Shaving cane: Making music by the micrometer

“He’s one of the best oboe players out there,” Lee said.

And when Lee toured the music building, she discovered yet another reason to choose the U. of I.

In the corner of the basement is a small room, just big enough for a table with eight chairs. Desk lamps and hooks anchored into the table show that it’s used as a workbench. Charts and diagrams decorate the walls, and an industrial sink dominates one end of the room.

“As soon as I saw it,” Lee said, “I knew it was a place for making reeds.”

For oboe players, reeds are crucial: They function as the entire mouthpiece of the instrument. Unlike a clarinet, which uses a single flat reed, vibrating against a hard rubber mouthpiece, an oboe requires a “double reed” – a pair of wood slivers, cut from a length of hollowed-out cane, shaved down to something thinner than a thumbnail, and bound together tightly enough that the two blades emit sound when air is forced between them.

Kristin Weber, a junior oboe major from Overland Park, Kan., said she has wrecked more than one reed with her long hair. “I’ve had times when a single strand will get stuck to a reed and take a tiny chip out of it,” she said, “and that will completely ruin it.”

Even with no collisions, these fragile reeds die young.

“A reed is good for vibrating for about 24 hours,” Dee said. “So if you practice three hours a day, then go to rehearsals and play a concert, you’ve got about a week and that reed is done.”

Reeds can be purchased at prices ranging from about $12 for a factory-made specimen to $30 or more for a handmade reed. No matter how high the price, there’s no guarantee that a reed made by someone else will play precisely the way a particular oboist wants it to sound.

“If I’m making a reed and it turns out to be an awesome reed, I’m not going to sell it; I’m going to keep it for myself,” said Evan Tammen, a graduate student who is Dee’s teaching assistant. “Everybody has to learn to make their own reeds because you can’t really even put a price on a really good reed.”

Weber still remembers the panic she felt in high school, relying on professionally made reeds to arrive in the mail. “They were expensive, and they’d come in and maybe only two or three of them would end up working for me,” she said. “It was very stressful wondering when they’re going to come in, if they’re going to work and how long they’re going to last. Now that I can make a basic reed, it feels a lot better.”

Reed-making is a complex, tedious, quirky craft involving tools ranging from old-fashioned single-edge razor blades to $200 Japanese knives, common beeswax to micrometers. Each step is measured in fractions of a millimeter, and any miscalculation can damage the wood. It’s possible to follow each step precisely and still not end up with a satisfactory reed.

Amy Shea, a sophomore oboe major, started trying to make her own reeds when she was still a student at Urbana Middle School and attended Illinois Summer Youth Music camp at the U. of I. Every morning of the weeklong camp, oboists and bassoon players (bassoons also use double reeds) would meet for an hour to study reed-making with Dee.

When camp ended, Shea bought a beginners reed-making kit, but her father, unnerved by the dangerous tools, consigned it to the top shelf of a closet. He eventually allowed Shea to take it to oboe lessons so she could practice scraping half-formed reeds, called “blanks,” with her teacher.

“For all of my sophomore year (of high school), I was making probably one reed per week, on average, but I was ruining them,” Shea said. “I would scrape off the corner, like half the tip, for a very long time. It was very frustrating for me.”

Many music schools provide no dedicated space for reed-making; some provide only a small practice room that can be occupied by one person at a time. The U. of I. reed lab is big enough to accommodate several students, and they end up swapping bits of cane, nylon thread, razor blades and reed-making wisdom.

Audrey Levengood, a freshman music education major from the Chicago suburb of Crystal Lake, said she visited five other schools, and none showed her a reed lab.

“It’s a really nice thing to have,” she said. “As a freshman, I’m still learning about reed-making, so that’s definitely helpful, just being with people who have more experience.”

Lee, a sophomore oboe major from Marietta, Ga., toured other schools, some with reed-making facilities, some with none, but noticed that the U. of I. reed lab was in active use.

“I could have chosen other schools, but I think I chose the U. of I. because … like, the reed lab, when I looked at it, I could see myself making reeds in here with friends,” she said. “I knew that if I went to a school with a reed lab with no one in it, I would be emotionally unstable. Here, I walk in and there will be two or three people making reeds, and I’ll be like, ‘Hi, guys! Can you look at my reeds and see if we can figure out a way to make them sound better?’ ”

Even Shea, who has been making her own reeds since 11th grade, occasionally seeks the aid of other oboists.

“If you’ve been staring at a reed for a long time, you can’t really tell what’s wrong with it,” she said. “Sometimes, if someone else looks at it, even if they’re not a more advanced reed-maker, it helps.”