<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I was never much good at the instrument, really.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
