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"The oboe curriculum at Curtis consisted almost entirely of etudes, long tones, slow scales and arpeggios and occasionally duets."

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"We then went on to the first Barret melody where he explained how the use of the “speed of the wind” applied to musical phrasing by creating motion suggested by the underlying harmonic tension and relaxation defined by the bass line and by the melodic shape and structure of the music. In a variant of the dictum of “putting the notes on the wind,” he said I must learn to “play between the notes” to achieve a true legato and compelling musical line, and demonstrated with a slow scale where all the notes were perfectly conjoined and matching in timbre."

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"My instruction in Barret continued through all the Articulation exercises, Melodies, Sonatas, and Grand Studies. I recall many inspirational musical ideas conveyed to me through this music, which is full of many genuinely inventive and touching early romantic melodies and covers a wide range of expression. Mr. de Lancie brought out its worth to me by showing musical moods, contrasts, rubato (now almost a lost art), rhythmic variety of expression, and sensitivity to harmonic changes. He spent a great deal of time emphasizing the art of phrasing, as his teacher had and as I do, defining the relationship of the notes to one another in the music by grouping them with the use of “musical punctuation,” and within each group finding, by intensity and duration, the best way to allow the music to “speak.” This creates the possibility of an eloquent, poetic musical narrative and gives music a meaning to the receptive listener that is far deeper than the more common approaches of a declamatory style of expression, or a simply unacceptable monotone devoid of musical meaning. Mr. de Lancie frequently employed Tabuteau’s “number system” in order to point out how music must constantly move and develop, how it is built often upon progressions, and how notes should not arbitrarily stick out in a phrase simply because of the instrument’s resonance on a particular note."

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When Gillet composed the Studies in the early part of this century, it was to help his students to be prepared to meet the difficulties being encountered in the new music of the time. Many of the compositions of Debussy, Ravel and Dukas with their increased use of the upper register of the oboe, contain passages which present a challenge to this day. As Gillet says in his dedication:

"The studies given heretofore in my class are old in form although they possess real value, but they no longer meet the requirements of the perfecting work that the continuous progress of modern music calls for."

If during the first part of this century many oboists entered the professional field without a thorough preparation of the Gillet Studies, now eighty years after their appearance, we have long since reached a point where they must be considered an integral part of every student's program of study.