The reed

Without a reed there is no oboe. 

The idea is deliciously simple. Take a piece of dried grass, scrape it so it is thin enough to vibrate, fold it in half over and you have a source of sound for an oboe. 

The fragility of processed cane. When this material begins to vibrate as a finished reed, a musical universe opens. I am constantly astounded...

All our energy, all our expression, our entire musical lives, go through that little gap found between the two blades of the reed...

The task

It is Monday morning. 

In the cool air of the early day, I walk into the workshop and immediately see the tube cane waiting quietly, gently calling me. I feel a sense of anticipation, an acute awareness of all the creative decisions that lie ahead of me. It is both exciting and foreboding all at once. That juxtaposition is curiously integral to the task of making a reed. The two constantly interplay against each other and drive the process inexorable forward.

I am standing in front of a stash of some three hundred small tubes of dried grass—arundo donnax—each between ten to fifteen centimetres long, a single centimetre across. If I were to just glance at them, they all look the same. On closer inspection, they are all subtly different—different in texture, in colour, in the surface patterns, in their thickness.  A modest piece of golden-hued, slightly speckled tube cane gets my attention. It holds a quiet promise—that this will morph into a sweet sounding, warmly resonating reed. The journey has begun. Perhaps that step is the most important—choosing the piece from the myriad of other pieces. 

I now take the chosen tube and split it in three down it’s length before studying each of the three pieces looking for straightness and evenness. I reluctantly reject the two that are uneven, only one  looks straight enough to make a reed.

My pace quickens now, in quick succession I remove the pith from the inside of the piece of golden dried grass on one machine—the ‘pre-gouger’—then scrape away the remaining excess cane with another tool—the ‘gouger’. Then I jump over to the shaping machine through which the piece of cane—getting more diminutive now—takes on more of the recognisable shape of a finished reed. These machines are costly, precision-made, and utterly gorgeous. They are a joy to work with.

I have done this a dozen times and now put the group of shaped and gouged pieces into some water to soften. Only then will they withstand the force—without splitting—of being pulled into shape by nylon thread around the small brass tubes.

With crossed fingers, with hope, I begin to tie the little piece of grass onto the brass tube—less than five centimetres long. With all the care in the world, the cane can still split under the pressure of the thread, as it persuades the grass into a new, more rounded shape. 

Relief. The cane doesn’t split. I relax as I let it air-dry for several days, before scraping (‘profiling’) the reed thin enough that it vibrates into life. 

I feel excited, expectant, as I profile the reed. I also need to be patient, as I do it twice or three times, with at least a day in between. 

Finally the reed begins to sing. The long journey, spanning at least a week, if not two, ends. Yet it’s musical journey has now just begun. The reed now will utter the musical ideas of the greatest composers—Mahler, Mozart, Brahms, Tchaikovsky to an audience unaware of the creative task that has already occurred. 

Yes, the idea is deliciously simple. Yet the execution is long and fraught. It’s all about freeing the life-giving vibrations inherent in the piece of cane, and then to let the oboe and the oboist sing. For that we all give thanks.