Once this was deleted from Facebook a third time on a second day, I decided to put it here instead.

UPDATE ON PALMA OBOE FESTIVAL
(And a photo album)

This is effectively the post which was deleted twice yesterday. I’ll try without tags this time.

A month ago, I shared a poster for the 2024 Palma Oboe Festival, sponsored by just about every oboe maker and featuring a roster of nine all-male headliners. I extended the benefit of the doubt--having been told by one of the oboe makers that the roster was a surprise to them--that everyone involved, from sponsors to headlining artists was surprised by the organizer’s decision to exclude women and other gender-marginalized people from the headlining artists.

A few days after I (and others) posted about this exclusive event, Mujeres en la Música wrote an article about it on December 26. This event has been promoted by the Asociación de Fagotistas y Oboístas de España, an associate organization of the International Double Reed Society. A few days after Mujeres en la Música’s article, Bruno Lucas, who I believe to be one of the organizers, wrote a letter which was shared in response to my asking where the women were on Daniel Fuster’s Facebook page. That letter is in this photo album.

This morning, I was able to dig up previous posters for this event. As it turns out, it should actually not come as any sort of surprise to any sponsor or artist that the Palma Oboe Festival would have nine all-male artists for this year. While I don’t have any pre-2018 posters, the ones I do have (in this album) reveal at maximum one woman headliner. All these men artists and their sponsors who return year after year could not be surprised unless they are really living on another planet.

It is not as if there is a lack of excellent women oboists in the world, in Europe, or in Spain. In fact, I have received several DMs naming Spanish women oboists who would be *at least as good* (I’m paraphrasing here) as the chosen men. When the women exist, but they don’t have the same opportunities for financial or career advancement as men, there is a problem.

In his letter, Lucas took responsibility for the lack of women and promised to do better in the 2024 edition of this festival. This sounds like a good thing. However, at the end of this album is a screenshot of “Our Artists” from the festival’s website today, January 21, 2024. Either there is no urgency to update this problematic imagery or it won’t actually be done. I am curious what the plan is and how many women, if any, will be added to the 2024 edition. I hope it will be at least nine.

*Disclaimer for any Fragile Men reading this post or a team of them reporting my posts to get them taken down: This is not a personal attack. You are sitting on your computer or phone just as fine as can be, just perhaps a bit uncomfortable like the rest of us. This Palma Oboe Festival is representative of systemic discrimination in the world of oboe and in fact, in classical music at large. While men such as yourselves benefit from this systemic discrimination at the expense of the rest of us, you also have a great opportunity to insist upon better. This is a call for organizations like yours, sponsors who support you, and Big Fancy Men headliners at these places to insist upon better. Again, it is not a personal attack, and you don’t need to report this post because it is not hurting anyone.

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January Audition Ads

January 05, 2022 / Katherine Needleman

I read the audition ads in the back of the International Musician’s January edition a little more carefully than usual. The IM is the official journal of the American Federation of Musicians, which is a labor union most people have to belong to in order to work in the U.S. and Canada. There are a lot of auditions advertised this month!

I notice nearly every orchestra lists itself as an “equal employment opportunity employer” and several orchestras call themselves “proud partners” of the National Alliance for Audition Support (NAAS) as well. In the current IM, those “proud partner orchestras” are Buffalo Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic, Oregon Symphony, and Utah Symphony. It costs money to have bigger ads, so this is a commitment to something, I’m just not sure to what.

According to Merriam-Webster, an equal opportunity employer is "an employer who agrees not to discriminate against any employee or job applicant because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, physical or mental disability, or age.” According to its website, NAAS " is an unprecedented national initiative to increase diversity in American orchestras. It does so by offering Black and Latinx musicians a customized combination of mentoring, audition preparation, financial support, and audition previews.”

Usually, repertoire lists for these auditions are compiled by an audition committee comprised of other players in the orchestra who will be judging the audition. The repertoire lists feature the composers musicians in the orchestra think are most important. They feature composers who in theory will be played in concert by winning candidates. Most musicians will tell you that their ultimate obligation when presenting music onstage is to the composer, and to represent that person’s ideas to the best of their abilities. Audition repertoire is selected to display the candidates playing the biggest, most important, and most difficult parts in order to form a judgment about how they would function in the orchestra. If candidates can play this repertoire well, the hope is that this translates into their other work, and they will be able to play anything well. These lists are the standards by which everything else is judged.

