Author: ohsuzan
Date: 2005-12-09 21:01
Well, Shelley didn't say WHAT has begun to hurt her while she is playing.
Sometimes my midsection hurts, from keeping it so tight.
I've never had any problem with lips being sore or feeling fatigued -- the legacy, I suppose, of many, many years of clarinet playing.
As for hands and arms -- well, sometimes they do begin to feel tired. But again, for me, the oboe is so much lighter than those big clarinet tanks that I was playing (an Opus and an R-13) that it doesn't feel heavy at all.
And I am more than twice 30.
One of my favorite Robert Frost poems is called "The Oven Bird". It's about a particular species of bird that only begins to sing late in the season, after the freshness of spring and the heat of summer are past, and after all the other birds have gotten weary of their tunes.
The concluding lines go like this:
"The bird would cease, and be as other birds,
But that he knows, in singing, not to sing.
The question that he frames in more than words
Is what to make of a diminished thing."
Many of us who are "late singers" may have had, for most of our lives, the experience of not singing at all. Thus we are spared the invidious comparisons of what we are now with what we used to be.
And we can derive enormous joy from a "diminished thing".
Susan
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