Becca wrote:I got to play a BASS OBOE once and it was AWESOME!!! Thing was as big as me (I'm super tiny, btw--might have something to do with why saxophone felt so much more awkward to me than clarinet).
I've seen a Heckelphone before. I was touring around with the American Wind Symphony Orchestra like four years ago and we played three pieces that used it - oboe fingerings, bassoon reed. As for going between oboe and bassoon, the switch shouldn't be difficult at all. It's probably easier, in some respects - you never hear bassoonists complaining about reeds.
As far as degrees go, it's pretty much a losing battle, I think: you finish one and want to delay the real world as long as possible, so you go and get another... and then another... until you're a doctor! That doesn't appeal to me anymore, though it once did. All my degrees are in performance but I doubled up with a bachelor's in music education. I took all my certification tests and everything, so I can legally teach in New York, but with the economy as bad as it is, people aren't leaving their jobs. A lot of performance majors do education as a back-up, but even now that doesn't work - it's practically just as hard to get a teaching job now as it is to really use a performance degree. I'm substitute teaching and holding my breath for something to open up SOMEday.
I guess it also depends what you make of it. If you accept that you won't be a touring soloist or the principal player in a major orchestra (not every singer-songwriter can be as successful as Joanna Newsom, for analogy's sake), you can make something out of it. I don't necessarily regret what I did - I had a really good education, and I enjoyed it - but it's tough to make some things work in the real world. ESPECIALLY now.