THE OBOE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2059, 29 September 1880, Page 3

THE OBOE.

The oboe resembles a clarionet very much as a rake resembles a hoe ; all the difference is at one end. Tho voice of the oboe is very much like that of a man trying to whistle with his head under water. The orchestral composers use the oboe on account of its simple, honest quality to express a countryman going into a bank and asking the banker to lend him 200 dols. until Tilden is elected. In Jacobini’s beautiful creation, “ Sounds from the Kitchen,” you will remember that oboes are used to convey the remarks that pass between the cook and the grocer’s boy, who had just brought home two gallons of golden syrup in a one-gallon kerosene can, and vice versa. The candid astonishment of the cook infuses the soul of the listener, while the efforts of the grocer’s boy to explain away the apparent difcrepancy between the quantity of syrup and the size of tho can is beautifully and touchingly conveyed. The bassoon is made of wood, and the complete instrument is probably worth 8 dols. a cord. It looks like a pump log, and is played by blowing into a silver stem that winds into the side of the tube. When tho bassoon is not in use in the orchestra it can be utilised as a clothes-prop. It has two distinct qualities of tone. In tho upper and lower register it has a voice like a cow that has fttllen into a pit, and in the middle register it sounds like a man with the croup shouting “ fire ” from a fourth-story window. It is much ued by composers for mournful distracted effect?; and in tho opera of “La Somnambula ” it is employed as the interpreter of a men calling down a dark alley for his lost dog. When the average man listens to the ravishing bassoon solo in the slow movement in the concerto for piano and orchestra, it insensibly makes him think of a tall woman with her head tied up in an apron and her mouth full of clothespins, trying to hang up a fourteenfoot sheet in a gale of wind. The flute is too familiar to require any detailed description. In the hands of the young man living in the next block its expressive wailing notes are vaguely suggestive of a dog trying to craw, through a fence that is too close for him, assisted by another dog of greater weight and more irritable temperament. The double bass is the largest of the violin tribe. It is also tho worst. The man who plays it is usually fat, and always bald. —“ Argonaut.” 1