- "Hautbois" redirects here; for the strawberry variety, see
Hautbois strawberry. 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 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. The tim