oboe v. piano

Ever since I started learning the piano I’ve become more interested in the oboe. The oboe was my first instrument, and it’s for sure the instrument I’m best at. It’s weird being good at the oboe and then starting to play the piano. Looking back, I feel my oboe education was strictly set up as a path that, if followed, would increase my likelihood of getting hired for oboe jobs. Especially in college, my oboe curriculum involved studying orchestral excerpts that are frequently required at auditions, standard solo repertoire, and technical work like scales and arpeggios. The focus was on producing a beautiful sound and learning to play expressively and with intentionality, regardless of what music I was playing.

Now that I play the piano, I have realized something strange. All those years playing the oboe, I was never learning Music. I was learning to play the oboe. Of course, there is nothing about the oboe that isn’t related to music, so it sounds crazy to say what I’m saying. But I believe it’s true. I was learning the oboe, and I wasn’t learning music. I think it’s possible to be so focused on one detail of a complex system that you can become great at executing that detail without understanding how it interacts the other parts of the system. I once met someone who worked for DreamWorks as an animator. His job was to supervise the animation of the dust in the movie Kung Fu Panda 2. He worked with a whole set of tools to render dust realistically, so that whenever Po landed a punch, the dust wouldn’t look weird. He also worked with a small team who knew more or less what he knew, so that together they could make sure the dust was on point. He didn’t have to know how to direct a movie, or how to draw a fighting panda, or even how to animate water so that it splashes realistically. Those were all other people’s jobs. But his dust was seen by millions on screen when the movie came out, and it wouldn’t have been the same without it.

The way I feel now about my time as an oboist and only an oboist is as if I had somehow become a dust animator without ever learning how to draw anything but dust. Sure, I loved animated movies, and I thought it was fun to be around people who were making movies, and I even felt like I somehow had this strange affinity for dust animation, and some famous dust animators from the older generation saw my potential and felt I could possibly make it myself as a dust animator, and it didn’t really matter so much to them that I couldn’t animate anything else because, wow, I could really animate some good dust. And besides, we have a need for dust animators.

Now that I’m learning the piano, it’s like finally learning to draw a landscape. Sure, my landscapes aren’t gonna wow anyone into giving me a job at DreamWorks Animation, but they are definitely more fun to draw than dust was. And the more landscapes I draw, the more I realize how important it is to have realistic dust.