Are you a full paid-up member of SRP nationally - in which case you may have seen my anonymous mention in the spring issue (the one with Flautando Koeln on the front cover), as quoted in my as-yet-unanswered thread on online music communities.

You may not be missing much! Seriously, I often wonder to myself whether recorder orchestras are worth the effort. My dad once said, apropos of something else: "It reminds me of a scale model of St Paul's Cathedral made out of matchsticks. The end result may be impressive, but you can't help but wonder, 'Why bother?'" I for one wonder it is worth the trouble of trying to sell a novel, untested musical form to the general public. It would be different if there were well-known professional recorder orchestras, but I've never heard of any. As it is, we're stuck with performing either rearrangements of popular classics or special pieces for recorder orchestras composed by people unknown outside the recorder-playing world (Colin Touchin, Steve Marshall et al). This doesn't really help to shift the popular perception of the recorder as being more of a primary school teaching aid than a proper instrument with its own repertoire.

But if the consorts aren't looking for new members, they're not going to offer me a place even once they know me. Last year I happened to see a feature on John Craven's Countryfile programme about a Dartmoor-based maker of wooden flutes who makes a point of using local sustainably-sourced timber. Having tracked down his personal website I emailed him, asking if he knew of opportunities for me to play with other instrumentalists. He gave me the email address of "a lady who plays in an folk cum medieaval ensemble in Newton Abbot" so I emailed her next. Then two months later at a rehearsal of the recorder orchestra, a lady whose name I didn't know (I hardly know anyone's name in the group) came up to me and said: "You sent me an email. I've been meaning to reply for ages." As I didn't know her name, it took a while to register, but then she explained that I'd mentioned Nigel Shaw the flute-maker. She went on to state that she'd been playing in her group with the same people for 15 years and they're not looking for new recruits, thank you very much. (I subsequently checked the email I'd sent her, and I did not ask "Please may I join your group?" but "Do you know of any opportunities...?")

What, the group who had a hit with "Running Out of Time"? I remember the Chart Show prudishly referred to them as "Digital O", despite having had no qualms about showing the videos of Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up" and Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex".

Nope, not that one - we just liked the name, or more to it, I liked the name. I still use it sometimes for my own music!

Yes I Play Recorder And Harmonica And I Want to Play in an All Aspergian Band. It's Very Hard to do I Have Been Trying With Church Though.

An all Aspergian band? I'm don't care where my fellow musicians are on (or off) the autistic spectrum. Talent is the key!

The latest issue of The Recorder Magazine features The Royal Wind Ensemble (from the Netherlands) to illustrate an article about recorder orchestras. Mind you, the RWE's own website nowhere describes itself as such: http://www.royalwindmusic.org/

As I'm not at university (haven't been for nearly a decade), are you basically telling me I'm screwed?

It's the fault of people who don't respect the recorder which, to me, is most certainly a proper instrument.  One of my main musical preferences is the Baroque period and I quite like a lot of earlier music.  Performance-wise, I prefer period instruments to modern instruments and an admiration for the recorder is very much part of that.  I like Michala Petri, Frans Bruggen, David Munrow, and the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet.

I never took proper lessons on the recorder myself but my interest in it as a serious instrument was stimulated at an event at my local National Trust venue (Mountstewart) in 1982, called "Midsummer Masquerade", which included Elizabethan dancers accompanied by a similarly-dressed recorder consort playing Renaissance recorders. They were led by the late, great, Keith Rogers, who made the instruments http://www.jeremywest.co.uk/GKRinmempages1.htm
Keith also ran an organisation called the Belfast Recorder and Early Music Society and I attended a concert by them at least once, which included a set of oxhorns!

I played a Telemann Treble Recorder Sonata (the canonical one) at a local music festival in 1983 or 84. I later played it at a lunchtime recital at my university which led to my being asked to be one of the two recorder players in a performance of Purcell's "Come, ye sons of art". I was still on plastic recorders at that stage.  I'm much more out of practice now but I've got two wooden Moeck's that I bought on eBay.  My descant is English fingering but the treble is German and there are some notes that I never quite figured out!  They do, however, fit very nicely in my suitcase. I took the treble with me to Autscape last year, where I played a short solo on it at the entertainment evening.

