(no subject)
Sufjan Stevens
An Oboist with So-So Virbato
When my mother dropped me off at music school in upstate New York, she said, "Oh Jesus help this kid be something special!" She wanted a child prodigy, like Mozart and Lizst, but I was just an oboist with so-so vibrato. When my mother left, I changed my name from Horace to Horatio. It was a boarding school. You could be whatever you wanted for a year. I told everyone I was from Argentina, which made things better, since I was last chair in the orchestra. I refused to speak Spanish since I was in America now and I wanted to be American.
In truth, I was from Michigan. I wore Izods and stonewashed jeans, tight-rolled. I had a Midwestern slang. I said things like hoydie-doydie and naw. My father was an elder at a Pentecostal church. My mother cleaned our kitchen for a living. I was raised in a house with more bibles than aspirin tabs.
No one caught on because in music school you spend so much time repeating minor arpeggios that you don't notice other people's accents or skin tone. You only notice embouchure and posture. You envy someone else's G-sharp major scales and circle breathing. If you were an oboist, like me, you noticed the shape of a reed, the wood tone and nationality of the instrument: French Loree or Rogoutat. If you had a plastic oboe, like me, you were told not to leave your instrument on the radiator since it would melt and ruin a perfectly good case. I decided to rent an oboe from the music library; it was made of African balsam. "At least you don't sound like a saxophone anymore," Heather Wong said after sectionals. She was just being nice since she was second to last chair.
The other players fondled their oboes like exotic wives, with bulbed bells and cotton pads and gold-plaited keys. The best players used peacock plumes to swab. I used an old sock and a piece of string. Sarah Sinigesson said her father found her oboe in an abandoned Egyptian attic; it was worth ten grand, she said. I said my plastic oboe cost me two-fifty brand-new. She said, "Oh Horatio, that's just awful."
We learned to make double reeds with bamboo cane and colored thread. We shaped them with Vitry knives and a straight edge. I practiced for six hours every day. There was nothing else to do. I played Marcello, Vivaldi or Verdi, because Italians knew how to make something sound pretty with just a triad and some trills. But I was terrible.
"Relax your wrists!" Mr. Blund would say during my lesson. "If I see you use forked-F again, I will cut off your hands." Mr. Blund said he was very respected in Belgium. Mr. Blund said he couldn't wait to get out of this God-forsaken penitentiary and tour with a real symphony. He was right. The campus was stuck in a knot of trees: a row of cinderblock buildings and a performance hall shaped like a UFO. Every room on campus was sound proofed with synthetic pads and asbestos. Everywhere you went it felt like an asylum.
Juries were worse than The Gong Show. Anyone could sit in and offer remarks about intonation or timing. A bassoonist named Barbara Mushwater once stopped me in the middle of Wagner to tell me my retardation of the slurred note before the cadence was bad. I said I didn't know there was such a thing as good retardation, but no one found it very funny. I said, "Could you be more specific than bad?"
She said no, that about summed it up.
An Oboist with So-So Virbato
When my mother dropped me off at music school in upstate New York, she said, "Oh Jesus help this kid be something special!" She wanted a child prodigy, like Mozart and Lizst, but I was just an oboist with so-so vibrato. When my mother left, I changed my name from Horace to Horatio. It was a boarding school. You could be whatever you wanted for a year. I told everyone I was from Argentina, which made things better, since I was last chair in the orchestra. I refused to speak Spanish since I was in America now and I wanted to be American.
In truth, I was from Michigan. I wore Izods and stonewashed jeans, tight-rolled. I had a Midwestern slang. I said things like hoydie-doydie and naw. My father was an elder at a Pentecostal church. My mother cleaned our kitchen for a living. I was raised in a house with more bibles than aspirin tabs.
No one caught on because in music school you spend so much time repeating minor arpeggios that you don't notice other people's accents or skin tone. You only notice embouchure and posture. You envy someone else's G-sharp major scales and circle breathing. If you were an oboist, like me, you noticed the shape of a reed, the wood tone and nationality of the instrument: French Loree or Rogoutat. If you had a plastic oboe, like me, you were told not to leave your instrument on the radiator since it would melt and ruin a perfectly good case. I decided to rent an oboe from the music library; it was made of African balsam. "At least you don't sound like a saxophone anymore," Heather Wong said after sectionals. She was just being nice since she was second to last chair.
The other players fondled their oboes like exotic wives, with bulbed bells and cotton pads and gold-plaited keys. The best players used peacock plumes to swab. I used an old sock and a piece of string. Sarah Sinigesson said her father found her oboe in an abandoned Egyptian attic; it was worth ten grand, she said. I said my plastic oboe cost me two-fifty brand-new. She said, "Oh Horatio, that's just awful."
We learned to make double reeds with bamboo cane and colored thread. We shaped them with Vitry knives and a straight edge. I practiced for six hours every day. There was nothing else to do. I played Marcello, Vivaldi or Verdi, because Italians knew how to make something sound pretty with just a triad and some trills. But I was terrible.
"Relax your wrists!" Mr. Blund would say during my lesson. "If I see you use forked-F again, I will cut off your hands." Mr. Blund said he was very respected in Belgium. Mr. Blund said he couldn't wait to get out of this God-forsaken penitentiary and tour with a real symphony. He was right. The campus was stuck in a knot of trees: a row of cinderblock buildings and a performance hall shaped like a UFO. Every room on campus was sound proofed with synthetic pads and asbestos. Everywhere you went it felt like an asylum.
Juries were worse than The Gong Show. Anyone could sit in and offer remarks about intonation or timing. A bassoonist named Barbara Mushwater once stopped me in the middle of Wagner to tell me my retardation of the slurred note before the cadence was bad. I said I didn't know there was such a thing as good retardation, but no one found it very funny. I said, "Could you be more specific than bad?"
She said no, that about summed it up.