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Re: Origin of Forked F fingering

Author: Chris P
Date: 2011-05-28 14:18

The oboe is essentially a D instrument (along with the Baroque flute), so the main F fingering has always been xxx|xox. Raising one finger at a time starting on D gives a D Major scale on both Baroque flutes and oboes.

Only flutes have since been completely redesigned due to Theobald Boehm, but oboes have only developed by adding more and more keywork to them over time. Triebert having the most significant impact on the development in what we come to recognise as modern oboes, but he still stuck to the basic instrument in terms of fingerings where Boehm made a complete departure (and also Klose and Buffet with the 'Boehm' system clarinet which is a complete redesign compared to Albert/simple systems which German and Oehler systems still share their 5-key clarinet ancestry).

The forked F vent was fitted much later on when the mechanisms became more advanced to attempt to free up the stuffiness of the forked fingering without the need to open the Eb key which worked fine on thumbplate systems, but on conservatoire systems it was found necessary to have a closed standing forked F vent that only opens for forked F and remains closed for everything else as it caused grief with Bb (xxo|xoo).

Some otherwise full conservatoire systems (eg. some older Lorees made for the US market) had everything except the forked F vent as some players avoided using the forked fingering as much as they could due to it being a dodgy note in terms of tone quality.

The LH F key was favoured to avoid playing forked Fs and also to make passages such as D-E-F-D-E-F easier as there's no need to slide RH finger 3 from the F key onto the RH3 tonehole, although German makers often fit a roller to the F key for this purpose.

Even though Boehm system and saxophone fingered oboes have been made in some form or other, for some reason they never caught on, even with sax, clarinet and flute players who double on them - considering how easy saxes are to get around it makes me wonder why we still play oboes which have such archaic fingerings!

Former oboe finisher
Howarth of London
1998 - 2010
The opinions I express are my own.

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Author

Date

Origin of Forked F fingering new

JRC

2011-05-28 13:38

Re: Origin of Forked F fingering new

Chris P

2011-05-28 14:18