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Marcel Tabuteau: How Do You Expect to Play the Oboe If You Can't Peel a Mushroom?

Article Excerpt
Marcel Tabuteau: How Do You Expect to Play the Oboe If You Can't Peel a Mushroom? By Laila Storch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. [xxiii, 594 p. ISBN 9780253349491. $29.00.] Photographs, illustrations, manuscript pages, index, bibliography, appendices, glossary, compact disc.

Reading Laila Storch's description of lessons with Marcel Tabuteau transported me back to my lessons with one of Tabuteau's students, Earnest Harrison, in the late 1970s. The following words from Storch's personal diary of 1943 were used almost verbatim in Harrison's studio, and much of the current oboe playing population will recognize these instructions: "[The oboist should] start long tones like an engine, gradually, not suddenly, increasing the wind intensity by blowing faster from 1-9, while the lips do the opposite. On the return, 4-3-2-1 must be up, up up inflections before the "down" resolution on 1" (p. 245). Other memories of studying with Tabuteau were told in Harrison's studio as well, including tales of his mercurial temper, juxtaposed with his unpredictably kind moments. In one of Storch's letters home, she writes, "My lesson was a dilly! Tabuteau was just on the verge of being in a very bad humor, I could tell. He was sort of at the explosion point, but I had a pretty good lesson anyhow. He called me 'Stupide' and then later tells me...

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