When I was her age, all I thought about was practicing and becoming Really Good and being happy that I had a great instrument. I didn’t correlate oboe with a tree, ever. “I think that’s the best thing we can do,” I tell her. I mention that I think it’s amazing that she and her friends had the idea to blare loud sounds to protest fossil fuels.
“I’m going to protest deforestation, too.” She looks from her oboe to me with a serious look that only middle schoolers can pull off.
We play through a Telemann canonic duet. She’s very focused, sounding pretty good. Honoring the tree that became her oboe.
“Wait. What about the reeds?” She wants to know what reeds really are, what kind of plant and is it renewable? I tell her that it is, that cane is from a giant grass plant called arundo donax and that in some places it’s considered an invasive plant. This appeases her a little. “People should know this stuff,” she says. “People should know where it all comes from and that we stole some of it. That oboes used to be actual trees and if we cut them all down, no more oboes.”
She’s right.
To learn more:
https://www.brendaschumanpost.com/sustainable-african-blackwood
I'm assuming this is a story from your past, and Pammie is all grown up now. I wonder how she is nourishing our world with her spirit, and I hope she is still making music. Thank you for the links. Knowing things like this can enhance our listening experience. Nice post, Kathy. I love your stories.
Beautiful. So powerful.