Meet the Student: Q&A with Oboist Ben Price

Ben Price, from Portland, Oregon, entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2022 and studies oboe with Katherine Needleman and Philippe Tondre. All students at Curtis receive merit-based, full-tuition scholarships, and M. Price is the David H. Springman Memorial Fellow.

What was your first musical memory as a child, and what circumstances led you to pursue a career as an oboist?

I had a childhood that was rather immersed in music, so I don’t quite remember what my first musical memory was. But one of my earliest musical memories is actually of my mother practicing the violin. I was mystified by her tuning ritual and all of the strangely intuitive and natural sounds that she was able to make. She would also play recordings of her favorite pieces and occasionally play them into my hand as I was falling asleep. My early musical experiences were rather surface-level; I had a brief affair with the violin when I was three, which ended after my parents realized I was more interested in the keychain around my teacher’s neck than the violin. I also found the concept of practicing quite mind-boggling and didn’t particularly enjoy doing it, which ended my first piano experience.

When I was nine, I started taking piano lessons regularly, and while I was initially reluctant, I soon realized that something was calling me to music and that I should listen to it. My piano teacher, Carol Kilmer, had the most magical way of making a piece of music come to life by telling me all about its history and style. She also taught me music theory, which I didn’t realize would be so useful at the time (but very much realized it many years later). So, when I first picked up the oboe at ten, I was already fairly well-versed in music, so I could focus primarily on learning how to play the instrument. I chose oboe because I heard a recording of The Philadelphia Orchestra playing Scheherazade on the radio and was so taken by the magical sound of the oboe that I knew I had to play whatever instrument could make that sound.

I started playing in youth orchestra in sixth grade, and by the seventh grade, I took it quite seriously. I didn’t realize I took it seriously, though; I just thought that was how one did such things. Looking back, I probably knew that I wanted to pursue music professionally even then, and I just hadn’t realized it yet. I would continue to live in a state of loose denial until the summer after my junior year of high school at NYO-USA. I hadn’t played in a real live orchestra for many months due to COVID, and it happened that the orchestra was playing Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony that year. It’s quite an emotionally intense piece, and it was intensified by having waited so long to play live music again. After that experience, I realized that I was kidding myself and that I wanted to play music more than anything else, and I wanted it badly enough to walk the long road to becoming a professional. I guess you could say that I knew for many years that I wanted to be a musician before I realized it, and it took losing something I had and then finding it again to realize that I didn’t want to lose it.

Now that you’re wrapping up your first semester here and have found a rhythm to your daily life, balancing classes, rehearsals, practice routines, and performances, what excites you the most about being at Curtis?

It’s hard to single out a “most exciting thing” about being at Curtis because there are many wonderful things. A few stand out: my fabulous teachers, Katherine Needleman (’99) and Philippe Tondre (who were oboe idols of mine for many years before I even knew I could choose to study with them), my wonderful colleagues who inspire me every day, and the unparalleled access to opportunity and knowledge that we get at Curtis. My favorite thing is being given the space to develop my ability and grow into my own artistic presence and how actively that is encouraged. Philadelphia is also a very lively city, and I very much enjoy the East Coast and all it has to offer.

Who are the musicians that inspire you?

Leon Fleisher, Anna Clyne, Lera Auerbach, Slava Rostropovich, and Heinz Holliger are some of the many musicians that inspire me. Some non-classical musicians I enjoy are Lady Gaga, P!nk, Annie Lennox, Pink Martini, and James Morrison.

If you had to pick your favorite oboe repertoire, what would it be and why?

This is an ever-changing topic, and what I write now may not be what I think in a year, a month, or even a few days. But if I had to answer this now (which I suppose I do), I would pick the Ralph Vaughan Williams concerto, Alyssa Morris’s Four Personalities, and the Bohuslav Martinů concerto. I’ve played Vaughan Williams’s concerto more times than I would like to admit publicly, but the fact remains that it’s a stunning musical landscape based almost entirely on the pentatonic scale. For me, the piece strongly paints the image of a beautiful field of grass on the edge of the forest, and the protagonist (the oboe) dances with Fate before entering the forest, perhaps searching for something. Many elements of nature are encountered, and Vaughan Williams impeccably captures the bucolic joy of our protagonist as they flit about merrily.

Alyssa Morris’s Four Personalities are based off of personality types from the Hartman personality test. Each movement has a different color as its title: Yellow, White, Blue, and Red. Each movement has a different character and mood, and Morris shows the oboe’s versatility and many moods of playing through all four movements. For instance, Yellow is perky, jazzy, and flippant, whereas White is plaintive and a bit clunky. Blue soars with water straight from the id, and Red burns bright and flashes the oboe’s range and aggression.

Bohuslav Martinů’s concerto is honestly one of the most fun concertos in the oboe repertoire, both to listen to and to play. I think one has to channel a certain mental instability to pull it off, because the moods required range from without a care in the world to tragic total meltdown. The concerto is scored for chamber orchestra and piano, which creates quite a unique texture that manages to jump forward with energy when necessary, and also creates a static soundscape for the oboe to deliver a tragic aria over. The different colors and characters in the piece are my favorite thing about it, however. There’s never a dull moment!

When you aren’t playing the oboe and making reeds, what are your hobbies and interests?

When I was in middle school, I didn’t realize that professional musicians (or Curtis students) were normal people. I thought they were some deity-adjacent beings that interacted with the sublime all the time and led vastly different and more spiritually enlightened lives than the rest of us. I am now here to shatter that rumor into a million pieces. I do many normal person things! Lately, I’ve been reading more fiction, and doing some writing whenever an idea pops into my head. I like to go on walks through Philadelphia, because I like being able to see the collective lives of many happening in small snippets around me.

I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Google Maps, finding and marking places I’ve been, places I want to go, and places that interest me. So far, that list is at about 300 pins. I enjoy light travel to places nearby where I live, and walking/hiking through nature. I’ve almost gone bungee jumping about four times now; one of these days I’ll actually take the plunge and go through with it. (Pun definitely intended). Most of all, I enjoy spending time with friends and family, seeing movies or live music, and generally flying forward and never looking back.