Oboist Joan Champie has Died, Aged 92

Champie was the first woman to join the wind section of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Born in 1932, Joan Claire Champie was the first female musician to join the woodwind section of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she held the second oboe chair from 1955 to 1962.

Champie attended the University of San Francisco and worked towards traveling to Philadelphia to audition for the renowned oboist Marcel Tabuteau of the Curtis Institute of Music.

“I don’t want to waste Curtis’ money on a woman,” Tabuteau said to Joan at their first meeting in 1952, according to her obituary. Though Tabuteau encouraged Champie to study something where she could get employed as a woman “like ballet,” he allowed her an audition. 

After hearing her play and “taking up the matter with Madame Tabuteau,” Marcel Tabuteau famously accepted Champie as a private student — she studied with him from 1952 to 1954. 

Joan was freelancing in Philadelphia when she won an audition with the Baltimore Symphony playing a challenging Strauss orchestral excerpt, after which the symphony manager said: “A woman, what to do?” Champie was hired and became the first female woodwind player in the orchestra. 

Following her first marriage, Champie enrolled in Towson University in 1969 to study speech pathology; in 1975, she received her master’s degree in Deaf Education from Gallaudet University. After moving to Texas to teach preschool deaf children, she married local naturalist Clark Champie in 1977. 

She later became one of the founding volunteers at AIDS Services of Austin, taught American Sign Language at the University of Texas at El Paso, and worked at the Texas School for the Deaf as a curriculum and deafness expert. From 1983, she attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for many summers. 

Keeping with her music roots, she began playing baroque oboe with local groups in Austin and Dallas and started her own oboe reed-making company, “Champie Cane.” In 1991, aged 59, Champie achieved her lifelong dream of earning her pilot’s license. 

“Joan said, ‘The world of music was opened for me by my mother, who played the piano every day. When I was two, I asked her to teach me. Later, in elementary school, I started to play the violin in the school orchestra and continued this until high school, when I first heard the oboe. Immediate interest!’” the Baltimore Symphony Musicians posted on Facebook. “Joan had a trail-blazing and fascinating life before, during, and after her time with the BSO … We extend our deepest sympathies to her friends and family.”

Ms. Champie is survived by her children and grandchild, plus extended family. Our condolences to her family, friends, students, and colleagues.