Word: toning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most intractable of all orchestral instruments, the oboe keeps all its players anxious. Their worries are perhaps responsible for the legend that oboists inevitably go crazy. The silvery, reedy beauty of fine oboe tone is won only by the most skillful and unrelenting war against squeaks. In this war no one is more skillful than Marcel Tabuteau. This grey-haired, brawny, 55-year-old Frenchman earns about $300 a week as the star of the Philadelphia Orchestra's unsurpassed wood winds...
...oboist's technique begins long before he puts his instrument to his mouth. For Tabuteau, it begins in his medieval-looking fourth-floor workshop. There he whittles to perfection the paper-thin, cigaret-shaped reeds on whose shaping and adjustment oboe tone heavily depends. A flawed reed can make even the best playing sound like a tin horn. Tabuteau spends hours every day scraping away with a razorlike knife...
...using these courses in History and English strictly as propaganda weapons. If this is allowed to happen, their value will be lost, both directly, to the prospective officers as a basis of later cultural growth, and indirectly, as a pool of liberal thought to improve the moral and human tone of our society and the atmosphere in which the peace is made...
...real hero of the day, practically saving the session singlehanded at a time when it looked as if it would be a ghastly mess. Without any apparent warming up, the "Hawk" launched into a terrific chorus and thawed out the audience. He played very restrainedly, without forcing his tone as he did when he first returned from Europe. As for the "Hawk's" ideas, they're more than any five men have the right to have...
...sheer force of his tone. Pete Brown got even more applause, though he often overworked his ideas, which were none too prolific. He did play better than any time I'd caught him at the Ken, and his tone is as amazing as ever...