Oh boy, an Oboe

Oboes are those skinny woodwind instruments that many people mistake for clarinets.  Oboes are different from clarinets because they have something called a double reed, where clarinets use only single reeds.  The two small pieces of reed cane are setup against each other and the player blows through them, creating the sound.

This week, I am giving a presentation in my woodwind pedagogy class on the shawm.  Shawms are the instruments that eventually turned into oboes.  They were much louder than modern oboes and had almost no keys.  Modern oboes have lots of keys.  The keys on oboes (hautbois) were added in response to composers writing more difficult music.  And, while the shift from shawm to oboe was happening, musical styles were changing.  Classical music was giving way to Romantic music. Romantic music used more chromaticism (half-steps, less adherance to a tonal center), so the instruments had to be able to play in all keys.

You can still hear shawms.  In North Africa and the Middle East, people play on an instrument called the surna (or surnay or zurna, depending on how you spell it) that is a kind of shawm.  It has a loud, piercing sound and the players use a technique called circular breathing, so the sound doesn't stop for breath.