Blogville helps me study....oboe is a girl??!!

okay.
so here i am trying to fish out gems in this textbook to support my modernist oboe repertoire essay.......
and what!
i found the following and as i waffle on i might as well document it here
(what lies below....some of which does appeal to me obviously, since i'm a girl with an oboe, ya! -- but some of it is just plain doofus of a doofus i mean what the heck and i dont give a shugar and shit i'm running out of vocab here so see for yourself before this sentence needs a breathe mark)

"In the 20th Century the oboe continued to be identified with femininty: it plays the role of female protagonist in Richard Strauss (ya!)'s tone poems Don Quixote and Don Juan; literature is likewise scattered with references to the oboe as the 'lady amongst the wind instruments'. (awww -- says me. stop being so sopply soppy woppy Joy!) In 1941 Nicholas Bssaraboff described the modern oboe as 'an ultra-refined, almost effeminate descendant and the sole survivor of what at one time promised o be a complete family of oboes'.

dot. dot. dot.

As we have seen, this engendering was not conditioal on the gender of the player, but today the oboe can no longer be thought of as a fragile being dominated by a masculine artist. Professional oboe playing, formerly an exclusively male prerogative, was opened up to women in teh early twentieth century, and this has influenced the personal of the oboe. In 1917 the first woman oboist was admited to the Paris Conservatoire. Odette Rey - daughter of an oboist, was the only woman admitted by Georges Gillet at the Paris Conservatoire. (accepted by Gillet! who wrote like the Bible of oboe studies....)

dot. dot. dot.

Leon Goossens believed that 'the oboe was very much the lady of the orchestra'.....

....and similar rhetoric often appeared in the reviews of his playing: ' We think of the oboe among instruments as the "Lass with the Delicate Air" (more like squeeezed through hardly a hole sort of air!). She did not step out of her character, to be sure - she could not be other than herself - yet there was a scope of performance in the hands or at the lips of Leon Goossens which presented a new vista of tonal possibilities.'

and here's a wee interview...
(hmm i'm giving quite a lecture aren't i?)
Nora Post: One of the most fascinating things you've said is that you feel the oboe is a lady.
Leon Goossens: Yes.
NP: And I fee that it's definitely a man!
LG: Well, I suppose it depends upon your inclination....You noticce the oboe is used on TV and on the radio whenever it's something that is very romantic.
NP: Well, why does romanticism have to be something with women?
LG: Well, from the man's point of view, of course it is.
NP: So you think the oboe is a woman because you're a man, and I think it's a man because I'm a woman!....That's the only answer
Evelyn Rothwell: Do you think that it can take on the characterist of both?
LG: An androgynous oboe? I don't know!

(okay that is definitely squiggly squaggly wiffly waffly....what! gender issues man! it's like now the oboe's got this sexuality identity crisis! -- enough said! -- we have enough to worry about! i mean those reeeds....)

continue...

'Young ladies' might have been able to show their worth on the oboe, but in teh orchestras they still had a battle to fight. It was alleged that they wre uuited to the strain of long rehearsals and strenuous performances and that they distracted their male co-workers. (okay here they actually had a footnote reference, so this is not just some stooopid dooofus crap for opinions' sake - apparently!) The following statement attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham is as chauvinistic as it is pompous:

I do not like, and never will, the association of men and women in orchestras and other instrumental combinations...My spirits is torn all the time between a natural inclination to let myself go and the depressing thought that I must behave like a gentleman. I have been unable to avoid noticing that the presence of a half dozen good-looking women in the orchestra is a distinctly distracting factor. As a member of the orchestra once said to me, 'If she is attractive, I can't play with her; if she is not, then I won't.'

OOOOHHHKAY!
by this point i was so laughing off my chair i am in absolutely no mood suitable to write an intelligent and 'unbiased' bloody piece of crap of an essay.
*inhale good air*
*exhale crap air*

so what on earth was going on in that brain of his when he said "A NATURAL INCLINATION TO LET MYSELF GO?"

somehow i dont think it was his brain talking at that point in time...