Joan Claire Champie, born in 1932, has passed away at the age of 92. She made history as the first female musician to join the woodwind section of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she held the position of second oboe from 1955 to 1962.
Champie pursued her studies at the University of San Francisco and aimed to travel to Philadelphia to audition for Marcel Tabuteau, a renowned oboist at the Curtis Institute of Music. During their initial meeting in 1952, Tabuteau reportedly told her, “I don’t want to waste Curtis’ money on a woman.” Despite this, he agreed to an audition after encouraging Champie to consider other fields more suitable for women, such as ballet.
Following her audition, Tabuteau was impressed and accepted Champie as a private student, where she studied with him from 1952 to 1954.
While freelancing in Philadelphia, Champie won an audition with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, impressing the selection committee with a challenging Strauss excerpt. Despite initial reservations about hiring a woman, she was hired and became the orchestra’s first female woodwind player.
After her first marriage, Champie returned to academics, enrolling at Towson University in 1969 to study speech pathology. She earned a master’s degree in Deaf Education from Gallaudet University in 1975. After relocating to Texas to teach preschool deaf children, she married naturalist Clark Champie in 1977.
Champie became a founding volunteer 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 onwards, she attended the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for many summers.
Continuing her musical pursuits, Champie played baroque oboe with local groups in Austin and Dallas and started her own oboe reed-making business, “Champie Cane.” At 59, in 1991, she fulfilled a lifelong dream by earning her pilot’s license.
The Baltimore Symphony Musicians shared on Facebook, “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!’” They also expressed their deep sympathy, noting her trail-blazing and fascinating life.
Joan Champie is survived by her children, grandchild, and extended family. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her family, friends, students, and colleagues.
