Learning to Play; or, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back II

I think a capacity for silliness or playfulness is important. I find that people who don't seem to have one either are miserable or tend to make other people miserable, or at the very least extremely annoyed.

In med school I wrote a contemplative poem about my cadaver. That was not playful. But the little verse below, also penned during medical school, was meant to be, another self-check to make sure I wasn't taking everything so seriously all the time. In the wake of my recent ranting and raving, I include it as a way of stepping back and lightening up a little.

Ode to a Mitochondrion; or,

a medical student's homage to Ogden Nash

Cristae, cristae curling 'round,

In your matrix have we found

A clue to evolution's jaunt?

Are you an endosymbiont?

:)

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My son started taking violin lessons with my daughter's best friend's mom. Naturally when he brought home his little rental violin we all wanted to try it. No one sounded as screechy and awful as I did. It was pitiful. Best of all was our little boy, who produced a rich, mellow tone from it right from the start. I asked his teacher how this was possible - we had all been expecting to have to plug our ears during practice time to get through the squeaky beginning phase - and her explanation was eye-opening. Without a relaxed grip on the bow, it can't vibrate against the strings properly, and you get that awful scraping noise, whereas if one just eases up a little and "goes" with it - "goes with the bow," as it were - a nice tone comes out. The moral of the story is I am way too tense, and I need to learn to be more like my child who, despite a bit of an anxious nature, is still relaxed enough to be open to his experiences and just let the music flow through him. Maybe that's what's meant in part by "the kingdom of God belongs to such as these."

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That being said, I have to confess my annoyometer registered a pretty high reading this afternoon when I was dealing with someone from a local oboe reed manufacturer on the phone. This manufacturer charges $4.00 for delivery even though the same box sent through the mail by another manufacturer shows postage for MUCH less (like, by about 300%). Already this was irritating the first time I ordered from them. At that time I asked if I could pick the reeds up in person because I live so close by. They agreed, and it turned out the pick-up spot was two streets over from my house. Today I called and asked if I could do the same, and the woman made reluctant noises before saying finally, "We really don't like to do it that way."

"Why not?!" I asked, unable to imagine a powerful enough reason for her to object to such a sensible arrangement.

"Well, it's just coordinating everything..."

"But there's nothing to coordinate. The last time you let me know when they were ready, and I walked over, opened the front door, and picked them up from the foyer."

"Well...we like the orders to all to go out at once."

Eventually she agreed I could come on foot the two ridiculous little blocks, not worth $4.00, and pick up the reeds on Monday, but this whole exchange struck me as silly - not the kind of silliness I was advocating when I first started writing this post, but the ANNOYING kind, the kind of bad PR that makes you never want to call the company back or order from them ever again.

The problem is, their reeds are REALLY good, and I still haven't gotten to the point of learning how to make my own. Sigh...that's the trouble with getting attached to a brand. The only thing worse than your favorite pen or ice cream flavor or lip gloss getting discontinued is it remaining available but at the hands of people you don't really want to deal with!

First lesson of the fall is next week. Between my travels and my call schedule, not to mention my kids' activities, I may have to start from square one. This summer oboe hiatus has gotten pretty worrisome. I can feel my gains slipping away. I need to remember the lesson from my son's violin: I gotta just relax and go with the flow.

Lesson 7

Good lesson today! I'm improving! Kyoko will be leaving for the Colorado Music Festival, so I won't have another lesson till August. We crammed a lot of material in - long tones, little etudes from the method book, a teensy bit of repertoire, reed adjustments. One of my favorite moments was when she connected for me the anatomy/physiology of wind production with the physics of the oboe - and explained the greater breath support needed to counter the loss of wind velocity for notes played further down the length of the instrument. The doctor in me thought, This, I get!

She gave me one of her reeds as a summer gift, and it's the best one I have so far. And she gave me homework: Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. I'm going to have to work on my breathing for that one! One of my other favorite moments of the lesson was at the end, when, after talking about Bach for a bit, we started humming Sleepers Awake together and couldn't bring ourselves to stop. Bach has a way of reeling you in...

