Katherine Needleman is a musician from Baltimore, Maryland. She came to music through the once-robust public school music programs, where she played violin, clarinet, oboe, keyboards, and percussion before dropping out of high school at sixteen to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She later had a brief and instructive relationship with the Juilliard School that ended shortly after she won its oboe concerto competition.
She has been the principal oboist of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra since 2003 and has appeared widely as a soloist, chamber musician, and guest principal oboist. She has been playing the oboe professionally for a long time now—long enough to notice how her relationship to visibility, inclusion, and power in the field has changed over time.
Her interests center on the relationship between composers, performers, and the stage. She has premiered and championed works by composers including Kevin Puts, Christopher Rouse, Ruth Gipps, Brenno Blauth, and others, and has recorded extensively. Some of the performances that have mattered most to her in recent years have taken place far from the usual markers of prestige: accompanying her cellist daughter in the Haydn C Major Concerto at a middle-school assembly, a recital that felt unusually right at a retirement home outside Philadelphia, an 8am performance in Kansas of her own music for oboes, performing in Greenland (Denmark), including a concert in Sisimiut, as part of the first American chamber music group to do so, a Mozart Oboe Concerto in a bustling public library with cadenzas designed to avoid standing alone at the front of the stage, and one pandemic concert that began on a raft floating on a cold lake and ended with her swimming to shore.
She is a lifelong improviser and began writing music seriously during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her works for oboe and English horn have since been performed internationally. She enjoys arranging music she loves—by dead white men and by people who are not dead white men—to expand what the oboe gets to say. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Morgan State University, continuing a long habit of revisiting questions she thought she had already answered.
In addition to performing, Needleman writes widely about classical music and its power structures and maintains a blog and social media presence of some notoriety. She has been described in print in many ways over the years, ranging from flattering to baffling to accidentally revealing. The New York Times once described her as a “small, intense woman,” which seems accurate enough.