Katherine Needleman Interview
Below is the transcript of my interview with Katherine Needleman. Please note the link back to the podcast and video formats as well as show notes with all the links. Katherine Needleman is a wonderful oboe player, who has been the principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony since 2003. She’s also active as a solist and chamber musician, and is on faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. She is a champion of music of our time and you’ll find her recordings and many projects on her website. To many listeners in the Classical Music world, she’s probably better known for her Substack articles and posts on social media that address misogyny, sexual misconduct and assault, and the lack of diversity and equity in the Classical music world. In this conversation you’ll hear about some of her activism and advocacy work , and different aspects of Katherine’s life as a musician, including her work as a composer and educator, and mentors including Jennifer Higdon. Please note the timestamps to navigate the episode. I regret that I didn’t get into improvisation with her, because she’s also an excellent improvisor and has put out an album of improvised chamber music “The Marmalade Balloon”. Perhaps we can get into this next time she comes on the podcast!
Katherine Needleman (00:00:00):
This started, you mentioned 2021. I started with a collage that was basically made by the Pacific Music Festival and I put it out on the internet. I just screenshot the whole faculty. I didn't make anything myself. They did it and it was like one woman in some huge number of faculty members. And it's funny because I had been kind of talking about this stuff and I, I've been certainly talking about the Pacific Music Festival and nobody cared, and somehow I just put those pictures up there and it blew up, and there's this huge response and I'm like, really? You guys are surprised by this? You find this unacceptable. I found that unacceptable forever. I've known about this forever, but somehow when people see it laid out without words, I think words can be offensive and threatening to people sometimes, but just the picture allows people to see what they want to see.
(00:00:51):
It's easy for me as a white woman to see, oh, look, there are no men, but very many of these collages. Also, there are all kinds of other people missing too, right? You have a huge lack of gender diverse people. You have very few Black and Brown people in these photos commonly as well. So just putting these collages out there allows people to see themselves or the lack of themselves, and somehow I think it's a little less threatening. And so when I started these collages, that was before I started using words. Now I'm much more threatening with words, but this was my toe in the water, these collages.
Leah Roseman (00:01:36):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians with in-depth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to a life in music. Katherine Needleman is a wonderful oboe player who's been the principle oboist of the Baltimore Symphony since 2003. She's also active as a soloist and chamber musician and is on faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. She's a champion of music of our time, and you'll find her recordings and many projects on her website. To many listeners in the classical music world, she's probably better known for her Substack articles and posts on social media that address misogyny, sexual misconduct and assault, and the lack of diversity and equity in the classical music world. In this conversation, you'll hear about some of her activism and advocacy work and different aspects of Katherine's life as a musician, including her work as a composer and educator and mentors, including Jennifer Higdon. Please note the timestamps to navigate the episode. I regret that I didn't get into improvisation with her because she's also an excellent improviser and has put out an album of improvised chamber music, The Marmalade Balloon. Perhaps we can get into this next time she comes on the podcast.
(00:02:45):
You can watch this on YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I've also linked the transcript to my website, leahroseman.com. It's a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Please look at the links for different ways to support this independent podcast. In January, 2025, I'll be releasing Season Five of this series. In the show notes for this episode, I've linked some other episodes that may interest you as well as the newsletter signup where you'll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Now to Katherine Needleman.
(00:03:20):
Hi Katherine. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Katherine Needleman (00:03:22):
Hi. It's great to be here.
Leah Roseman (00:03:24):
I don't normally divulge who I'm going to be interviewing, but I couldn't resist with you. So many of my colleagues follow you and appreciate the work you do as an advocate. So I did mention it to few people and they were just so excited.
Katherine Needleman (00:03:37):
Oh, well, I'm excited to be here.
Leah Roseman (00:03:40):
A lot of people are so appreciative of the work you do as an advocate and a writer, and we're definitely going to be talking about that.
(00:03:47):
And people know you're an oboist, but I don't think everyone knows you're a composer or some of the other work you do.
Katherine Needleman (00:03:53):
Yeah, I wear some different hats sometimes I'm kind of new-ish to composing, but also not. I did it really since I was a small child, and then I just kind of lived as an improviser for many decades. That's sort of what I do for fun. Usually not on the oboe because the oboe is a little bit limited harmonically, but I play the piano for fun. That's my hobby. So I've been doing that forever, and I think that growing up with this canon of music just by men, it kind of never occurred to me that while I could put music on paper too, and then during the pandemic, it occurred to me, and so I actually really enjoy that. It's one of the more satisfying to me things that I do.
Leah Roseman (00:04:41):
So a lot of this work, you have done your advocacy work, you started during the pandemic, right?
Katherine Needleman (00:04:49):
I think you could say that, yes. I think that's fair.
Leah Roseman (00:04:53):
Yeah, I can relate because with this podcast and other stuff I've done, it's like I started when we had less to do as orchestra musicians, and then it kind of got out of control and now I have to fit everything in.
Katherine Needleman (00:05:04):
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's hard to describe exactly what I am and what I do now, but it was definitely a process to get here. The pandemic was a big part of it. Yes, because we had this free time and I think I first started getting some attention with the things that I post in the pandemic, but certainly I wouldn't say that it just started there. There was definitely a lead in.
Leah Roseman (00:05:30):
Yeah, no, but in terms of all the attention you've garnered, the amount of followers you have, your blog and all that, that was during 2021.
Katherine Needleman (00:05:40):
Yes, I believe that's about right. I started really posting some overtly feminist stuff in about 2021.
Leah Roseman (00:05:48):
Well, let's start with some good news. So you've started this fund for new music creation.
Katherine Needleman (00:05:53):
Yes.
Leah Roseman (00:05:54):
And the story's kind of interesting, it relates your student, Fatima. Do you want to tell that story?
Katherine Needleman (00:06:01):
Sure. So I would say I've always been hearing, at least since I've been kind of out on the internet, that the reason that we don't see women in all of these different spaces that I complain about, the reason is there's a pipeline problem and this means that we don't have the students or that we're not nurturing the talent in this so-called pipeline, and I am quite sure that that is an erroneous argument at this point because it's so obvious to me how many wonderful women there are ready to go, and not just women, people of other genders and people who are not white. There are all these people who are ready to go at the highest level, and it's not because they don't exist that we don't see them, it's because the system is a bit stacked against them. I think this is more accurate.
(00:06:53):
Anyway, I had complained about a brass ensemble online that was very, very disproportionately white men, and the man in charge was quite offended by what I had to say, and he wanted to speak to me. This was back when I would agree to speak to people on a cold call, which I no longer do, and I should have known I shouldn't have done it because there were so many red flags in the communication, the written communication that he gave me, but I was stupid then. And so I spoke to him, I should say he spoke to me and it was a 45 minute conversation. I timed it during which he spoke for 43 and a half minutes, and I had to ask permission to speak. I had to interrupt him in order to speak. I had to say, can you please let me finish in order to say the very few things that I said?