I've figured out why, for me, oboe is harder than piano. I need to recruit more of me to play the oboe - lungs, abdominal muscles, and oropharyngeal muscles in addition to arms and hands. When I hit a key on a piano, a sound is guaranteed; not so on the oboe. And notes on the piano keyboard are spatially arranged in ascending/descending order, logically. On the oboe there's definitely more jumping around that's not always intuitive. On the plus side, with the oboe we only have to worry about one note at a time...but I think it's harder to make that note sound "just right."

I've listened to more oboe music now and have come to the conclusion that pieces written specifically for the oboe are often less appealing than oboe parts written within larger orchestral works. That said, I have to admit I can't seem to go a day without hearing at least the first movement of Vaughan Williams' Concerto for Oboe and Strings, the second movement of Saint-Saens' Sonata for Oboe and Piano, and little snippets of Albinoni's and Marcello's concertos. I've also found some shorter works by Henri Sauget and Fernando Sor that I really like.

Yesterday my daughter had a piano recital and did beautifully. I don't know how she can be so relaxed about them. That's probably WHY she does well. I have been plagued by terrible stage fright in more than one area of my life and I've already told my oboe teacher I can't possibly EVER do a recital. At most maybe I'll play at church someday. Maybe. Years from now.

***

At work my colleagues and I take turns providing anesthesia for patients undergoing elecroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Today it was my turn. It's not like it is on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; it's a pity that it's such a demonized procedure. For some people it's literally the difference between life and death. Again I face the marvels and mysteries of the human brain and its workings during my day-to-day tasks at work...and participate in both altering and protecting it. This is always in the back of my mind during ECT's, which are some of the shortest procedures for which we provide anesthesia: the fact that the psychiatrist and I really have to take care of our patient's brain and concentrate every effort on helping it heal. And of course I'm also preoccupied with the airway, the cardiovascular system, the musculoskeletal responses...

Found this on Panda Bear's blog, and it made my day: "I’ve seen an Emergency Medicine Chief resident and a Medicine chief resident both fail to get an airway which the anesthesia junior resident put in while still half-asleep." At last! Someone who gets what our expertise consists of! Someday I'm going to have to vent about how little people seem to understand my specialty - even other doctors. Right now, though, this little anesthesioboist is bushed. Lights out.

Oboe Poem while on-call

(Disclaimer: I know that "poem" is a presumptous label. I am well aware that most of us are a far cry from W.H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop. But poems don't always have to be good, do they...? Although then maybe they shouldn't be called poetry, but just scribbling...)

The Double Reed

The world in which I rest is vast
a passage, mysterious
sonorous and dark.

It cracks in extremes
when tensions seen and unseen
are high. I am tiny
and fragile in its grasp
wedged well into
my tiny place.

A source of breath
I cannot see
blows through, and walls
that hold me in
now resonate
and set me free.

A song unfurls
like a sail
I tremble, never
more alive; I fill
with longing and with hope
that my home for a time
will be changed
while I'm here

from a silent to a singing thing
an ordinary object all at once
made dear.

If you don't like your D, don't go to C; or, The Gift of Imperfection

Today I had my fourth oboe lesson. I have been having trouble descending down the C scale. I'm fine till I get to E, then D, then C...I have trouble there, whether it's crooking my pinky finger just right to hit the low C, or getting the appropriate tone if I do hit it, or sometimes getting any sound at all. Kyoko gave me some pointers on where to position my finger and also how to rest my lips around the reed to make a fuller, rounder, more open sound in the low registers. "You have to have that full sound already at D," she advised. "If you don't like your D, your C will not be good either." So I worked on getting that whole, round tone before moving on. This will take some practice. She did say despite my struggles, "Don't worry, you actually have a nice, warm sound. Don't get stuck."

After she scraped at my reeds a little, things got better. "It's not you, it's your reeds!" she joked good-naturedly. We had a good laugh at my horror of blaming equipment rather than myself for bad form. As a doctor I can't ever say, "Sorry I didn't pick up that Grade III aortic MURMUR there, but it was a bad stethoscope," or, "Well, I couldn't get the airway and the patient DIED because my laryngoscope was broken."

