Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, Deborah Shidler was the beneficiary of an excellent music education program and started playing the clarinet in the 5th grade. But after a couple of years, she was losing interest, and when her music teacher announced that he would be auditioning students to play the oboe, Debbie took up the challenge.
Her motivation, though, had more to do with a school girl's daydreaming than with an innate desire to take up one of the most haunting (and difficult) instruments in the orchestra. "I was really into TV spy shows," she remembers, "and I wanted to be an international spy. I had a mad crush on David McCallum from 'The Man from Uncle,' and I found out through a fan magazine that he used to play the oboe. I won the audition and began the struggle."
The decision to play the oboe, English horn, or bassoon requires a commitment far beyond that required for other instruments. For a double reed player must be both a musician and a craftsman. The latter skill comes into play in making the unique double reeds that account for these instruments' unique sound. Picture a piece of a straw sliced in half lengthwise, the two halves pinched together to make an eye-shaped opening. The air that the oboe player uses is blown through this tiny opening, yet the resulting sound must be free, sweet and soaring.
Debbie devotes at least an hour a day to reed making. The reeds are fashioned from cane grown in southern France, and every player has his or her particular style of reed. At any given time she will have at least 15 or 20 reeds in various states of completion. "The reeds change if the weather changes," she observes. "If it's humid, they swell up. If it's dry, they close up. You need as many possibilities as you can get. I use the less interesting ones to practice on. You save your favorites for performances, and you might want to use a certain reed for a certain piece."
Debbie got her bachelor's degree in Music Education at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, then went on to Yale, where she got a master's in performance. She met her husband-to-be, trumpet player Dave Burkhart, at Yale, and after their graduation they spent a couple of years in Israel, playing with the Jerusalem Symphony, before returning to the U.S. and settling in the Bay Area.
In addition to her position as the Berkeley Symphony's principal oboe, Debbie is a member of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra in Orange County and is an active freelancer around the Bay Area with groups such as the San Francisco Opera and Ballet Orchestras, the San Jose and Oakland-East Bay Symphonies, and Opera San Jose. She has taken part in many festivals including the Aspen, Cabrillo and Carmel Bach Festivals, Music in the Mountains and the Bach Aria Festival and Institute in New York. Also active as a teacher, she teaches at California State University-Sacramento and a San Jose State University.
When not playing the oboe or teaching, Debbie is usually involved in a succession of hobbies. "I've gone through home improvement, gardening, landscaping," she says, "and for a while I did a lot of furniture refinishing." Currently, she adds, she and Dave have become fascinated with genealogy and are researching their families, which has led them into many areas of interest. "We spend time in libraries looking at microfilm. You end up learning about migration and immigration. The families I am studying migrated from Pennsylvania through Ohio to Indiana. You learn a lot about what life was like in the eighteen hundreds, from wars to daily life." She has yet to discover a serious musician among her ancestors, though. "A couple of people played instruments. My grandfather played a little sax in college. But there was nobody who really stuck with it."
—Richard Reynolds, April 2001
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