(00:07:40):
But this was his big thing that it's the pipeline, and this is why the women brass players weren't in this very high class brass ensemble because there just simply weren't any who were good enough, and he knows how everybody plays in the whole world, and he would love to invite women, he loves women, but just that they haven't been in the pipeline and we really need to focus on that pipeline. He, of course, didn't put forth any way that he had planned to focus on that pipeline and fix this so-called problem of not knowing these women brass players. But I thought to him, well, maybe this is the issue. I thought to myself, maybe this is right. Maybe this is the issue with oboe. I know about oboe and maybe we don't see these women in the highest echelons of OBO because they just haven't been trained appropriately and they're not here ready to go.
(00:08:31):
And so I opened up a scholarship for free online lessons to anybody, anybody in the world, and I said, you have to speak English or Spanish, otherwise I can't communicate with you. I'm sorry. And I got two young women students who were phenomenal. One of them stayed with me. She asked to stay for a second year, and her name was, is Fata, and she is remarkable. I could kind of smell her fire through the internet in a conversation just like this, and she spoke no English at the time, and my Spanish is not particularly good. It's kind of all right, but I can't have a conversation like this one in Spanish, but I could still smell her fire in her drive, and she hadn't had really any training to speak of. And so we engaged in a couple of years of online training, and she came here after about eight months.
(00:09:26):
Valerie Coleman was instrumental in getting her here to the United States for the summer, and she went to BUTI Tanglewood, and Valerie really arranged a full scholarship for her, and we needed to get some money together to get her here. So I did a GoFundMe for that, and I ended up with a little bit of extra money. I bought her some reed tools and stuff like that, and she showed up to my house and I was able to teach her in a room for the first time ever, and it was unbelievable to me because the stuff she was playing was unplayable and I had been working like, oh, let's try this control issue. I was really struggling with this intonation thing or this control thing, but when I had her stuff, I couldn't do anything at all with it. This is how lucky I am with my equipment and the ability to afford decent equipment.
(00:10:13):
And she was just playing whatever she could get her hands on in small town Mexico. And so at that point, I'm like, well, we got to get this kid an instrument. And so when she went back and she's coming back to the United States again, she came back for college auditions and she did fantastically well at those auditions. She ended up getting into Curtis and she needs an oboe, so I was like, well, let me go back to GoFundMe and see if we can raise money for an oboe. And we did very, very quickly. Within three hours, I had the funding for obo and I actually had some leftover. So with that leftover money, I've decided that I want to continue work for students like Fatima, and I also think it's really important to get some new pieces out there so that we can play things that are outside of that canon. Outside of this, when we play the oboe, we have 30 pieces. We basically study as students, and I think it's really exciting for people to work with composers. I think that we need so much more music from so many different voices, and so that's what I'm hoping to use this very small amount of money to continue work on.
Leah Roseman (00:11:24):
There's a few elements to the story that are so amazing. I mean, for one thing that in three hours you could raise thousands of dollars.
Katherine Needleman (00:11:30):
Yeah, it's sort of shocking, isn't it?
Leah Roseman (00:11:33):
And also that Fatima was able to get into Curtis, it's one of the most exclusive music schools in the world.
Katherine Needleman (00:11:39):
It is, and she is extremely gifted, and I'm sure people are going to say, well, I was at the audition. We had an audition behind a screen. We had three rounds, and two of them were behind a screen, so you can say, Hey, the third round wasn't behind a screen. I would definitely complain about that at an orchestra audition, but she made her way from behind the screen and was very compelling, not just to me. I was not the only person on the committee, and she's been very successful at Tanglewood as well. She's, she's a joy to teach, and she will do more in a week hands-on with good training than a lot of people will do in a year because she's so motivated and the fire is so strong, and maybe that comes from having to fight, having to fight for education. Sometimes my kids, I can never get them to practice because I'm always there, let me help you practice. Let me take you to your cello lesson, and that doesn't go over so well. They're not very motivated, but it seems very different in her case.
Leah Roseman (00:12:40):
Actually, this comes up often with my guests who are parents. I have two grown kids, but I certainly went through this in terms of arts education, do you think it's a challenge that they have this accomplished professional musician as a mom? Do they compare themselves to you?
Katherine Needleman (00:12:54):
No. I mean, my kids have no desire to be professional musicians. Maybe this is sad, but I have not, I guess, presented a view of the profession that led them to say, oh, I want to do that too. Oh, I want to play in an orchestra. So my son doesn't really talk about what he wants to do yet, only nine. But my daughters are both in high school and they both have academic interests. I mean sort of political academic interests, and that's great. That's their thing. Certainly they've been studying music since they were young, and I do kind of force them to do it now, just because
Leah Roseman (00:13:32):
That's what I was wondering about.
Katherine Needleman (00:13:32):
I force them to do math and other things that they don't want to do, and I think probably when they go to college, they won't do it, but maybe they'll change their mind. But they have a good education in music, so they can do with it what they want. It's their choice.
Leah Roseman (00:13:47):
And for yourself somewhere you were writing, of course, I've read so much of your writing,
Katherine Needleman (00:13:53):
There's a lot of crazy stuff out there. There's a lot of material
Leah Roseman (00:13:58):
That when you were 15, you were at the Baltimore School of Arts, you performed what you consider maybe to be your best performance of the Mozart Oboe Quartet.
Katherine Needleman (00:14:05):
Yeah, probably
Leah Roseman (00:14:06):
Because after that performance got more fraught with anxiety. Do you want to speak to that?
Katherine Needleman (00:14:12):
Yeah, fraught with we're always fighting in classical music for everything, for this job and that job, and to get paid $200 for something that's thousands of hours of work, and I didn't realize any of that. Then I just loved the music and went and played. It just not really for anybody. So I think that's kind of the most pure way to approach it. So I think I probably did better that time than any of the other times, although I probably play better in tune now or with more control or something like that.
Leah Roseman (00:14:46):
Yeah, it's interesting. You weren't playing for anybody, just for the enjoyment of the music.
Katherine Needleman (00:14:50):
Yeah, I mean, that piece, if you're a 15-year-old Oboe player, that piece is amazing. It's wild. It's crazy. There's nothing that could be more awesome than that really, I think if you're a 15-year-old Oboe nerd.
Leah Roseman (00:15:05):
Yeah. I used to play oboe for, actually in high school.
Katherine Needleman (00:15:07):
Oh, really? Yeah. Well, you know, it's like a high F and it's got the cut time and the six eight. It's insane. It's awesome.
Leah Roseman (00:15:16):
Well, what I could relate to when you have a video, when you're talking about getting in shape quickly, which I could really relate to because that there's different sort of seasons of your playing in every month, probably in every year, and that when you need to increase a lot of resistance, you use a very thick reed, right?
Katherine Needleman (00:15:35):
Oh yeah. If I'm preparing for recital or something or I just need to get back in shape quickly, sometimes it's basically lifting weights, use a maybe heavier read then I would actually want to use in real life.
Leah Roseman (00:15:48):
Yeah. I found that very interesting actually. Well, I think it relates to other instruments and probably singers. I mean, there's a way to increase resistance in order to be more efficient,
Katherine Needleman (00:15:56):
Right? Yeah. When we play the oboe, you just have to be really flexible. I mean, I don't really have a frame of reference for playing anything else at this level, but everything is always changing on the oboe every day. And if you're not willing to kind of accept that and go with it and say, well, I got to make the best of this, you're going to be totally screwed because one day your reed is one way, one day the reed is another way the instrument cracks and then changes and is never the same ever again. But I think the reeds especially are so finicky that you have to kind of exert your own force of will over it. So I do try to practice on everything just so that I know how to deal with it when it comes.
Leah Roseman (00:16:39):
How much has that reed making machine you bought changed your time? You say it doesn't save you time, but it must
Katherine Needleman (00:16:48):
No, it kind of reduces my stress level. No, because I still spend a lot of time getting them just right or going through and picking out which one is which, but I don't sharpen knives anymore. It makes it so I don't have to sharpen knives anymore, which is awesome because I spent a really sick amount of time sharpening knives for a normal adult human before. No one should spend that kind of time sharpening knives. So that's awesome that I don't have to do that, and I just kind of do final finishing work because of this machine I have. It's been really nice for me. It allows me to be pickier about certain things is fun.
Leah Roseman (00:17:21):
How many reeds do you feel you need to make every week in order to have a good choice?
Katherine Needleman (00:17:26):
I try to make about two or three a week, which is actually very low amount. I think most Oboe players would tell you they spend a lot more time and make a lot more reeds, but I try to make two or three good ones, and I try not to waste any time just to get that done. And my reeds last now, they last a pretty long time too, so I have plans to make them last long, and so I can use the reeds from this week or the reeds from last week or the reeds from last month, and somewhere in there I hope to find something acceptable. If I combine that with my skills of being able to play on anything, usually I can hopefully show up in public without making an embarrassing noise or something.
Leah Roseman (00:18:06):
I was charmed in that video where you show your reed making journal so meticulous, which you have to be, I understand you wrote down, you said, and now I'm going to write down, and it's like the exact length of the
Katherine Needleman (00:18:18):
Oh, yeah, that's new for me. That's like-
Leah Roseman (00:18:20):
oh, is it? OK.
Katherine Needleman (00:18:22):
Yeah. I've only been doing that for about a year, but a lot of people do it and everybody has a different way. Some people have a really messy reed table and no organization at all, and some people are super organized and number all of their reeds and make Excel spreadsheets and stuff. I've usually been on the sort of messy, disorganized end of things. That's kind of my way.
Leah Roseman (00:18:46):
Yeah. Well, you have such attention to detail in the work you do showing the inequalities in our classical music world, just this idea of doing collages of look at this faculty at this university and look at this festival. Did you get that idea from somebody?
Katherine Needleman (00:19:04):
This started, you mentioned 2021. I started with a collage that was basically made by the Pacific Music Festival,
(00:19:11):
And I put it out on the internet. I just screenshot the whole faculty. I didn't make anything myself. They did it, and it was like one woman in some huge number of faculty members. And it's funny because I had been kind of talking about this stuff, and I had been certainly talking about the Pacific Music Festival and nobody cared, and somehow I just put those pictures up there and it blew up, and there was this huge response and I was like, really? You guys are surprised by this? You find this unacceptable. I found that unacceptable forever. I've known about this forever, but somehow when people see it laid out without words, I think words can be sort of offensive and threatening to people sometimes, but just the picture allows people to see what they want to see. It's easy for me as a white woman to see, oh, look, there are no women, but very many of these collages. Also, there are all kinds of other people missing too. You have a huge lack of gender diverse people. You have very few Black and Brown people in these photos commonly as well. So just putting these collages out there allows people to see themselves or the lack of themselves, and somehow I think it's a little less threatening. And so when I started these collages, that was before I started using words. Now I'm much more threatening with words, but this was my toe in the water. These collages,
Leah Roseman (00:20:38):
You write so well. You have such excellent terms of phrase, and you're very funny. Have you been writing as a hobby?
Katherine Needleman (00:20:45):
No, I'm not a writer at all. Really?
Leah Roseman (00:20:47):
You don't think of yourself that way?
Katherine Needleman (00:20:49):
No. I'm just an oboe player. I mean, that's how I started. I think that everything we do in music is about communication, though in some way. I was always good at spelling in school. I was always really good at spelling. I noticed this week at work, one of the titles of the pieces that I'm playing is misspelled. I am that kind of person, but I'm definitely not a writer. I didn't graduate from high school. So I mean, I'm not particularly educated, but I do what I can to get my message out there, and I write as well as I can. I go back and proofread, not always perfectly.
Leah Roseman (00:21:28):
So you were able to go to Curtis directly from high school,
Katherine Needleman (00:21:31):
Right? I left. I didn't finish high school, and I went to Curtis. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:21:35):
Yeah. I know a few people who've had the same experience.
Katherine Needleman (00:21:38):
Oh, tons of 'em. I mean, Curtis, tons of them. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:21:42):
What was that experience like for you overall,
Katherine Needleman (00:21:44):
Curtis? Yeah. Well, I would say first off, it was amazing to be around so many musicians because I had not been around people who took music as seriously as I did until I went to Curtis. I mean a few, but not a whole school of them. And that was awesome. And I met some people that are my best friends, still people that I just love. I met so many really wonderful people there. And I would say the most that I learned there actually was from those people, from my friends and from my peers. You can't really replace being in an environment like that. It's really remarkable. Looking back on it, there were actually a lot of problems that I was only minimally conscious of at the time, and so now I am sort of much more aware of them. There were no women faculty in the woodwind department when I was a student there, so we really had this God complex about the teachers there.
(00:22:49):
They were gods, but they were also all white men. That was just how it was. And that was so normal for me that it took me a while to realize it, and somehow I understood that I was not that, but I didn't understand why I was not that. And so there was a bit of a learning curve there. I mean, I think there were really some things that in the profession that were just not open to me on the basis of my gender. And we still see that a generation later. We still see the highest echelons of oboe in this country and in the world really are not occupied by women. The principal chairs and the very biggest orchestras have never been occupied by women, but as we had this God complex with the teachers there, I mean, I try to teach differently. Let me put it that way. I try to teach differently than I was taught, and I'm very conscious about that at this point.
Leah Roseman (00:23:45):
In what ways do you do that differently, do you think?
Katherine Needleman (00:23:48):
I guess I'm more analytical and I have more of a plan. I like to present the students with a plan, and I like to engage them in that plan. What do you want to do? What do you want to accomplish? How are we going to accomplish that with what repertoire are we going to accomplish that? I try to keep it a very positive experience, although learning an instrument is really hard and it's not always positive, and you have to really look kind of critically at what you're doing, but I still try to keep that as positive as possible. I've had a lot of trouble being on stage maybe as a result of my education, and I don't want it to be scary for anyone. I mean, I think music in its ideal form is a beautiful thing, and it's a beautiful profession. So I try to help them as much as I can, whether that's be comfortable or come up with a plan for playing the way they want to play. I'm really trying to help them with what they want to achieve their individual goals.
(00:24:54):
And I think because we often start so young, there were basically the three grandfathers, or I don't know, the paternal trio of oboe. It came from Curtis. It was Marcel Tabuteau, the great Marcel Tabuteau, and he was the principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and his student was John Delancy, same thing. And then his student was Richard Woodham, my teacher, same thing. And I think that they all taught in this same kind of way. And then Woodham's student did not succeed him at the Philadelphia Orchestra. So now we have a totally new thing there, and I'm working with the teacher there. I really like him a lot. I think he's great, but it's a totally different thing. So we have a little bit of a different way now, and I think that that's a good thing. I think that sometimes you have to be able to reflect on what you learned and what was good about it, and what you learned and what you wish you hadn't learned, or what you wish that you learned instead. So I'm always trying to think about what would've been more helpful to me as a student.
Leah Roseman (00:26:02):
We had talked a little bit before about composing, which is relatively new for you. I listened to a couple of your compositions on YouTube, and I really liked the quartet. I'm trying to remember. Oh yeah, the "Land Where My Fathers Died". So I understand the first performance, unfortunately didn't get professionally recorded.
Katherine Needleman (00:26:18):
No,
Leah Roseman (00:26:19):
But you do have one where it was recorded.
Katherine Needleman (00:26:22):
I do. Yeah. Those are with some great colleagues of mine from Baltimore. I'm so lucky that they took it so seriously and so well, they did such a great job with it.
Leah Roseman (00:26:30):
Could we include a clip of that and then link the real video in the description?
Katherine Needleman (00:26:35):
Oh, sure. Of course.
Leah Roseman (00:26:36):
Wonderful. Thanks. You're about to hear an excerpt from "Land Where My Fathers Died", composed by Katherine Needleman. The link to this complete performance is in the show notes. This is a live performance from community concerts at second in Baltimore from March, 2024 with Agnes Tse on violin, Karin Brown on viola, Lachezar Kostov on cello, and Katherine Needleman on oboe.(music)
(00:26:54):
So writing that piece, do you compose with the piano piano when you do that kind of thing to hear harmony?
Katherine Needleman (00:32:17):
I do. Yeah. Typically, yeah, it helps me harmonically. It helps me to put my hands on it.
Leah Roseman (00:32:26):
Wonderful. Well, you were just talking about difficulty on stage, and I was curious what you do do to cope with stage fright in terms of your pre-con, your routines before you go on stage or,
Katherine Needleman (00:32:40):
Yeah, I don't have any good answers for it. I still don't have any good answers for it. Sometimes we just have to accept I guess that things will either go well or not well, or any range in between of that. It either go really well or really terribly. I don't have any solutions. I've been looking for solutions. I'm sure you'll have 8,000 suggestions of solutions, how we deal with stage fright, how we deal with performing, this whole idea of performing, which is for me, fraught, right? Because I'm not really, I'm not that kind of person really. I'm not a performer. I'm someone in a party. I kind of sit in the corner. I'd be kind of happy to sit in the corner and have a couple drinks so that I don't feel that I'm there anymore or play my phone or something. But having to actually perform in some way is not always the most comfortable thing for an introverted person. So yeah, I don't have any solutions. I don't have any solutions. One thing that my teacher did say that was super helpful to me actually about stage fright, maybe it's the most helpful thing he ever said actually, was that once you embarrass yourself on stage enough, you become less scared. And so I've had so many things go wrong and so many things go badly that it's not so terrifying to me anymore. At least nobody dies if I screw up.
Leah Roseman (00:34:52):
Hi, just a quick break from the episode.You may be also interested in my episodes with Anna Petersen, Gail Archer, Omo Bello, Karen Donnelly, Renee Yoxon and Jessica Cottis. It’s a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time; please support this series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page; you’ll find the links in the show notes. For the merch, it features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly and you can browse clothes, notebooks, water bottles and more. You’ll also find the link to sign up for my newsletter where you’ll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Now back to Katherine Needleman!
(00:34:52):
I was curious about those solo lockdown concerts you did. I think a lot of us engaged in that sort of thing at the beginning of the pandemic, and it's a different kind of feeling with the audience, right?
Katherine Needleman (00:35:02):
Oh, no. I felt the audience in those. I absolutely felt the audience. I mean, I knew afterwards they would leave comments. No, I felt like they were a real performance actually, to me, even though they were in my living room
Leah Roseman (00:35:16):
Or on a raft in the middle of a
Katherine Needleman (00:35:18):
Lake, that one actually wasn't a real performance. It had to broadcast. Yeah, because the internet wasn't good enough, but the others were live. And so yeah, I felt just a real performance for those.
Leah Roseman (00:35:33):
And I mean, you just have such a singing, it seems to me when you play, you're just so in the music and so, and just have such a lyrical, beautiful quality to your playing.
Katherine Needleman (00:35:43):
Oh, thank you. That's very nice. Thank you.
Leah Roseman (00:35:47):
And then when you jump off the raft, the end of that particular concert, I was thinking about you as an athlete. I think there's another post you did where you wished you'd realized when you were younger, how important it was to work out and work on fitness and strength.
Katherine Needleman (00:36:00):
Yeah, I'm definitely not an athlete, really. I mean, I can do certain things, but I'm not any kind of athlete. Although I did have a doctor call me an athlete a couple years ago, and I was so happy. It was because I run basically to cope with being on stage. And I had injured, what's a nice way to put it? I had injured something in one of my glutes. I call it my ass. I injured my ass, and it was really painful, and it was bothering me for months and months, and I went to the sports medicine doctor and she said, oh, well, it's because you're 44 years old and you're an athlete and you've been running a long time. And I'm like, I'm not an athlete. She's like, oh, well, compared to the general population you are. So I did feel good about that, but I wouldn't really classify myself as an athlete. I don't typically do any more than a half an hour of something a day.
Leah Roseman (00:36:52):
But you didn't always do that when you were younger?
Katherine Needleman (00:36:54):
No, no. It never occurred to me, and no one ever told me to, but I told my students to now, no, I mean playing the oboe or violin or whatever, it's kind of bad for your body, isn't it? To be stuck in that weird position doing these weird things forever. And then when we play the oboe, we're always hunched over like this, scraping reeds with the reed right in our face. It's so bad for you that you need to actually go move your body in a healthy way and keep all the stuff working.
Leah Roseman (00:37:22):
Catherine, what kind of advice do you give your students about auditions and different types of auditions for schools as opposed to orchestra auditions?
Katherine Needleman (00:37:30):
Orchestra auditions are very fraught. I think for oboe especially. They're tricky because historically, the biggest principal positions have not been filled by these blind auditions. But that said, you have to be able to do well in these blind auditions to even get to a spot where you might be invited somewhere. I think ultimately, these blind auditions are not testing what we're looking for to play Principal Oboe in orchestra. They might be testing the appropriate skills for second oboe player somewhat, but there's so many skills that you need in a first oboe player that I do not think are particularly well tested by playing standard excerpts behind a screen. We have this issue that said, I tell my students, look, you have to be really rhythmically accurate, and when you stretch the time, remove the time. It has to be quite calculated in a way that isn't something we would do in a real performance, a lot of the time. You have to make it very obvious, I'm taking time here because, and this is the kind of time I'm taking, and it's very tasteful, and I'm still a very rhythmic person, even though I'm taking time. The intonation has to be really perfect, the sound. I advise them not to try to push it too far. The oboe behind a screen seems to do best when it's played within a small pretty range in anything that's pushed like we actually have to do in real life to be successful as a character role in an orchestra, that kind of sound often does not do well behind a screen. So I encourage them to kind of keep the sound within a certain quality profile. So those things I think are really important, the sound and the intonation and the rhythm. So I advise them to focus on that in a way that they wouldn't perhaps in a real performance where engaging the audience in an expressive way is obviously the most paramount thing. When you're actually in a room with an audience who are there to enjoy you, it's quite different than when you're playing with a screen in front of you for nine people who are there to vote yes or no, it's kind of a different thing.
(00:39:48):
And if I'm preparing students for a audition for school or something like that, that's very different because you're not trying to get a yes or no vote. You're trying to convince someone about the value of what you have to say. So that's much more performance oriented. I would approach that with a student. I would approach playing a recital or something
(00:40:09):
That said, when you go play the orchestra audition, you have to present it as if you're playing a recital. It has to seem very natural and all of this, but you have to have all of these boxes ticked in a way that you don't when you play a recital, if you play a recital as an oboe player, you play for an hour or 90 minutes or whatever. There's not so much riding on each note in a recital. If one goes astray, it's not such a big deal in a way that it can be in an orchestra audition.
Leah Roseman (00:40:40):
Do you remember the first time you were sitting on the other side of the screen as a member of the jury and what that felt like?
Katherine Needleman (00:40:48):
I don't remember. That's crazy. It must've been at the Baltimore Symphony a long time ago, but I don't remember.
Leah Roseman (00:40:55):
Yeah,
Katherine Needleman (00:40:56):
That's how unmusical an experience it is for me. Yeah, it's something I don't have an answer for. I don't have an answer for the whole audition thing. I mean, I think it should be fair. I think the way that we hire people needs to be more fair than it is. I have a lot of problems with it now, but I also, I feel quite strongly that playing excerpts behind a screen is not a way to really judge an artistic character, so I don't have a great solution for this whole thing yet
Leah Roseman (00:41:27):
In Baltimore, do you have trial weeks?
Katherine Needleman (00:41:30):
We do sometimes. I believe the contract now has changed. Originally, I don't think it was required when I joined the orchestra, 21 seasons, 22, I don't even know how many seasons ago that I've been here. And then at some point, it became the go-to with the audition that most auditions would lead to a trial week, and then you would hire or not hire someone based upon that. We've done basically everything in Baltimore, so they have that kind of trial week, and then we've had tons of failed auditions where they then just invite people in. And of course, this is a very fraught process when you just invite people to solo chairs. It's been done for decades, for generations, but is it the most fair way? I don't know. Probably not.
Leah Roseman (00:42:19):
I think the Met Orchestra is one of the only ones I've heard of where they have to hire at the end of auditions,
Katherine Needleman (00:42:24):
I think so. I think that's correct.
Leah Roseman (00:42:26):
But people,
Katherine Needleman (00:42:26):
They just had an oboe audition for two spots, and they only hired one. So I don't know the details of how that works. So they did hire, but not two.
Leah Roseman (00:42:33):
Maybe that's changed. Yeah, it's definitely a difficult process. And I did your recent post as we're recording this, it was recent about you thought your audition was blind or however you put it, pointing out all the ways that things aren't truly blind.
Katherine Needleman (00:42:50):
No, yeah, they're not. So really, if you want it to be fair, you have to trust that the people judging it are fair and reasonable and as unbiased as possible, and that's really hard.
Leah Roseman (00:43:02):
Yeah. Have you had some positive reactions from some of the men who read your essays doing the kind of change we need where they push back and say, Hey, why isn't there more representation on this festival or this sort of thing where there is ability to have changes made?
Katherine Needleman (00:43:24):
I mean, I get some nice notes here and there. I hear mostly women talking on the behalf of their husbands who do this, which is always a little weird for me. I haven't actually seen anybody say, no, I'm not going to do this because they're not enough women involved, or, oh, there are not enough Black or Brown people involved. I haven't seen that happen yet, but I'm open to learning about it. I hope it does happen.
(00:43:54):
This idea that I pose so often as not my idea at all, it comes from Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH, and he said that he was going to stop participating in "manels", he called them, and if he didn't see appropriate representation when he was asked to speak, he was going to decline to speak. And I think that's really allyship at its best. And so I try to hold him up here and there, because I think that that idea is so inspirational. But that said, I haven't really seen a lot of concrete evidence of it happening yet.
Leah Roseman (00:44:29):
NIH?
Katherine Needleman (00:44:30):
Yeah, National Institute of Health, though, I'm sorry.
Leah Roseman (00:44:32):
Okay. In the States.
Katherine Needleman (00:44:33):
Okay. Yeah, it's our big institute. It is right down the street here in Bethesda, Maryland.
Leah Roseman (00:44:39):
Okay. Well, what do you think about in terms of building audiences in the orchestral community? I feel like there's an absence of including soloists from the orchestra in general in terms of making those connections that people feel like they feel connected to the orchestra members. And it's all about bringing in fancy soloist, people know.
Katherine Needleman (00:45:00):
Yeah, this is very interesting. Wow, that's a great question. So of course I'm all for that, but maybe I'm a biased party here. I think it's great for the musicians to get that opportunity. And in my experience with, for example, the social media of the Baltimore Symphony musicians, when we share videos of our own players playing solos, the very few who get to do that each year, these posts are often wildly popular. So I mean, I do think the audience enjoys it. I think the audience eats these people up. And it was explained to me, because I have all these ideas of what I would like to play. Of course, that very rarely happens, but I was explained, oh, well, we don't have orchestra soloists that often because we need to have the big names in to sell tickets. And so Yo-Yo Ma was here this year, and Yo-Yo sells tickets, there's no doubt.
(00:45:56):
But we also had James Ehnes here this year, our opening week, and it didn't sell well at all. And he's one of the great violinists, and we've had all kinds of similarly great, amazing soloists that don't sell. So I don't know what, I guess nobody knows what the audience really wants. If we knew what the audience really wanted, then we wouldn't have budget problems. But when I see these things happen when they're paying tens of thousands of dollars for a soloist, and it still doesn't sell well, I think, well, maybe they should have an orchestra soloist that's much cheaper, and the audience likes it just as much or better. So I think there's probably an appropriate balance for that. But this is the perennial problem. I mean, I've been hearing about my whole involvement in classical music was dying, and nobody's coming to concerts, so how do we get them in the door? And no one has been able to answer that yet.
Leah Roseman (00:46:54):
There's a beautiful recording you made, which I really found very touching of Kevin Puts' concerto that he wrote.
Katherine Needleman (00:47:01):
I love that piece. Yes, it's beautiful.
Leah Roseman (00:47:03):
The Moonlight Concerto.
Katherine Needleman (00:47:05):
So beautiful. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:47:06):
So Marin Alsop, I think is conducting, and she worked with you for many years.
Katherine Needleman (00:47:11):
I mean, we worked together in the Baltimore Symphony since she became the music director. Well before that, I think she became the music director in 2007, maybe, something like that. So quite a while
Leah Roseman (00:47:24):
For me, the first 20 years, I've been an orchestra musician for about 30 years, I'd say the first 20 years almost never saw a woman on the podium. And then it was honestly a little shocking, and I kind of recognized my own bias because it was such an unusual thing. Now, thankfully, it's very common and normal, but yeah, it struck me at the time, I thought, why am I reacting this way? It's really strange,
Katherine Needleman (00:47:47):
Right? Because we expect certain things to be men, or we expect, I was talking about the A today and giving the A and how people, some men don't like to take the A from a woman because they're supposed to come to us, right? It's like we deliver the pitch, and then they're supposed to move to that. And that can be really offensive to some people, and maybe it would be less offensive if that's another man giving it to a man. But sometimes men have trouble taking the A from a woman, and we're discussing the disrespectful things that can fall out from that. But in terms of the conductor and what we expect, it's absolutely what we've seen. And in some ways, I was lucky because you say you've seen very few women, or you hadn't for the first 20 years. And I was telling you, Curtis, I didn't have any men teachers. I also didn't have any men conductors except for one. They brought in one guest conductor for one week. You said men, but you meant women. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I saw only men. And then one week of all of those men, I saw one woman, and that was Marin Alsop.
Leah Roseman (00:48:53):
Okay.
Katherine Needleman (00:48:54):
So Marin Alsop was on my radar since I was a child, basically. I was a teenager, and I mean, I played for her then. And then she became the music director of my orchestra. But I hadn't played for any other women conductors very rarely or not of that level, not at that echelon of the profession. I hadn't played for any of them. It was Marin as a teenager, and then it was Marin in my twenties when I was in the Baltimore Symphony. And we had years and years and years where Marin was the only woman on the podium of the Baltimore Symphony until quite recently. Right now, we see more of them. And I really like working with women conductors. The occasions that I've had to play solo with women conductors, it's always been a really wonderful experience for me. Not that I want to be biased towards them, but for whatever reason, it's been really nice. But Marin has been kind of the one, or at least the one in my career forever. And at least until I was 40, I really didn't see other women conductors either. And I think I was just lucky that I had that one.
Leah Roseman (00:50:03):
And if we look at orchestras, certainly North America, I don't know what the scene is elsewhere. It's still a big problem.
Katherine Needleman (00:50:11):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that orchestras like to tap themselves is really great for women conductors. They all have three of them now. They'll have a season of, I dunno, 38 weeks. What do people program 30 weeks, 38 weeks of classical programming, and they'll have three weeks with three different women conductors, and they think this is some achievement. I mean, was it last year or two years ago? The Cleveland Orchestra. The Cleveland Orchestra had zero women conductors all year on subscription concerts. And then I think this year they have three. So yeah, it's really dismal, but it's not that they're not, again, in the pipeline, you see lots of women conducting students.
Leah Roseman (00:50:52):
Yeah. One of the women brass players. I know we were talking about this stuff, and she was saying that she has heard from colleagues that they don't necessarily want to go for principal positions as brass players.
Katherine Needleman (00:51:04):
The women.
Leah Roseman (00:51:05):
Yeah. Have you heard that?
Katherine Needleman (00:51:07):
I haven't. Why would they not want to?
Leah Roseman (00:51:11):
I don't know. Maybe they don't want to deal with all the men
Katherine Needleman (00:51:14):
In that position. They say the men won't hire them. I don't know. I haven't heard that one, but I That sucks.
Leah Roseman (00:51:21):
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Queen of Filth Digest. Oh, sure. So hard to read. So just heartbreaking, so much of it. And I know you don't publish everything you get, and it must be so hard to sift through.
Katherine Needleman (00:51:40):
Yeah, I'm so behind also, I mean, I haven't published one since. It might be August. I'm really, really behind. I think I have 160 posts messages out there, and I probably have another 160 that I need to organize that I just haven't dealt with. And it's so hard. I have to go back and forth and say, can I share this? Can I not share this? What needs to go out? What needs to stay in? How can I do this without getting myself sued? A lot of people want to just call somebody's name out, but they're not willing to use their own name, and that's a recipe for me getting sued. So I don't do that, even though I wish I could. Yeah, it's a lot of stuff there.
Leah Roseman (00:52:22):
How do you deal with it on a personal level? It's just so hard to
Katherine Needleman (00:52:26):
Yeah. Well, I've been not dealing with it right now. Right. It's in my inbox. I feel bad just because I don't communicate with everyone that I want to communicate with on a reasonable level. I was late to be with you today. I definitely can't handle it all, for sure.
Leah Roseman (00:52:47):
Are you getting some help from people behind the scenes?
Katherine Needleman (00:52:51):
No. No.
Leah Roseman (00:52:53):
Okay.
Katherine Needleman (00:52:53):
Yeah, I did have someone lovely helping me, but she needs to do her own thing, and she's busy, and I'm not going to saddle this on anyone. And I also have to be really careful. I can't just let anybody have access to my inbox, so it has to be someone I really trust. So it's just me. That's it.
Leah Roseman (00:53:09):
I think everyone respects that, and you have to have boundaries in a certain point.
Katherine Needleman (00:53:13):
Oh, not everyone respects it. No. I mean, I have people go off, I'm Satan because I haven't responded appropriately or something sat in the inbox, and it's like, I'm sorry. I really try my best. But yes, it is just me.
Leah Roseman (00:53:27):
Yeah. Well, thank you for doing that work. Like many people, I read this stuff and I don't comment. Partly I think I don't want Katherine to have to read another comment. She has so much to do.
Katherine Needleman (00:53:37):
Oh, no, don't worry. Yeah, no, I love the comments. And again, I don't get through all of them, but I love them. I mean, the ones that I read, and some of them I hate, which is also great because sometimes they spark discussion and sometimes they show the problems in the world. And I think the comments are great.
Leah Roseman (00:53:53):
So not everyone listening to this will know why this moniker, Queen of Filth and what this is. So maybe you could just talk a little bit to what these messages are you're getting.
Katherine Needleman (00:54:04):
Yeah, so the Queen of Filth Digest is something I started shortly after Cara Kizer's story hit the New York Press or the New York magazine on April 12th of this year. And all these people started sharing their stories with me. I mean, people had been sharing their stories, but the inbox got kind of flooded with them, I think, because of my coverage of that story. And so then I started asking people, Hey, can I share this without your name? And so I just started putting these digests out of people talking about their experiences in classical music. And some of them are as harrowing or worse than Cara's, and some of them are much less bad. Some of them are just garden variety sexism and misogyny. But I think they often speak to the condition or the experiences of marginalized people and classical music. And it's certainly not all women that I'm sharing. I mean, it's not always clear who I'm sharing from, but maybe it's majority women, but it's not just women, they're men. I've shared for many trans people a number of non-binary people. I really do get the gamut of races and genders sharing these stories. But of course, it's not always obvious to the reader. But I think it just speaks to kind of the difficulties of our profession,
(00:55:29):
That it is not just about how well you play your instrument in the pipeline.
Leah Roseman (00:55:34):
And of course, there's this danger with people having these private lessons as children and teenagers where there's no safeguards.
Katherine Needleman (00:55:43):
Yeah, absolutely. It's rife with the potential for problems
Leah Roseman (00:55:52):
In terms of sort of, you, it might be qualified as microaggressions. I really enjoyed your piece, the mandatory dress, I really related to it. And it's funny, it's hilarious to me. You kept that dress too.
Katherine Needleman (00:56:05):
Yeah, I just laughed when I found it. I was like, oh my God, look at this thing. And then I wore it, and it was still uncomfortable just because I couldn't open my legs wide enough to play. And people were like, well, I don't know how cellists could play in it, but the good news is they didn't have women, so it wasn't an issue.
Leah Roseman (00:56:23):
Could you explain the context of why the women had to buy this dress?
Katherine Needleman (00:56:26):
Oh, yeah. So we had this lady, and I didn't know her name, but it's been pointed out to me. I've promptly forgotten it, but I could look it up. She was the executive director of the orchestra, and I played in this orchestra in Philadelphia that is now called the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. And at the time, it was Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra. It was Marc Mostovoy's group, and it was just transitioning to this new name. I'm not sure where in the timeframe this happened, but this lady, this executive director, decided the women were dressed too sloppily. And I mean the women playing in this orchestra, well, at least I was not making very much money. Real, not a lot of money. It didn't pay a living wage at all.
(00:57:12):
We're always looking for the next meal when we're a young classical musician or a freelancer. So she knew that she couldn't insist that we wear classier clothing, so she knew she had to provide it. So she went to some fancy store on Philadelphia's mainline, and at the time, they told us this dress was a $600 dress. And everybody's like, that's not a $600 dress. It looks like crap. Anyway, that's what they told us. And we had to get this dress altered to fit. So it was one dress that's supposed to fit all the women in the orchestra, which were many different sizes of women and pregnant women and not pregnant women, and playing different instruments. And it was just insane. And I remember I was incensed that I had to spend 60 or $80 getting this dress altered, which was a huge amount of money. I never paid anyone to alter clothes for me. But the thing didn't fit at all. It was way too huge for me. And so they wanted me to return this dress when I left. And I was like, no, screw this. I'm not returning that dress. I spent $80 getting altered, but of course I didn't want to wear the thing. So it sat in my closet for the next 24 years or something, and then I found it a couple of months ago and wore it for a concert.
Leah Roseman (00:58:25):
If I'm not mistaken, when I joined my orchestra, we still had gendered dress codes, which we don't anymore.
Katherine Needleman (00:58:32):
Well, that's good. I think we still do.
Leah Roseman (00:58:33):
Yeah. Although they're not called gendered, but they basically are. But anyway, the women, I think we were required to wear dresses instead of pants, but everyone ignored it.
Katherine Needleman (00:58:43):
Oh, that's good.
Leah Roseman (00:58:43):
Somebody came from another orchestra from a different city, and she actually said she was shocked. She thought it looked so bad for women to be wearing pants, and I was really
Katherine Needleman (00:58:53):
Oh, shocking.
Leah Roseman (00:58:54):
Yeah, I was really surprised that she would have, that. My peer would have that attitude. Anyway, thank goodness things have changed. But
Katherine Needleman (00:59:01):
Do you know, there was an article in the New York Times relatively recently about the Philharmonic releasing its dress code for the women. Do you remember that? That I'm looking it up right now. In 2018, the New York Philharmonic updated their dress code in 2018 to allow women to wear pants on stage.
Leah Roseman (00:59:22):
Well, let's talk about a wonderful American composer, Jennifer Higdon. So your performance of her Aria for oboe and piano is very beautiful. I hope that was another piece of music we could include.
Katherine Needleman (00:59:35):
It's fine with me if it's okay with Jennifer.
Leah Roseman (00:59:37):
Yeah, yeah, I can check with her. We've played her music before. I knew the name, but I never looked up who she was, just one of these names that goes by. So I was looking her up and like, wow, what inspirational, interesting person.
Katherine Needleman (00:59:52):
Oh, yeah. So we were talking about Marin and how Marin had been the woman conductor of my adolescence and young adulthood, and Jennifer Higdon was the woman composer for me because I went to Curtis. I actually was in Jennifer Higdon's class, and she ran a great class at Curtis. I don't remember the name of it. It was like 20th Century music or something like that, which sounds old, but I was in school in the 20th century, so that meant modern music, right? 20th century music, and she really had an inspirational class about new music and the value of composers and this relationship of the composer and the performer. So I've known Jennifer forever. I spent an embarrassing amount of my career playing virtually no music by women composers, but I did play Jennifer Higdon's quintet work was one of them. I played her oboe concerto before I kind of got clued into how pathetic my repertoire was. So again, she was that sort of lone woman composer in a certain way for me, and I've known her really forever at this point.
Leah Roseman (01:01:03):
Great. You're about to hear an excerpt of Jennifer Higdon's Aria for oboe and piano with Katherine Needleman and Jennifer Lim. I did get in touch with the composer who is happy to have this music shared as part of this podcast. The video of this live performance is on Katherine Needleman's YouTube channel and is linked directly in the show notes.(music)
(01:01:21):
Is there anything you've changed your mind about with all this exposure you've had to the realities of what's going on in classical music?
Katherine Needleman (01:04:46):
Yeah, yeah. There is something I've changed my mind about. I was raised in me and probably from Curtis era or before in this culture, that we have to be nice, and that's the most important thing for women in order to get work or maybe for men to, in order to get work, in order to be successful, is that we have to be nice, we have to be good colleagues, and we have to have people like us. That's what success looks like, and I've really given that up. Everyone says, well, your tone is bad and you're strident and you're shrill, or you're not polite. I know that's by design. I am past that. I think it's actually really detrimental. That's something that's changed for me.
Leah Roseman (01:05:38):
Good. For people who aren't, not everyone listening will know who you are. Be familiar with your social media presence from the beginning. I just found it so funny. These, I don't know the style of selfies you have with your drink. You have to have a photo. It's kind of like your brand,
Katherine Needleman (01:05:56):
And again, I told you I'm a really introverted person. I had avoided my face and all of this. I was never a person who posted a selfie, and now I have all these men talking about how narcissistic and arrogant I am because I have these, I'm in this very location, these very unmade up pictures of me with a glass of tea or whatever, but they've really increased my presence in the algorithm, these stupid selfies. So I keep doing it, and I love that it offends people who is offended by an unattractive picture of a middle aged half Jewish woman. It's like it's really kind of non-offensive, right? It's not like I'm trying to be this or that in these photos, but it really is quite offensive to people,
Leah Roseman (01:06:39):
And especially during the pandemic. So many musicians went online to try to really grow their presence and hope to chase that elusive YouTube dollar, which maybe doesn't exist. And the way you -
Katherine Needleman (01:06:52):
I've never made 1 cent on YouTube. I'm waiting.
Leah Roseman (01:06:55):
Yeah, I haven't either.
Katherine Needleman (01:06:56):
I have more than the magical thousand. You need a thousand followers. I have more than that, and I still have made zero cents.
Leah Roseman (01:07:02):
Well, as of this recording, I'm two hours away from the 3000 hours you need within a certain number of days of people viewing your content to make,
Katherine Needleman (01:07:10):
oh, congratulations.
Leah Roseman (01:07:11):
A penny. So we'll see.
Katherine Needleman (01:07:13):
Oh, that's awesome. You're going to make a penny.
Leah Roseman (01:07:15):
But all to say, I find your presence so refreshing. It's an overused word, authentic, but really you are, because not trying to have this carefully crafted video. You're just like, here's my lunch. This is what I do for my routine. It's just very like 2012.
Katherine Needleman (01:07:31):
Yeah. I'm pretty disorganized in a lot of ways.
Leah Roseman (01:07:34):
No, I think you're prioritizing the correct things, the correct use of your time. Right.
Katherine Needleman (01:07:40):
Thank you. I'm trying.
(01:07:42):
No, prioritizing is really important. That's something I tell my students. You got to and my kids too. You got to prioritize.
Leah Roseman (01:07:50):
You've played in other orchestras as principal oboe. What's that like to go to a completely different orchestra?
Katherine Needleman (01:07:58):
It's fine. It's kind of the same. I haven't done it for a while. I don't expect that I'm going to get called ever again to do that, which is fine with me. It's totally fine with me, but I think that's very important to a lot of people that they get called to go play here and there when somebody gets sick. But I gave up on that idea a while ago, but you do the same job. Everybody sounds a little bit different here and there, but we have this idea that the great orchestras are so great, and the less great orchestras are not so great, and I don't really buy into that at this point. I think that we all have good days and we all have bad days, and each person within that ensemble has good days and bad days. I've played in kind of a gamut of orchestras at this point, and I don't know that there's any one that's really that much greater than the other.
Leah Roseman (01:08:52):
Yeah, I was just wondering because I mean, it is such, at its best, an orchestra does feel very much like an organism, and I'm a tutti player. I'm not a principal player, and I've, since I haven't played in another orchestra in so long, I can't imagine what that would be like to be plunked. Well, I've never been, just me going to play. I haven't freelanced in so long, so I was just kind of curious, especially as a principal player, what that would be like. But I guess different blend within the section and well,
Katherine Needleman (01:09:21):
I mean, we're expert listeners supposedly, right?
(01:09:25):
To be good at listening, although some of us are super incompetent at it, but we're about listening and judging and intuiting things about other people. So it is nice sometimes to get to do that with people that you don't know exactly where they're going to be. I mean, I play in a wonderful section in Baltimore. I'm really lucky. We have a wonderful wind section. I love it, but I kind of know where everybody's going to be now. Like, oh, I expect this to happen, and if something else happens, then I know how to respond appropriately. So sometimes it's exciting to play with other people in that way, to be honest. You have a lot more flexibility sometimes if you're playing chamber music with people outside of an orchestra, outside of that setting. I think sometimes you can learn more and more quickly with people or about people.
Leah Roseman (01:10:16):
Yeah. I'm just curious about your perception of the music education ecosystem, because my impression, talking to Americans is still pretty robust. Public music education opportunities.
Katherine Needleman (01:10:28):
Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not my experience. I'm always hearing about how this and that are getting cut and music study is really only for people who are financially privileged that their parents can afford to take them to study with musicians, and this is expensive to take. Music lessons is expensive, and I think that music is getting more and more cut from school systems. Yeah, that's not my impression here, that the public school system is particularly robust. That's where I learned I am a product of the public school system, but yeah, it's not my impression now.
Leah Roseman (01:11:07):
Yeah, I mean, certainly in terms of private lessons, but I got the impression you have this very robust marching band culture. People have the opportunity to play string instruments in schools, which is pretty rare in Canada
Katherine Needleman (01:11:18):
Sometimes. I think in Texas, actually, the marching band culture is very big in certain places like football schools. But I think in Baltimore city where I lived for the majority of my life, I don't think this is particularly strong. I don't think you're going to have a lot of kids growing up learning classical music from a young age in the school system. I don't think it happens here in very many big cities too. I think it's also a problem
Leah Roseman (01:11:50):
To close this out, I was thinking about all your different, you were saying at the beginning, you wear a lot of hats mean we all have different identities. Do you find that your work as an activist and the keeper of the blog is sort of pushed out other parts of your life that are important? It's hard to keep a balance. Do you see a way forward where you can do this work and keep everything going?
Katherine Needleman (01:12:15):
I think I can keep things going as they're now, I'm quite good at compartmentalization. Sometimes there's certain things, well, I guess I learned this in my job playing in an orchestra. You have to kind of show up for that job no matter what. Right? I mean, if you want to keep it, you have to show up in every possible state. And so I've learned a way to kind of separate myself from that in order to protect my ability to be a professional. And so I try to do that also with the blog, and I am kind of behind on the Queen of Filth stuff, but it's really easy to get caught up in it because a lot of it's horrible and a lot of the stories are just appalling and never ending. And so at some point, I do close myself off from it in the way that I do from playing the oboe in an orchestra.
(01:13:14):
Sometimes I can play the oboe like a professional, but I don't always put all of myself there in order to do that. I think we have to do that sometimes, which isn't to say that's not the kind of musician that I am, but sometimes when you're a professional, you have to just show up. And so I do have this ability to step back, I think sometimes, which is helpful. And I do plan to keep going with the blog and the social media until I see other people doing it, and until I see change happening, maybe if we see some real tangible change happening. If I see women playing principal oboe in the big orchestras or concert master or principal trumpet, something like that, then I can feel there's a change. And then maybe I don't need to do all the crazy online stuff. But I'm really pretty driven to do it right now. I don't have any plans to stop it.
Leah Roseman (01:14:13):
Okay. Well, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciated it.
Katherine Needleman (01:14:17):
Oh, thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure.
Leah Roseman (01:14:21):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases and more. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.
