What the garden teaches

She's my favorite gardener, and I listen to Paloma when she says the following:

"A garden can teach you amazing things everyday. Sometimes, it's a miracle - like walking into the garden and seeing something flourish that you had messed up. It really shouldn't be growing at all, yet there it is, happy and strong.

And other times, disaster. You do everything right, but for no discernable reason, some plant, that by rights ought to be thriving, just gives up."

It's pretty easy to see where I'm going with this. Making reeds is a lot like gardening.

Those of you who make reeds know what I'm saying; do I really need to give examples?

OK, fine, here's an example:

Back in March, the Oregon Symphony was playing, among other things, Debussy's La Mer. During the later rehearsals that week, I was working up what would hopefully be the concert reed (one of them, anyway.) A promising candidate, I accidentally took off a big chunk of one of the corners of the reed.

Oops. Normally that's a recipe for tossing the thing out -- lopping off 20% of the business end of a reed is not normally a prescription for a stellar results. Yet that's exactly what happened. I ended up with a reed that played fabulously. It had all the functionality and the wide tonal palette required by a program that contained works by Khatchaturian, Hayden, and Debussy.

It lasted for the rest of that week. And into the next, which for me, as anyone who know me can tell you, is a long time.

As for example of disasters, I really don't need to give them, they happen all the time. You take what looks to be a really good piece of cane, process it just right, have all the tools in tiptop shape, and come up with a very promising reed, right? Yeah, except that when to get to the hall the next day and start to play, it sounds like a chainsaw cutting through frying bacon.

I have to remind myself that arundo donax is a plant. It comes from somebody's garden.

Tying up a New Poker Hand

There's a certain expectancy when I sit down at the reed table and tie up a new blank reed.

What will this one be like? Will it allow itself to be scraped into a decent reed? Even better than decent, like, unexpectedly fine? Or will some unseen flaw in the cane cause it to split the instant I pull those first windings of thread tightly? (don't laugh, it still happens often enough)

Now I've played enough poker to recognize the same hope, waiting for a new hand. Just before the first card is dealt, that same sense of anticipation fills me: Hey, this might be the best poker hand of the evening. Or, even if it's not that great, it might be good enough that fortune and skill can transform it into a winning hand.

Or, like that cane that splits, I could take one look at it, and know I'll have to fold.

But even after getting a complete bust of a hand, I know there's always another one coming.

Always another piece of cane that might take the pot.

The dreaded Reed Slump

They say that we learn from our mistakes, more than from our successes. I sure hope so.

From time to time, every oboist/reedmaker goes through a slump, wherein she can't seem to make a decent reed no matter how she tries. And, like a baseball slugger whose season average has dropped below .100, it feels like it lasts forever - even if it's only been a few days.

I'm just pulling myself out of one these slumps right now. It lasted about 2 weeks, since before the Oregon Symphony went to New York. Fortunately, I had enough good reeds to carry me through (one of the benefits of A Reed A Day.) But during that trip, and for a week afterwards, no piece of cane that I scraped was any good.

In an earlier point in my development as a reedmaker, a slump like this would find me tying up reed after reed, changing some one variable with each attempt. I would try other cane, a different gouge, another shape, different staples (the little cork covered metal tubes on which we tie the cane.) Hell, I even tried different color thread in my desperation, hoping somehow that Green thread would make better reeds than Magenta. And when none of that had the slightest benefit, I would resort to threats, curses, prayers, and sacrifices to the Great Reed God.

Then, a colleague of mine mentioned that 90% of the time his reed slumps were the fault of his knife. Not sharp enough. Or the wrong kind of edge to it.

Bingo. Ever since then, my reed slumps have been less frequent, and less severe. Notice that I don't say that never happen anymore. After all, I just had another one.

Why? Didn't I know how to sharpen one of these straight razors by now? Oh sure, I got my knife to feel sharp enough (testing its edge on my thumbnail.) But somehow that quality of that edge just wasn't doing it for me.

Then I remembered: the tool that I use most often for sharpening my knives - a ceramic 'stone' - needs to be cleaned once in a while. So I did.

All better.

The point to all this? That I made this very same mistake some years ago, and thought I had learned my lesson. Well, I did learn my lesson, I just forgot it.

So here's to learning from our mistakes. And here's to not having to re-learn the same lessons.

Reeds cured me of Magical Thinking - mostly

Up until the age of 5 or 6, we are all magical thinkers. We believe in Fairies. Monsters under the bed. If we only believe hard enough, we can save Tinkerbell.

Life's disappointments gradually knock the magical thinking out of us. Yet we still cling to the idea that desire by itself can influence the material world.

For me, even well into my 20s, I still thought that I could make good reeds if I believed it enough. A new batch of cane would always bring up thoughts of "oh yeah, this is going to make my best reeds ever." I told myself that the next piece of cane would make the reed that would do everything and sound better than anyone has ever sounded.

I didn't know enough to notice whether the cane was too green, or twisted, or too soft and spongey. I was sure that it would be the next great reed.

This delusion allowed me to delay the development of a discriminating faculty when it came to cane and reeds.

Even after I bought my first gouging machine, magical thinking persisted. Working with the cane in its least processed form (tubes of bamboo), should have opened my eyes to the qualities of the cane that passed through my fingers. But I still couldn't see the evidence in front of me.

Gradually, over many years, I came to realize that close observation is critical. Observation of tools and materials, of knife technique, and above all, evaluation of results, i.e. the sound and functionality of a reed.

Does all this mean that there's no such thing as Magic? Who knows? Sometimes a truly spectacular reed comes along without my doing much of anything different. Where did this reed, with it's silky tone and impeccable articulation come from? With so many variables, it's impossible for me to say whether it was all my doing, or divine intervention.

God helps those who help themselves.

Right. First posting. Here we go.

Will this blog always be about making reeds? We'll see I guess.

Certainly I won't bother to bore anyone with the daily vicissitudes of reeds and how the the fickle environment of Portland, Oregon is. How it wreaks havoc on these little sticks of bamboo.

OK, maybe I will. Just a little.

It's an Art.

It's a Craft.

It's A Reed a Day, like it or not.