Double Reed Musicians: Armed and Dangerous

In response to the Friday’s post about an orchestra memo banning firearms in the workplace I received this note from oboist and blogger Patty Mitchell,

NO firearms to rehearsals or runouts? Geesh. They sure take the fun out of everything! (But they can’t take away our reed knives.)

Patty is always successful at making me smile. 

And for those of you who have been writing in asking if that memo really was an April fool’s joke or not, I can assure that it wasn’t. 

For some more double reed humor, here are some excerpts from Garrison Keillor’s The Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra:

The oboe is the sensualist of the woodwind section, and if there is one wind Lutherans should avoid, it’s probably this one. In movie soundtracks, you tend to hear the oboe when the woman is taking her clothes off. Also a little later when she asks the man for a cigarette. You start playing the oboe, you’re going to have babies, take my word for it.

The English horn sounds Christian, maybe because we think of it as the Anglican horn, but it’s so mournful, so plaintive. And so are English horn players. They all have deep complicated problems. They’re all down in the dumps, especially at night, which is when most concerts are. Maybe because they want what oboists have, I don’t know.

Should a Lutheran play the bassoon? Not if you want to be taken seriously, I don’t think so. The name kind of says it all: bassoon. It’s an instrument that isn’t playing with a full deck of marbles. Maybe it’s something you’d do for a hobby (“Hey honey, let’s go bassooning this weekend!”), but not as your life’s work. Some bassoonists filling out applications for home loans just say “orthodontist.”