How NOT to Save an Oboe Studio
“Our Lawyers Made Us Change the Name of this Article; How NOT to Save an Oboe Studio”
I came into the world hearing the music in everything around me. I don’t remember a time without music. I heard music in simple sounds and patterns. The vibrations in the air turned my head from any tasks. They still do. So , how did we come to devalue this so thoroughly in our hectic, daily lives, when every second we are surrounded by it? While most people have a type of music that feels like ‘home’ to them, or they feel the tug of their heartstrings when a movie’s score highlights a dramatic moment, few actually think about the musicians themselves creating those sounds. Often, we hurry through our day with headphones in, but the average consumer barely wants to pay $10 a month to hear endless artists or listen to sound on repeat. The ironic counterpoint is that a day without art, without their soundtrack, without their workout music, without their calming wave sounds a night, would feel hollow and empty. The cost of a concert or CD seems too much.
My background in music began at a very young age and I continued to play well through a college degree and complete change of career. Because that’s really the point to this story: when you’re told the thing you love is not “a career,” a word infused with terror by your depression-era grandparents, it constantly felt like the world is taking your art.
The first excuse will sound familiar: you’ll never make a living trying to get an orchestra seat.
And I listened. I shifted from music performance to music education.
The second one will also ring a bell: you’ll never make a living teaching music.
And I listened. I shifted into music and psychology, music therapy, some “career.”
The third time, I should have listened to myself. I should have decided then.
But instead, I gave up another dream. Another wish. Another hope.
All I ever wanted was to write my music and have an orchestra bring it to life.
The never-ending fear, a romanticized image of being ‘starving, alone, sick, and afraid,’ wondering when my next paycheck would come, took me far from the world of art and music and theater that I so loved. Because there was never an option that looked…like a career. Not everyone can afford to sell zero paintings or to not get the orchestra seat. With no net, you fall. Your dream starts to look like a curse, or worse, a contagion. Very few people I ever played with were able to make a real career with their art. Most, even at a professional level, have had to work two or even three jobs to pay the bills. So, if you’re not the next Madonna or Pavarotti or van Gogh, if you don’t copyright that melody, you lose.
Somehow, art while it is being made, seems to have no intrinsic value. The first Degas is worthless; the first bestselling book is a fluke. Some of the most well-known artists to walk this earth have been the poorest, in terms of money. So, what do we actually value? Do we value things only when we can possess them? The painting half done is worthless, but the complete painting is a priceless masterpiece. Is a piece of music only worth listening to or paying to listen to, because the experience goes with you ? Do you have to own it, make it tangible, possess it, for it to be worth money? Is music then worth less than art, after it is complete, because it can be repeated? And what on earth is value? No matter the medium, it seems art as an experience is not ‘good enough’ to have consumer value.
How do you humanize the artist? How do you display the cost? We don’t come with price tags, yet we pay people to do…everything else. Is a vacation worth more than a concert?
What would a year be like without sound? Would you pay to live in a world without art?
“Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns…You had to ask for the Claire de Lune”
I always sang, but I learned to actually read the music at about 5, when I started piano. The sound of the hammers hitting the strings was like a wave to me and I remember the first time someone explained the physics of sound, I immediately saw a set of bells in my mind, shaping the air around them in concentric circles, ever-expanding. I always knew where the song was going, where the chords would shift and the second anything was the tiniest amount out of tune. The idea of music and mathematics being separate seemed silly. Music is a progression of time based on vibration, math at its simplest and most beautiful, like the rate of motion curve in calculus or the Fibonacci nautilus shell described by Phi.
Not too long after, there was clarinet, the flute, and percussion, and finally, the Oboe. The Oboe could put pathos into a single note, tiny fluctuations in pitch or intensity of which a piano was incapable. I started writing music around then. Piano and voice, then full orchestrations. I always felt where the music was supposed to go, where in instrument’s sound it fit and carried the intention of the melody. Chord structures slid into place like a glove, even if the words didn’t always make sense to me (oh music theory, how I hated you – give me my parallel fifths back!).
Writing music and my time studying music therapy did eventually lead to my research in auditory neuroscience, which allows me to test my hypotheses on vibration and intentional frequency on a neural level. That still has not been lucrative enough to be the focal point of my research. And I love the work that I do, most of the time, science is plenty challenging.
But…I do wish I were playing my piano with the orchestra.
Leah L. Somerville, PhD
12/15/2025