Plus, I've heard my teacher play my "bad" reeds, and you know something - a really good oboist can get a good sound out of a "bad" reed. But I understand her point - as a student I probably need a good reed to achieve a good tone consistently, at least until all the mouth muscles and lumbricals get in better shape. "You so want to be a swan," she commiserated, noting my love of the oboe parts in Swan Lake, "but with oboe you have to be willing to be a duck first. I was a duck for years."

The great thing about all this is I can LAUGH about it. Hear me quack. We spend half my lessons in stitches over my playing. For someone who's been a perfectionist all her life, for whom patience has never been a virtue, whose psychological self-flagellating capacity rivals that of St. Augustine, this relaxed attitude to imperfection - in fact, to being really BAD at something - is a HUGE deal. It feels great. Maybe that's why I feel so comfortable blogging about all this and have the audacity to name myself an "anesthesioboist." My definition of success is true peace with oneself, and I'm so at peace with my own imperfection at the oboe that I feel I've already succeeded, in a way.

Oboe is helping me with my spiritual homework. Here's what I mean. I think "the meaning of life" is to learn how to be more loving and more complete each day, but I also believe that under that umbrella-meaning, each person has little "homework assignments" to work on. I think some of mine are to learn about human worth - what defines it, and how to honor it; to learn patience; and to learn enough humility to accept imperfection (my own as well as others'), and also to forgive and let go when imperfection causes me pain. I have other homework assignments, but these seem to be the recurring themes, I think because I am a slow learner. I try, I fail, I try, I fail - "I'm all... 'this is hard!' " as the speech-impediment girl on Will & Grace said. Oboe helps me slow down and work on learning these lessons.

So if I'm playing badly because I haven't developed sound technique or muscle strength yet, so be it. I'll just keep working. If the reed really is at fault, ok then. We'll scrape it and try again. Patience, patience, patience. No need to fixate on blaming something.

I believe, like so many self-help books and gurus have expressed one way or the other, that assigning blame is one of the most immature and unproductive human tendencies (speaking as someone who has succumbed to it many times). People seem to NEED to point to someone who's at fault, and also NEED for themselves NOT to be found faulty, as if imperfection were the end of the world (again, guilty).

I had a very recent experience of this latter phenomenon when I pointed out an instance of unequal treatment to someone, and that person bent over backwards trying to find outside explanations for the event rather than taking responsibility for it, however unintentional it may have been, as if admitting a mistake or a failing or an imperfection were going to destroy some precious, unblemished identity. But people are intrinsically precious; if we could all really, truly believe that, no matter what, then dealing with our own imperfections and mistakes, and those of others, would be so much easier. We wouldn't be wound so tight. (This was actually what my NPR essay was about.)

I think Jesus was probably one of the most relaxed people on earth. Heal on the sabbath? Sure, why not. Hug a leper? Absolutely. Tell a person caught in adultery that she wasn't condemned? No problem. I think one of the reason's he wasn't wound so tight is because of what HIS faith was made of. He KNEW people were pearls of great price - all of them. "You are the light of the world," he said. I think this "good news," in fact the whole point of his life and the reason he was willing to enter fully into our human experience, was to help us learn this about OURSELVES.

So many of his teachings are precisely about the worth of each human being. No, don't sit in the place of honor, because EVERYONE has dignity and value. Wash each other's feet. Trust like a child, live simply, be generous. If someone asks you to walk with him a mile, go for two. Do not judge (if only people would take THAT one literally more often). Don't lord it over others. Don't just love when it's easy - love when you don't feel like it either. "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)

But wait, isn't this post about imperfection? What happened to, embrace your own imperfection?

