Michael Adduci

• The Syllabus. This document is the most-current syllabus for oboe lessons. It contains most of what you need to know to be successful in this class, including practice requirements, scale requirements, suggested repertoire by level of study, information about end-of-term juries and the barrier examination, recommended recordings and books, and more.

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• Fall 2021 Ensemble Audition Music for Wind Ensemble, University Orchestra and Bryan Symphony. (Coming in August!)

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• Listening Assignment Guidelines for your required listening assignments.

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• Oboe Pedagogy Guide. I wrote this guidebook to help band directors guide their oboe students. It covers the four basic areas of pedagogy: posture, breathing, embouchure and articulation, and gives exercises for working on the main problems young players face. These are the same exercises I use for myself and with my college students.

  • My doctoral dissertation studied the relationship between air pressure and loudness when playing the oboe, which has implications for our pedagogy as well.

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• Adduci's Rules of Oboe Playing: These are a collection of the most important concepts I have learned from my teachers over the years, for oboe technique and general musicianship. There is also a list of suggestions for making your performances of Baroque music sound more stylistically authentic, even on a modern oboe.

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• Warm-up exercises: spend 20 minutes on these during your first practice session every day.

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• Scales! Mastering your scales is a very important step on your way to professional-level oboe playing. All of our music is based on melodic patterns derived from scales. Having all of the major and minor scales "under your fingers" (that is, memorized, and playable at a fast tempo) will improve your sight-reading, and also make your practice more effective - if you can play many technical passages more automatically without requiring so much woodshedding, you will have more time during practice to work on your phrasing and presentation. Learn your scales!

  1. Here are all of the freshman-year scale requirements, with the scales written out on the staff and the required fingerings marked in. By the end of your freshman year you should be able to play all major and minor scales, two octaves to high F. In later years we will add patterns and higher notes, but this should be your foundation. You can start by reading your scales from the printed music, but they need to be played from memory at your juries so you should get started memorizing them immediately.

  2. I view scales as an absolute necessity, and I also feel very strongly that learning scales is the responsibility of the student, not the teacher.  I do not spend lesson time listening to your scales unless you are not taking care of business adequately on your own. I expect that every student will spend sufficient practice time on their own to master their scales, so that we can spend your lesson time on the higher orders of musical learning and not on this basic technical requirement. If you need more structure in your scale practice, you might try using my scales checklist to keep track of your progress.

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• Reed Making! I am currently revising my reed making handouts, and will post them here when the new versions are finished.

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• Flowcharts for gouging and shaping cane. Reeds 'n Stuff tools  -  Ross tools

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• One of the best ways to learn tricky technical passages is to change their rhythm and create an exercise out of the melodic line. This handout explains how to take a sixteenth-note passage and rewrite it as a triplet exercise with the metronome. I have learned some very challenging passages with this technique; I've never found any music that cannot be mastered with the triplet method. Give it a try!

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• Finally, here is a sheet of staff paper that you can print out as many times as you need.