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Re: Grain direction in reed cane

Author: wrowand
Date: 2006-07-29 15:03

mschmidt wrote:
>>> They understand what to do to make a reed work the way they want it to work, and they come up with a plausible explanation for why it works, but if you listen to enough different explanations from enough different oboists, you soon realize that they can't possibly all be true. <<<

I couldn't agree more.

As an illustration, I've heard oboists say that tonguing on the corner gives you a cleaner articulation, particularly for legato passages. This works for me. But it seems contradictory to the description of a clean articulation occurring when the tongue touches the both blades of the reed squarely in the center (and I don't mean to suggest that this is exactly what you said, d-oboe, but it's a description I've heard as well).

As an oboist and an engineer, I appreciate that oboists invent explanations for why things work the way they do. For those ideas that lend themselves to observation and experimentation, it serves to increase our understanding of how to play oboe better.

But I don't see how the issue of whether the tip of the tongue touches both blades at the same time or a single blade lends itself to observation and experimentation. One can vary the angle of clipping of the reed, and gather data about the how different reeds perform and that can be useful in itself. But as far as what is actually happening in the mouth and whether the tongue touches one blade or two, we don't have high speed video or any other detailed data from the inside of the mouth so nothing can be said with certainty about that.

However, if that description helps your teacher explain the issue or helps his students play better then it has served some purpose, regardless of whether it reflects reality.

Similarly, I saw an article describing how airplane wings achieve lift (See http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/bernnew.html). It contradicts a description of lift that appears in many science textbooks that applies Bernoulli's equations (incorrectly, or at least incompletely). The illustration in the textbooks is ultimately incorrect, but it serves an educational purpose in that it presents a visual description of Bernoulli's theory.

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