For thirty-eight years, from 1955 until I retired in 1993, I was principal oboist of a symphony orchestra in the Midwest. I am seventy-four. One of my former students set up this page and told me I might put on it whatever I liked. What I like, it turns out, is to be brief. Here are a few notes.

Before every rehearsal and every concert the hall grows quiet, the concertmaster stands, and the principal oboe plays an A. The orchestra tunes to it, section by section. The duty falls to the oboe because its tone carries to the back of the stage and its pitch, once the reed is set, does not easily wander.

I gave that A some thousands of times. It is one note, held for a few seconds. I never once played it without my heart beating a little faster.

An oboist makes her own reeds. They begin as cane, a tall grass not unlike bamboo, much of it grown in the south of France. The tube is split and gouged on a small machine until it is very thin, then folded, cut to shape, and tied with thread onto a slender brass tube corked at one end, called the staple. A knife opens the fold into two blades. After that it is all scraping: a very sharp knife, a little at a time, a test, a little more, for an hour or for a week.

I still scrape a reed each morning at my kitchen table, after breakfast, with the radio low and a small glass of water to soak the cane. I play now only for myself and the cardinals at the feeder. The reeds are better than they need to be. I find I cannot do otherwise.

Mozart, Oboe Quartet in F major, K. 370. Written in Munich in 1781 for the oboist Friedrich Ramm. Late in the last movement the oboe wanders off in common time while the three strings carry on in six-eight, and then, as though nothing had happened, comes home. I played it perhaps forty times and smiled every time.

Strauss, Oboe Concerto. Written in 1945, when Strauss was eighty-one and the war had just ended; it was an American soldier, himself an oboist, who asked him whether he had ever thought of writing one. The oboe enters almost at once and scarcely pauses for breath for pages. It is the gentlest music I know, from an old man in a ruined country.

Brahms, Violin Concerto, the slow movement. The soloist must stand and wait while the oboe, with the other winds, sings the melody first. A celebrated violinist of Brahms's day is said to have declined the concerto for exactly that reason. I played that solo beside some very fine violinists. All of them were gracious. One winked.

My husband, Thomas, played cello in the same orchestra for thirty-one years, a few yards in front of me and a little to my left. We married in 1957. He died in the spring of 1996.

He told me once that in all those years he never heard my A without looking up. I did not believe him. After he was gone, three of his colleagues told me, separately, that it was true.

I taught some sixty young oboists over the years, at my dining room table. I shall not name them here. They know who they are, and several still mail me their reeds for an opinion, which I give, and which they sometimes take.

Were I sent to an island with one piece of music, I would take the Schubert String Quintet in C, which has two cellos and no oboe at all. Thomas played the second cello part more than once, and I sat in the hall with nothing to do but listen. I have never been happier at a concert.

Letters are very welcome, from oboists especially, and from anyone who has read this far: [email protected]