In the koine Greek of the New Testament, as I understand it, the word translated as "perfect," teleios, implies not sinlessness or faultlessness but completeness. Being whole (whole, holy, same root, I think), fully integrated, without missing parts, mature, having no need for external honors or affirmations. If you believe every person is precious, including YOU, then there's nothing to be afraid of or envious of, not a movie star's beauty, not a businessman's wealth, not an academic's accolades or publications, none of that. You're already worth the world. You can be at peace. You can also stop thinking, or needing to think, that you're "all that," more deserving than others, superior to others. I repeat: you can be at peace.

I remember recently hearing an ad on the radio for a summer program for high school students being offered by a well-known Ivy League university. It was inviting young people with talent, vision, "leadership," etc. to apply. I had to roll my eyes. If EVERY child were a leader, where would all his or her followers come from? Why is "talent" so important? If our children were "average," would I love them less than if they were prodigies? DUH, of course not. This is why I love the movie Little Miss Sunshine so much; the idea that life is a beauty contest in our society, but SHOULDN'T be, is so true and so humorously rendered in the film. I'll be thrilled if our kids grow up to be loving, kind, happy, hard-working people with good judgment and integrity. Integrated, whole, holy, teleioi. For all their imperfections, I already think they're pretty perfect.

If the shoe fits...

I think being steeped in ballet music for years set the stage (so to speak) for this oboe love. Ballet music is filled with GREAT oboe parts. Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, and Katchaturian wrote GREAT oboe pieces. Before I got to the point where I could say, "Gosh, I wish I could play the oboe," I first filled up with a deep love of those passages that I found haunting and beautiful, or perhaps exotic, or at times even witty. I devoted so much energy to dance that by the time I shifted my focus, which was in college, I probably subconsciously thought I was too old to start anything so daunting as a new INSTRUMENT and honestly never even considered the possibility.

Plus, college put enough on my plate. There was a huge buffet of knowledge and extracurricular activities before me, and I feasted. And there were challenges: I went from being a big fish in a small pond to a decidedly average fish in a large pond. I had study-skill issues that have only recently been better elucidated. Then after college, there was grad school, marriage, parenthood, med school, residency...My (post-)dance card was full.

Throughout those post-college years I would say wistfully when I heard great music, "Boy, I wish I could play the oboe," but with so much to do, I thought of it as a castle in the air, pie in the sky. Never did I think I would decide to stop saying "I wish!" But the time and opportunity finally came, and here I am - an adult student taking up a new instrument with no wind experience whatsoever. All those piano and ballet lessons made for an amazing journey in and of themselves, but they also helped me launch this whole new adventure. Just goes to show, even trees that took root ages ago can bear fruit now.

I danced ballet for about a dozen years. Between the ages of 12 & 15 I went to New York every summer to the Joffrey Ballet School's summer program. I also took class with Wilhem Burmann, whose classes were fast and scary and wonderful and, at that time, not overcrowded. He coached me privately, too, and was one of the most incredible teachers I've had in my life - you know, one of those few you can count on one hand that really made a difference. He believed I had talent. During adolescence, however, I also came to have bulk. I put on extra weight once the hormones kicked in, and my formerly slim dancer's body became an uncooperative mass of adipose tissue that would only stay under control if I ate about 1000 calories a day. My parents must have been relieved when I decided that enough was enough and I was going to go to Harvard instead of trying to starve myself to be a dancer. Now I'm huggably plump and Willie Burmann's famous. All the hottest ballet stars crowd into his class, which I can't believe I had the guts to take on pointe (that is, in pointe shoes), routinely.

After a while in his class, dancing on pointe became easier than off. With experience came increasing versatility and virtuosity. But none of that would have been possible without the dancer's equivalent of an oboist's reed: a great shoe. Dancers are obsessed with a lot of things - body image, certain warm up moves and clothes, and shoes, to name a few. Everyone has shoe practices and shoe rituals. As a child I was trained in the British Royal Academy of Dance system, and we were taught to darn the ends of our pointe shoes. Later, American efficiency kicked in, and most of us just lopped the slippery satin tips off. Some dancers bang their shoes on the floor, some hammer, some break the shanks in half, some cut them, some sew elastics and ribbons on, some just ribbons, some treat shoes in ovens or freezers, some scrape repeatedly at their shoes, all to get just the right fit and feel. Inside every dancer there is an embryonic oboe reed maker.

