8/2/2023 0 Comments Reeds do it best![]() It was said that the room where he made his reeds was underground, locked and secured. Before each show, audience members were invited to see how these arcane machines worked-and to witness for themselves (in a very small dose) what Josh calls “the Sisyphean task of continually trying to make oboe reeds.” “When I was a student, I heard that the legendary oboist Harold Gomberg had his own cane fields in Italy. The other was that, as part of his set, Kornbluth had filled a corner of the stage with the odd-looking tools and devices required for the shaping of cane into reeds. He was joined by actor Amy Resnick and a small klezmer band-which accompanied Kornbluth during the show’s several oboe recitals. Two things were unusual about “Sea of Reeds.” The first was that it was Kornbluth’s first multiplayer production. In 2013, Kornbluth wrote and performed a solo show called “Sea of Reeds.” Ambitious, if a bit diffuse, the show interwove two aspects of Kornbluth’s life: an exploration of his Jewish heritage, symbolized by the Biblical story of the parting of the Sea of Reeds (often called the Red Sea) and the daunting task faced by every serious oboist: the exacting, time-consuming, and often futile crafting of perfect reeds from a few slivers of cane. It seemed, at first, a startling non-sequitur. ![]() Learning that he is also a serious oboist was akin to my discovery that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman played the bongos. I’ve long been a fan of his probing and often hilarious autobiographical monologues, two of which-”Haiku Tunnel” and “Love & Taxes”-have been adapted into films. It was Kornbluth who’d rekindled my childhood interest in the oboe. “There are beautiful things that the oboe plays,” says Josh Kornbluth, the Berkeley-based oboist and performing artist, “like that famous solo in ‘Scheherazade ,’ and the duck in ‘Peter and the Wolf.’ There’s also a particular solo in Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird.’ But compared to other instruments, very little is written for the oboe as a solo instrument.” Since then, I’ve recognized the oboe’s voice in a few other random compositions-like the opening credits for “Six Feet Under,” or the mournful theme called “Gabriel’s Oboe” in Roland Joffé’s 1986 film “The Mission.” The second movement features a haunting oboe solo-one of the only oboe solos in classical music. Her long-lashed eyes, a faceted gem on her forehead between them, were featured on the slipcover for The New York Philharmonic’s powerful 1959 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. One of my mother’s cousins, Elaine, was a model. My childhood introduction to the oboe was serendipitous. ![]() The duck sections, Josh says, are “kind of tricky… You have to do some pinky work.” The performance was conducted and narrated by the great Leonard Bernstein, with a very frightened duck immortalized by Harold Gomberg’s oboe. The sound of the instrument was so clear and distinct that the French called it the hautbois (ou-bwa): literally, “loud wood.” Given the speed of conversational French, it didn’t take long for this to become “oboe.” Josh’s first memory of the oboe as a kid is from its role in Peter and the Wolf, the famous 1936 “symphonic fairytale” written by Sergei Prokofiev. During the Crusades, this godmother of woodwinds found its way to Europe, where-during the reign of the Sun King-it joined the court symphony. Tall and sleek, the shawm used a double reed and seven finger holes to produce a captivating tone. It’s the ill wind that no one blows good.Ībout 3,000 years ago, an instrument called the shawm become popular in the Middle East. It is being republished with minor updates. Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in our Fall 2020 issue.
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