The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois", "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca. 1770 from the Italian oboè, a transliteration in that language's orthography of the 17th-century pronunciation of the French word hautbois, a compound word made of haut (high, loud) and bois (wood, woodwind). A musician who plays the oboe is called an oboist. Careful manipulation of embouchure and air pressure allows the player to express a large range of timbre and dynamics.
In comparison to other modern woodwind instruments, the oboe has a clear and penetrating voice. The Sprightly Companion, an instruction book of 1695, describes the voice as "Majestical and Stately, and not much Inferior to the Trumpet." Similarly, the voice is described in the play Angels in America as sounding like that of a duck if the duck were a songbird.[2] The timbre of the oboe is derived from the oboe's conical bore (as opposed to the generally cylindrical bore of flutes and clarinets). As a result, oboes are readily audible over other instruments in large ensembles.
The oboe is pitched in concert C and has a mezzo-soprano to soprano range. Orchestras will usually tune by listening to the oboe play a concert A (usually A440, but sometimes higher if the orchestra tunes to a higher pitch). The reasons are that 1/ the oboe is really audible over most instruments 2/ its timbre is very rich in harmonics, which facilitates other instruments' tuning and above all 3/ because its pitch is very hard to adjust- see just below.
The pitch of the oboe may be adjusted by permanently altering the scrape, removing cane from the reed, or changing the position of the reed in the instrument (although the latter method should only be used as a last resort, because adjusting the position of the reed may cause some notes to warble). Subtle changes in the pitch are also possible by adjusting the embouchure.
The oboe was developed further in the 19th century by the Triebert family of Paris. Using the Boehm flute as a source of ideas for key work, Guillaume Triebert and his sons, Charles and Frederic, devised a series of increasingly complex yet functional key systems. A variant form using large tone holes, the Boehm system oboe, was never in common use, though it was used in some military bands in Europe into the 20th century. F. Lorée of Paris made further developments to the modern instrument. Minor improvements to the bore and key work have continued through the 20th century, but there has been no fundamental change to the general characteristics of the instrument for several decades.[7]
The modern oboe is most commonly made from grenadilla wood African Blackwood, though some manufacturers also make oboes out of other members of the genus Dalbergia, which includes cocobolo, rosewood, and violetwood. Ebony (genus Diospyros) has also been used. Student model oboes are often made from plastic resin, to avoid instrument cracking to which wood instruments are prone, but also to make the instrument more economical. The oboe has an extremely narrow conical bore. The oboe is played with a double reed consisting of two thin blades of cane tied together on a small-diameter metal tube (staple) which is inserted into the reed socket at the top of the instrument. The commonly accepted range for the oboe extends from b♭3 to about g6, over two and a half octaves, though its common tessitura lies from c4 to e♭6. Some student oboes only extend to b3; the key for b♭ is not present, however this variant is becoming less common.
A modern oboe with the "full conservatory" ("conservatoire" outside the USA) or Gillet key system has 45 pieces of keywork, with the possible additions of a third octave key and alternate (left little finger) F- or C-key. The keys are usually made of nickel silver, and are silver or occasionally gold-plated. Besides the full conservatoire system, oboes are also made using the English thumbplate system. Most have "semi-automatic" octave keys, in which the second octave action closes the first, and some have a fully automatic octave key system, as used on saxophones. Some full conservatory oboes have finger holes covered with rings rather than plates ("open-holed"), and most of the professional models have at least the right hand third key open-holed. Professional oboes used in the UK frequently feature conservatoire system combined with a thumb plate. With this type of mechanism the oboist has the best of both worlds as far as the convenience of fingerings is concerned.
