The Oboe BBoard

The Oboe BBoard The C4 standard

New Topic | Go to Top | Go to Topic | Search | Help/Rules | Smileys/Notes | Log In

Re: Sound in Motion

Author: mschmidt
Date: 2008-06-20 18:10

One interesting snippet about Tabuteau's number system comes out of Storch's recent book. She writes that Tabuteau said that the origin of the number system was that Tabuteau found himself, in the early years at Curtis, trying to teach kids who really didn't have a lot of musical sophistication (I guess in terms of hearing lots of well-played classical music throughout their youth). He came up with the number system to make more concrete and explicit what he had learned to do in a less formal way from Gillet. Storch puts this snippet in pretty early in the book, and (perhaps ironically) a lot of the rest of the book details efforts by Tabuteau and others to get this system "fixed" on paper or tape for all posterity.

It is somewhat hard to read between the lines to figure out just how Storch herself feels about the number system. I had lessons with two Storch students, and the number system wasn't introduced to me except in the context of long tones. It could be that I just wasn't advanced enough at the time to be introduced to it. But certainly some of the ideas embodied in the number system were introduced to me: the idea that the line must always be moving, the idea that one should never have a "flat" dynamic, the idea that the highest note isn't necessarily the climax of the line, the idea that you must always be going somewhere.

I was rereading Vogel's essay that is frequently cited on this board. In it, he says: "In this country many oboists make the mistake of seeking to phrase according to warmed-over formulas and devices of Tabuteau, but Bloom, no imitator himself, taught his students to learn to phrase, not by numbers, but by searching into the music itself." I think that probably expresses a lot of contemporary musicians' feelings toward the number system. It was a means to an end, and not the only means towards that end.

Mike

Still an Amateur, but not really middle-aged anymore

Reply To Message | Avail. Forums | Flat View

Newer Topic | Older Topic

Topics