I guess that in a way me switching from saxophone to oboe was a way for me to assert ownership over these nothing feelings. If the drive is there in the first place, the drive is there to play music that falls along the lines of 'beauty', and if saxophones aren't really made for that, then maybe I could at least walk a finer line between being the instrument my dad played and sating that drive by picking up an instrument with a similar fingering pattern, right?
And no, saxophones are not pretty. Saxophones are a pile of compromises pretending to be elegant in their slick, brass-colored dress. Everything about saxophones, every little quirk and idiosyncrasy, is another small testament to the fact that Adolph Sax really didn't know what he was doing, he was just a good salesman.
Like, what if you took a perfectly good clarinet and tries to make it easier? Oh shit, you actually made it way out of tune. Well, what if you made it longer and spread out the keys? But now the holes have to be larger, so now every key is attached to a paddle and pad, but now it sounds weirdly muffled, so you have to make the conical bore more extreme, which means more fine-tuning. And hey, when you get to the deeper instruments, anything below soprano, you have to have have some fancy armatures to manage the keys past the elbow. And suddenly the instrument you designed to be easy to play in band is basically only easy to play in band and nothing else, and next to --- but not quite --- impossible to play while crying.
And like, that's not really a consideration most instrument makers take into context, I get that, but that I couldn't play the oboe at all while crying served the added benefit of making me calm down before I could manage to play. It turned play into something meditative.
I was never much good at the instrument, really.
I loved the way it sounded almost painfully sweet in the higher registers, and how the lower register could get almost sultry. It was more versatile than the saxophone for a beginning player. Melismata and long notes were as easy as more staccato and jouncy passages. Which is to say, pretty difficult, in all, but somehow more attainable than the saxophone. With the sax, all that felt attainable was band music and jazz.
And it's weird, I picked up that instrument and shortly thereafter started to take control over other aspects of my life. Like, I'm sure that that's an instance of correlation-not-causation going on right there, but at the same time, it's weird that picking up the oboe and putting down the sax feels like this weird liminal period between who I was and who I am. It was the step between saxophone and choir, and thus the step between childhood and adolescence.
I remember the vague confusion that came with the switch, a sense of, not anger, but a subtle sense of disappointment that I didn't go on to master the saxophone or something else.
Why oboe? So expensive. We'll have to rent. And those reeds, ten dollars a pop at the low end. You could get a box of saxophone reeds for that much. And it sounds like a dying duck when you start, it'll take forever for you to get any good.
I stuck to my guns, such as they were. I suppose I must have, I mean, as I don't remember that much about it. I started playing the oboe in fifth or sixth grade and continued on through the end of middle school. Or maybe part way through middle school; I moved schools in there and I don't remember if I was still in band at that point.
But I loved it, in my own way. I owned it. The instrument was rented, of course, but I owned the fact that I had decided on it. It was expensive, with the reeds and the lessons and everything, but it was mine.
The love was mine. The frustrations were mine. I once snapped a reed at the top of the staple --- the metal tube onto which the actual reed is mounted --- out of anger at my, yes, lack of immediate progress, but my teacher collected my staples to make her own reeds to sell back to her students at a discount over the stores.
The love was mine. The frustrations were mine. They were almost of a necessity mine to enjoy on my own. My parents didn't enjoy it. I don't know whether my band conductors enjoyed it. I certainly never got very good at it, but I was happy to be bad at something I had picked out for myself.
