The Bore's Smoothness And Taper

The plaza at Lincoln Center in New York City has been stripped of all signs of nonhuman life. The architectural narrative aims to honor and elevate high art but also to exclude, forcefully declaring that human power and ingenuity are entirely in control here. This is a place seemingly for those who believe themselves to be maestros, or masters, from the Latin magister, he who is greater. Much beauty, artistry, and meaningful connection happen here, but this is also a place of fracture and erasure. We walk into the concert hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. Wood panels so smooth and glossy they seem made of plastic. The doors to the concert hall close, sealing out sounds from the rest of the world. On stage, the musicians’ bodies are veiled by uniformly black shirts, trousers, and dresses. The aesthetic is formal and signals wealth. Every part of the journey to this concert impresses on the listener that they are engaged in a shedding of the messiness and particularity of the city, the community of life, and even of human flesh. The audience sits apart from musicians in a darkened space, muscles and nerves resisting any urge to become entrained in or contribute to the music. The experience of sound here will, it seems, transcend this time and place, focusing our attention on a sonic experience of creativity, artistry, and beauty unshackled from Earth.

Take Another Look

But this escape is an illusion. There are few other places in our culture where the boundary between human and nonhuman is so thoroughly erased, even if we do not usually celebrate this merger in our external representations. These trappings of concertgoing mediate the entry of music’s earthly power into our bodies and psyches, easing a union that might otherwise be discomforting in its raw openness, vulnerability, and animality. Paper programs rustle, like a strong breeze over dry oak leaves. Conversations hush as heads and torsos orient to the stage. The note sails out into the hall from the oboe’s bell, drawing in its wake a flotilla of notes from other instruments. The moment breaks into applause as the conductor, Jaap van Zweden, strides out, sweeps his arm over the audience and orchestra, then takes his perch. Another moment of expectant silence and the baton falls. A shiver and crescendo from the percussion swells into brass and strings, and Steven Stucky’s Elegy commences. From the moment the oboe sounds, forests and wetlands come alive on stage. In this place of high human culture, we are lifted into joy and beauty partly by the sounds of other beings, our senses immersed in the physicality of plants and animals. The oboe’s sound is rooted in plants from the coastal wetlands of Spain and France.

Just To Keep Satisfied

The reeds that impart vibrations to the musicians’ breath are parings of a giant cane indigenous to the brackish, sandy shores of the western Mediterranean. Growing more than six meters tall, the hollow stems of this grass grow only two to three centimeters wide. Tough fibers made from interconnected plant cell walls run lengthwise through the canes. This dense, uniform array of microscopic filaments stiffens the canes, allowing just a little flex in strong winds. It takes tools as sharp as surgeons’ knives to excise thin slivers to make reeds for wind instruments. Only after blades have shaved the reed to translucent thinness can human hands or lips feel any springiness. Reed instruments in India, Southeast Asia, and China use plants with similar qualities, either giant canes, palm fronds, or bamboo. Reeds made from more diminutive grasses or from shaved tree wood produce soft or coarse sounds with inconsistent tone. Oboists play with the finest reeds of all. When I spoke with Sherry Sylar about her work, she told me that the oboist’s relationship with reeds is like woodworking, a precise craft of manipulating plant material. The oboist is both luthier of cane and musician. The oboe’s bore and its finger holes sculpt the pressure waves within the instrument, pulsations that then push sound into the hall.

Until the End of the World

It is the bore’s smoothness and taper, the bell’s flare, and the dimensions and sharpness of the finger holes’ many openings and edges that combine with the resonant properties of wood to give the instruments’ bodies their acoustic signature. Any warps, pits, cracks, uneven surfaces, or irregularities in proportions degrade the sound. Oboes and other wind instruments, then, need to hold their shape, surface gloss, edges, and proportions, even when bathed in the warm moisture of human breath. These trees grow slowly, layering wood into themselves in thin yearly accretions. Similarly dense and smooth apricot wood is favored for the surnāy of western and central Asia and bamboo for Japan’s hichiriki. Before the nineteenth century, the music of reed instruments flowed from the woods of their homelands. Now we often hear materials that have been transported from other continents. Most of the oboes and clarinets used by professional musicians, for example, are made from mpingo, also known as East African blackwood or grenadilla, or other tropical woods such as cocobolo or rosewood. These materials became available to European instrument makers after colonial occupations of Africa, South America, and Asia. The superior stability, density, and smoothness of these woods were ideal for instruments that are repeatedly bathed in human breath then dried, a process that cracks or warps other woods. The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound.