HOW I SLEPT MY WAY INTO MY GREAT JOB

Behind Every Successful Woman are Two Men... Enough Said.

This is a photo of me taken on April 19, 2015, after I played the Ralph Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony. I actually specialize in the music of dead, white men despite appearances. I love playing that piece even though I thought it was trash when I was young. Behind me are two men, Joseph Turner, on the left of the photo, and Richard Woodhams on the right. Turner was principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony from 1965-2001. Woodhams was principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1977-2018. Turner was one of my teachers in high school, on and off from 1994-1995, and Woodhams was my teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1995-1999. In the photo, I am almost 37 and had just had my son after a not-so-easy pregnancy. Turner is 72 and Woodhams is 65.

When I was hired as principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony, I was 24. Turner was 60 and Woodhams was 53. I am finally going to talk about my hiring despite having previously decided to not address it. I didn’t think it was worthy of being addressed because no one talks about how these men got their jobs, or how any of the BFM get their jobs. I felt it was insulting to have to defend myself as if I am somehow unqualified. I had preferred to let these assholes waste their time spinning their tales about how I was hired while I myself acted like the men who are just simply entitled to their chairs without question.

Of course, I want to tell you now that there was a blind audition, and I won from behind a screen, and they were surprised to see little 100-pound, 5-foot-2 me walk out because I had been breathing like a man from behind the screen and wearing flat shoes.

Looking at this photo gives me a lot of feels. I stared at it drinking iced coffee for twenty minutes this morning until I began to shake. These men both played a tremendous role in who I am and are very important to me. I cannot extricate them from myself, even if I would want to. One of them I love dearly, walks into my house without knocking, and I consider a member of my family. The relationship with the other is more fraught.

You know there are a lot of people who really don’t like me. And top amongst their complaints against me, of course, is my alleged lack of competence. The first way to insult a musician is to say they are not very good, because we take that shit personally. Attacks on my “talent and effort” are to be expected. If I am not deserving of “the little position” I hold, then of course, what I have to say or write is just as undeserving of attention as my talentless playing which I put onstage without practicing. It is, in fact, what one of the men in this picture said to me yelled about my playing which is the reason I no longer speak to him.

So, now let me tell you what actually happened with the audition process for Principal Oboe of the Baltimore Symphony from 2002-3 and how such a talentless player ended up on top that one time.