I'm sure every art or profession has its share of rituals created by its practitioners. I've seen tennis players with their racquets and doctors setting up their central line kits get pretty particular about what they do with their instruments and how they do it. I think ritual even at its most mundane is valuable. It sets a rhythm. It defines the mind's foci of attention. It enacts meaning and infuses physical acts of work with the desires that underlie the work.

I started out my pointe shoe career with Capezios, which were ultra-hard and heavy, and then Freeds, which were a little lighter. Each shoemaker of Freed of London would stamp his individual symbol onto the sole to mark the particular shoes he had made by hand. As far as I remember, dancers got pretty attached to their particular shoemakers. Ballet feet need accuracy to the millimeter. Otherwise they hurt. (Actually, they hurt anyway, but much less so in shoes that are a good fit.) I imagine if I had continued in ballet and continued with Freed shoes, I would have been beside myself with anxiety if Mr. Upside-down-triangle had DIED or something. I had a brief flirtation with Schachtners, which felt pretty good, but when my mom's friend, the late Margot Fonteyn, observed me doing a variation from Le Jardin Animé in them, she thought the shank wasn't quite right for my foot. My quest for "just the right shoe" continued. The moment I tried my first pair of Turning Point shoes by Gamba, size 4 1/2 M, I knew I was home. Each pair fit my feet so well and were so comfortable I didn't even need to try them on after a while and could just order them by mail. No need for nips and tucks. Finding "my shoe" set me free to enjoy my rehearsals and performances with one less thing to worry about. In college I did a lot more modern & jazz dance, and the shoe thing was less of an issue. Now I wonder: is there an oboe reed out there that's a REALLY great fit for me? That would be even better than anything I could hope to make myself? That would emancipate the musician inside that's hoping, with time & learning, to be able to come out?

I have no idea if those Gamba shoes are made any longer. I left the ballet world and all that shoe obsession behind and for all I know these have been discontinued, like two other things I absolutely loved - the milk chocolate-coconut-macadamia nut bars by Godiva, which USED to be available at Barnes & Noble just like the plain milk chocolate and dark chocolate ones, and the White Christmas scented candle at the Yankee Candle Company (they say Snow Angel is almost the same - ok, ALMOST, but not quite). I bet MAC will discontinue Delish lipstick just because I love it. I infrequently wear make-up, so I guess that wouldn't be as bad as the Godiva and Yankee Candle losses. But to discover a reed maker who makes super reeds that play consistently well in all registers, then find oneself unable to get more of those reeds? THAT would be a total bummer! I've ordered a couple from local makers my teacher recommended, so we'll see - the quest for the Holy Grail of reeds is afoot.

***

P.S. Happy Star Wars anniversary! The fact that I saw it in the theaters when it first came out boggles my mind. I have many a happy childhood memory of playing Princess Leah to my Lukes and Han Solos, invariably played by schoolmates who had to duke it out between themselves as to who would be Luke and who would be Han. And yes, my yaya did do the hairdo on me a couple of times...

Oboe Consolation Pudding

"Hautbois, ta vie est pleine de mystères;
Un temps lointain a chanté ton pouvoir;
A tes accents les esprits des clairières
Autour de toi venaient errer le soir."

(apparently a traditional verse, pulished by Alfred Guichon in an 1874 article, 'Le Hautbois,' in Chronique Musicale, and quoted by Burgess & Haynes in their book The Oboe)

The mystère of the week is how a reed can work so beautifully for a few practice sessions, then just DIE. It must be something I'm doing wrong, a big beginner's blunder that's wrecking the reed. I sounded like a honkin' goose yesterday trying to do my long tones in the doctors' lounge at the hospital where I was on-call for the night. What a total bummer! And I think I was getting a headache from the vibrations of trying to get it to work better. I have a lesson today and I don't think she'll say what she said last week about showing a lot of improvement in a week...

On the up side, the reed-making stuff I ordered arrived, so when I got home from my call night, it was like mini-Christmas opening up the packages. I'm a little kid at heart, what can I say.

