Oboes Quotes

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter. ~ Steven Soderbergh

Now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden as spilled perfume, piercing as crystal, dark and sweet as the sound of oboes. ~ Steven Millhauser

How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound? ~ Daniel Dennett

If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe. ~ John Corigliano

The oboe sounds like a clarinet with a cold. ~ Victor Borge

Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer's voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of "Green River" by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son"; the oboes in Beethoven's Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

Certain voices hold this odd pull on our heartstrings. They are like sad oboes or something, something that makes you want to throw all your money at the radio while yelling, "I love you." I don't know what it is. ~ Jonathan Goldstein

An oboe is an ill-wind that nobody blows good. ~ Bennett Cerf

And that unusual squawking sound is actually the mating call of the the rare ... oh, it's just an oboe player. ~ Steve Irwin

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets-it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza-nor that of the women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they. ~ Walt Whitman

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder. ~ Gavin Bryars

When you play the oboe, the flute or other wind instruments, there is something between you and the breath; there is the embouchure, the reed, etc. But with the recorder, I receive an immediate response from the instrument. This is something that attracted me to the instrument, that I could immediately feel the response of what I was doing. ~ Michala Petri