Aeolienne, back in the late 1990s, when I was also in my mid-30s, I was asked by the music service of my local education board to stand in for one of the full-time general woodwind tutors, who was on maternity leave at the time. This involved having to teach myself (a bassoonist) flute, clarinet, oboe and alto saxophone in order to have an understanding of the instruments.  There wasn't any actual requirement to play them in the lessons and as far as I'm aware, most general woodwind tutors don't even play some of the instruments that they teach.  However, I was determined to be better than that, with the intention of getting into a full-time post in that field (which never happened).  What I can tell you is that if you take up an orchestral woodwind instrument, it will not be an entirely new set of fingerings.  There will be both similarities and differences between recorder and modern orchestral woodwind, just as there are both similarities and differences between different orchestral woodwinds.  The general similarity is the principle that there will be a range of about an octave which is climbed by the sequential removal of fingers from right little finger at the bottom of the tube to left index finger at the top.  Treat that as the core principle and regard the different variations on different instruments as tweaks of the sequence rather than something completely different.

Going beyond that first octave, you cross a "break" where the climbing sequence is loosely repeated in a higher octave, or at the interval of a perfect twelfth in the case of the clarinet. I say "loosely" because, depending upon the instrument, the tweaking of the finger sequence increases in higher octaves for reasons of tuning, tone and ease of speech.

I don't know anything about your mental capacity, but I'd think you could if you're like most 34 year olds. I'm not a woodwind player (although I played clarinet on my own for a few months, I wish I had kept up with it) so I'll take rarepegs word for it that the fingerings will not be completely new.

As for getting up to the "orchestral standard," there's not one. If you want to play for money with a professional orchestra, you might never do it, although it's not a completely unrealistic goal. If you don't want to play for money but you want to play western european music with other people in a concert setting, you could look to play with a community band. This list is a good place to start:
http://boerger.org/c-m/groups.shtml

Community bands (or orchestras) vary in terms of seriousness and level of difficulty, so you'd have to check with them. You could also ask around at music shops. I would reccomend taking lessons, at least at first (but longer wouldn't hurt either), and if you're consistent and organized about it for a year you should be on a high school level.

I played with a community band for about a year out of high school, and it was very disorganized. Just kind of a "whoever shows up" kind of thing, and there were some "weekend warriors" and some professional level players. If you couldn't play something you didn't get chewed out, although of course you were expected to make an effort to do well.

It's easier to learn a second instrument than it is to learn the first one, no matter what instrument you choose. Think about if you want to try to get into popular music and/or jazz too, obviously sax would be better than oboe for that.

what

Don't take this time frame as a rule though, it's just a rough guess. You could be ready sooner.

Well, it depends on what you're trying to do, and you certainly aren't going to start out playing with a pro level group. I found the group I played with to be challenging, and the people took it seriously, although they were still mostly there to have fun. And as a musician, I can say that was absolutely not pointless, playing with a group of people takes some different skills than playing alone, and the only way to learn that is through experience, it definitely was helpful to me.  

But I also find the emotionally playing with a group is very important to me, so important that I would learn a new instrument if it was the only way I could play with other people. That's why I said "If you really care about playing with other people," because maybe what you really care about is playing the recorder, and the people come second (not that I talk to them a lot myself, heh). In that case I guess you'll just have to keep doing what you're doing.

By the way, by disorganized, I meant disorganized for a functional and large concert group. I meant much the organizing was done on an informal basis, and the different sections were expected to work things out on their own. I meant that you don't get chewed out for showing up a few minutes late to practice, which is normally taboo for musicians to do. I didn't mean that people were crapping through their horns, switching parts in the middle of songs, etc.

I'm just trying to make you aware of your options. These may not be worthwhile to you but they are options nonetheless. Finding musicians to play with in itself isn't difficult although your goals and needs may be more complex.

I am not from that bit of the world. Google isn't really clearing it up much for me.

Argh I know you said "good amatuer," by the way, but "good" is so subjective that I don't know what it means to you.

Aeolienne, I was quite deliberate when I mentioned about my recorders fitting nicely into my suitcase. When I visited Exeter with a party of organists last year over the early May bank holiday weekend, I liked the place so much that I decided that I should come back for a more thorough look around (including the tunnels).  I have been considering it as a possible option for this summer ever since last May.

ABRSM
Trinity Guildhall