This was previously called Oral Board Frustration Pudding, but now that that's over, it's Oboe Consolation Pudding. Yes, I know, the worst eating offense is self-comforting with food, but it's so much FUN to use bread, chocolate, butter, & sugar this way once in a while, so everybody back off, lighten up, and join in:

Oboe Consolation Pudding

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Crumb 5 slices of white bread.
Place crumbs in a square baking pan or loaf pan.
Melt together
-4 oz semisweet baking chocolate
-1/2 c butter
-1/2 c sugar
-1 c milk or half-&-half or (yikes) cream.
Add 2 beaten eggs.
Add mixture to breadcrumbs and stir together.
Dot with pieces of a Godiva 1.5-oz dark chocolate bar (the kind they have at the Barnes & Noble counter where you're about to spend your last extra dollar on BOOKS).
Bake @350 for 45 min.

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Addendum: just got back from a really enjoyable lesson. Thank God for patient teachers, the kind that allow beginngers to be BEGINNERS and don't resent them for it (a new experience, having come out of the medical world where you're expected to have leapt from the womb knowing how to be a doctor and people actually get physically MAD at you if you don't know everything the very first moment). After solving my reed problems (by simply replacing the two I was using), my teacher Kyoko and I did a couple of one-line duets together and even played through all of O Come O Come Emmanuel. I was shocked - this is going ok!

Kyoko, you're da best!

Anesthesia Oral Boards: a thing of the past!

We weren't supposed to find out our results till the 25th, but I happened to check online last Friday, and I PASSED my oral boards!!! The last hurdle! Finally, the rest of my life can begin. No more dissing the kids in favor of anesthesia flash cards. No more weekends & vacations spoiled by practice questions. WOO-HOO!!! Free from the shackles & tyranny of medical certification! No more, "Wait-I thought you already passed your boards." Those were the WRITTEN boards, which we needed to pass first in order to qualify to take our the stinking ORALS during our first year in practice. Before that there were also the USMLE steps, three in all, which were licensing boards. Passed those a while back. So it's all finally OVER! Done! I can live the life I want, read the books I want, think the thoughts I want, Hallelujah!

So what did I do to celebrate? (Besides the obvious & obligatory guzzling of champagne, play-time with husband & kids, etc.) I started taking oboe lessons! (My first one, in fact, was on the anniversary of my graduation from medical school.) Am I crazy, starting such a hard instrument in my thirties? Probably. But would I be crazy not to try to fulfill a lifelong wish now that I'm not chained to my anesthesia review materials? I think so.

Today's lesson was only my second. After sounding like a dying duck (I thought) while practicing at home, I felt a little better when my teacher said my tone was actually promising. She also made a huge difference by shaving several key millimeters off my reed, a commercial thing which came with the rental & which was too long, & therefore quite FLAT. I can see why oboists are so meticulous, & sometimes even neurotic, about their reeds! Getting those shavings off made a world of difference.

I can honestly say I am madly in love. Well, I have been as a listener, for years, but now that I'm trying to play, I'm REALLY in love. I know it's cliché that seeing Jeremy Irons playing "Gabriel's Oboe" in The Mission in theaters in 1986 was the source of my oboe longings, but there it is. That, and years of ballet - all that Swan Lake, the Wedding pas de deux in Sleeping Beauty, the adagio in Raymonda's Grand Pas Hongrois, not to mention non-ballet favorites like Amahl and the Night Visitors, Concierto de Aranjuez, Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody #2, Brahms' Symphony #3...I've been wistful for years!

Still, people have asked me, "Why oboe?" I also often get asked, "Why anesthesia?" I won't go into any deep reflections right now, except I notice they have a lot in common: they're unusual, elegant, mysterious, & challenging and require great attention to detail, dedication, and diligence. Maybe you have to be a little "different" to be attracted to them...who knows?

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Addendum July 21, 2007:

If anyone's interested in checking out one possible path for preparing for the anesthesia oral boards, click here or at the link on the sidebar.