So, I looked at the repertoire lists for the current publicized auditions of these orchestras paying to represent themselves as both equal opportunity employing and NAAS "proud partnering" orchestras. Of the lists that are published (I’ve attached all that were available online today), there were no living composers, no women composers, and no Black or Latinx composers deemed important enough to make it onto the repertoire lists in Buffalo, Dallas, Wisconsin, Oregon, or Utah. (Illinois Philharmonic has not posted any of their lists.)

There were many big, fancy orchestras who did not call themselves “proud partners,” but “equal opportunity employers,” such as Cincinnati Symphony (which according to its audition page is also an NAAS partner and a 2020 leader in gender equity), Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and San Francisco Symphony. Similar to the “proud partners,” their published repertoire lists included zero women composers, almost zero living composers (with the exception of a John Adams bass trombone excerpt in San Francisco), and zero BIPOC composers beyond Alberto Ginastera (dead Argentinian composer of European descent who is required in Cincinnati, LA, and Chicago).

The Philadelphia Orchestra, advertising a horn audition this month but not sharing its repertoire list yet, has a published repertoire list for Associate Concertmaster which includes one work by Gabriela Lena Frank, who is simultaneously living, female, and BIPOC. I suspect their horn list will also include one or more excerpts by a composer who is not dead, white, or male.

What does it say when there is so much talk about equity and equal opportunity when the standards by which we judge a player are almost entirely tested on repertoire composed by dead, white men? It says that either an orchestra is not playing music by people who are not dead, white men or that it does, but doesn’t take it seriously enough to judge new players based upon it. Perhaps the people making these repertoire lists do not know the repertoire outside of dead, white men; or they don’t like it; or they don’t find it suitable for testing a new colleague.

Audition repertoire lists do not need to feature exclusively orchestral literature. They often feature solo and chamber music works. This is a great opportunity to include works by “other” composers if suitable orchestral literature is unknown. But a little bit of work with the Google/Youtube machine can reveal all kinds of orchestral literature worth programming on these lists.

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22 for 2022

January 03, 2022 / Katherine Needleman

Here is a list of 22 pieces I think oboists should be playing and teaching in 2022. They should have and may have been enjoyed (sometimes long) before this. As I am terrible at list making and it causes me anxiety, I actually deliver 25 composers here instead of 22. Think of my counting as approximate. And for some composers, I list multiple pieces. Brevity is not my strong suit. If I don’t specify instrumentation, it’s for oboe/piano or oboe solo.

Earlier, I made another imperfect list of ***THE 31 Most Popular Works for Oboe Lessons, Recitals, Competitions, and School Auditions***. I was thinking of including a token piece by somebody who was a woman and/or a person of color because we definitely see people trying to branch out on occasion. But I just couldn’t think of any options that were as truly mainstream as the rest of the pieces on that list. There are a number of pieces on that first list I truly love, and there are a few I cannot abide.

If you’ve played all or most of the pieces on my ***31 Most Popular*** list, or even a decent fraction of them but only ever a token piece or few by a woman composer and/or a composer of color, please check out my ***22 for 2022*** list.

I see so many students playing one or two movements of many of the pieces from my **31 Most Popular List*** because the whole pieces are just too hard for them (Poulenc, Saint-Säens, Vaughan-Williams, Schumann, Marcello, Hindemith, Mozart, Strauss.) Instead of studying something you won’t be able to play in its entirety yet, I’ve put asterisks on pieces in this newest list which might be currently manageable if you can handle the easiest movements of some of the big pieces in the ***31 Most Popular.***

I have very good to loving feelings about every piece on this list. This is more than I can say for my ***31 Most Popular List***.

I am sure this list is wildly imperfect and missing a ton; it was hard for me to keep it as short as it is. It's always exciting to find new, great pieces that have been either completely ignored or not given their due. Please let me know what you think I should've put here. Maybe it will find its way onto another list!

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Valerie Coleman: American Vein (for oboe/English Horn and doublebass)

Jean Coulthard: Sonata

Daniel Cueto: Encuentros (ob/bsn) (some movements which can stand alone*)

Viet Cuong: Six Canadian Scenes and Mist Fantasy / Extra(ordinarily) Fancy (double oboe concerto) / Suite (2ob/EH)

Marina Dranishnikova: Poeme

Reena Email: Jhula Jhule

Vivian Fine: Sonatine (ob/pn)* / Solo / Second Solo

Lukas Foss: Concerto

Ruth Gipps: Oboe Concerto / Sea-Shore Suite* / Sonatas No. 1* and 2 / Threnody for EH* / Piper of Dreams*

Clemence de Grandval: Concerto*

Pavel Haas: Suite*