The Baroque Oboe

The presence of the oboe in an ensemble is not easily ignored. Its unique tone quality and timbre is easily distinguishable from all other instruments. Keeping the instrument’s tone and instrumentation blended with the rest of the ensemble is a challenge unique to oboists. The oboe’s natural loudness comes from its history: its main predecessor was the shawm, which was much louder than the oboes that come after it. The baroque oboe, duetsche schalmei, and other oboes that were developed from the shawm were various attempts by the French, Germans, and the English were all to refine the sound, make it quieter, and make it easier to play. As time went on through the 17th and 18th centuries, instrument makers worked on “stabilizing” the oboe,

The shawm also had many different names depending on the country the instrument was made in. Paul Carroll elaborate on this by saying, “the shawm went under different names for different sizes in Germany where it was called pommer, bomhart, bombard, and schalmey” (Carroll 91). Who exactly developed the shawm into the baroque oboe in disputable among scholars. According to records by Josef Marx, the oboe was mostly likely developed in the late 1640s (Carroll 93). This instrument was commonly referred to as “hautbois” (loud woodwind). Paul Carroll writes that “The French word ‘hautbois’ and its English derivation ‘hautboy’ were both names which were applied to shawms during the 16th and 17th centuries” (90). Soon, the term transformed into a new instrument that was developed from the shawm. Burgess and Haynes state that “The changes the shawm underwent in the process of being transformed into the hautboy were quite basic, as the instrument was swept along on the tide of a profound shift in the conception of what music was about…. An even more fundamental mutation took place in the idea of the instrument’s character and role” (27). The 17th century is seen as the most inventive and explorative part of the oboe’s history. Beginning after 1650, the oboe becomes

The oboe now had a place in the opera, with artist like Jean-Baptiste Lully and Francois Couperin pairing two oboes with a bassoon in most of their pieces. Carroll states that “Handel used the oboe throughout his life in his operas and oratorios and many of the oboists who played in his orchestras also composed, their works ensuring their immortality in a way that their virtuosity could not” (103). But no one’s works for the oboe are more extensive than Johann Sebastian Bach’s. As well as using the instrument in his arias, Bach employs the oboe as a concertante instrument in the sinfonias of his cantatas (Carroll