Double Reed 70 cover - British Double Reed Society

The Oboe Band
The Oboe Band was founded in 2005 on
an old barge moored at Canary Wharf,
which was my home at the time. The four
of us all went to different universities
and music colleges: Frances to St. John’s
College, Cambridge and the Royal
Academy of Music, Sarah to the Royal
College of Music and then to the
Schola Cantorum in Basel, Joel to the
Birmingham Conservatoire and then to
the RAM, and Rebecca to Trinity College
of Music and then to the Guildhall School
of Music and Drama, and Paris. Joel and
I met later on the Britten-Pears course
in Suffolk and had the idea of forming
the band.
Oboe bands were enormously popular in
the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth
centuries, employed both by courts and
in the military, and in theatres or for
private functions. Louis XIV had one as
part of the royal musical household and,
when French musicians brought the oboe
to England in 1673, Charles II soon
followed suit as did his successors James
II and William of Orange. They played for
ceremonies and parades, balls, dinners,
concerts, coronations, birthdays and
Oboe bands flourished in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Three oboists and one bassoonist
have come together to revive that tradition and one of its members, Sarah Humphrys, explains more.
(L–R: Sarah Humphrys, Frances Norbury, Rebecca Stockwell, Joel Raymond)
funerals, and a large body of repertoire
developed over the years. Much of the
simpler march music, for example, was
probably learned and played from
memory, but plenty was written down.
Louis XIV had Philidor compile a volume
of music specifically for court musicians
to draw on; this is one of the most useful
sources for us today.
It was with the aim of reviving this once
ubiquitous ensemble that we formed The
Oboe Band. The sound of three baroque
oboes and bassoon, or two oboes, oboe
da caccia/taille and bassoon, has a
unique and special quality: we very much
enjoy researching new material and its
background, and presenting this to
audiences with plenty of historical
and social context.
Our group goes from strength to strength.
Last year, in 2007, we were finalists
in the York International Early Music
Competition, and this year we have given
concerts and workshops at the London
Handel Festival, Concerts in the West,
Huddersfield University and the Mayfield
Festival. Our diary is filling up for next
year, with concerts planned at Les
Musicales de Normandie, Leeds
University, the East Cork Early Music
Festival and the London Handel Festival.
We will shortly record our first full length
CD, War and Peace.
In July we were fortunate to receive a
grant from the Performing Rights Society
to pay for a new commission for the
group. The Catalan composer Blai Soler
has written a five-movement piece
entitled Oboes, which makes use of all
the possible combinations of oboes,
oboes d’amore, oboes da caccia and
bassoon to explore the sound world
of our instruments. The premiere*
was given at St George’s Hanover Square
in September.
BLAI SOLER: OBOES
Blai Soler introduces his composition for
The Oboe Band
I was immediately drawn into the sound
world of baroque double reeds at a
casual meeting with The Oboe Band,
where I was shown the range of playing
techniques and sounds that can be
produced on these instruments. I was
struck by the array of timbres that they
could create across the registers.
Particularly impressive was the sound of
the oboe da caccia, with a round tone in
the lower register resembling that of a
French horn. I straightaway considered
the possibility of composing a work for
The Oboe Band, an exciting opportunity
to explore this wonderful and archaic
sound world within a modern context.
As the members of The Oboe Band made
me observe, the baroque double-reed
instruments, as versatile as they might be,
are designed to play diatonic music and
are rather ill-adapted to the chromaticism
of contemporary compositional
techniques. Furthermore, all the
instruments have chromatic note gaps in
their ranges. These were crucial factors to
take into account for the composition of
my piece.
Double Reed News 85 Winter 2008 19