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PJB: Okay, now the cork pad question. You're one of the few people in America who is on record as saying that cork pads are not superior to skin pads. Do you want to articulate that position?

PL: Sure. In the first place, all instruments, including European ones, used to have skin pads. Makers discontinued using skin pads during and after World War II because skin pads were not available. The skin pad makers were in France, and they were out of business. The only pads that were available came from Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, and were made of cork, so instrument makers had no choice. But cork is an extremely unstable material.

PJB: In terms of expansion and contraction?

PL: Right. You have to keep a wine bottle lying on its side so that the cork is constantly wet. If you stand the bottle up, the cork dries out. It can shrink so much that the cork can drop down into the bottle. Even if that doesn't happen, the cork can shrink enough so that the wine will spoil. Cork expands and contracts rapidly with humidity changes and with temperature changes. A big cork changes at a different rate than a small cork. On an oboe, you've got big pads next to little pads, and they are changing all the time. As a cork pad swells, it gets thicker.

What happens on an instrument is that as the pad gets thicker, it hits at the back and no longer at the front of the tone hole. So you have a leak in the front. Conversely, as it shrinks, the pad goes down and leaks in the back and not in the front. And that's going on all the time with temperature and humidity changes. Now, if you have two cork pads together, they are expanding and contracting at different rates. If these two keys have to work in tandem, you have an adjustment problem. People who have cork pads constantly have the screwdrivers out.

Of course, you have to use cork on the plateaux. But if you use cork in conjunction with skin pads, then only one pad is changing. The skin pad itself won' t change, and it's also resilient enough that it will take up the difference in the adjustment between the two pads. The result is that you have a relatively stable adjustment..

PJB: You do use cork pads for the trill keys and the octave keys.

PL: You don't want skin pads in the octave keys because they are working over metal inserts which will cut through the skin. You can use skin pads in the trill keys, but they are hard to seat. And as long as the keys are mostly down, cork pads won' t
cause problems.

PJB: Have you ever seen an oboe in all cork that's covered well?

PL: Yes, for a few days, but then it needs to be adjusted. People also have the idea that cork changes the sound, but that's not so.

PJB: So it's not a matter of an imperfect cork supply.

PL: No, we've been making oboes and playing oboes for a very long time. I have used every conceivable material that I can think of in my instruments just to see what will happen. I have used erasers, plastic, anything I could possibly think of, and what works best is skin pads.

PJB: And modern materials haven't provided anything better?

PL: We haven't found anything. I'm sure it's possible to make a synthetic material that would be better than either skin or cork, but the economic rewards for developing such a material are not there. How much could someone possibly sell?