She wasn’t quite that (“I’m still not that,” she told Jamie), but she discovered in the first few months of private lessons with a teacher recommended by her Uncle Izzy that she had, well (and she told this to Jamie reluctantly and with a modesty he found both touching and endearing), well, she had what she supposed was a natural affinity for the instrument, what you might call a talent, she supposed. And she was surprised when, after having taken lessons for little more than a year, her teacher arranged a recital at Town Hall for five flutists, two men and three women, and Joanna was chosen to be one of the women. (“I was fifteen years old, not exactly what you’d call a woman, but the others really were women.”) In such fast company, Joanna was not far enough advanced to play first, but she did play third flute, and she did have several solos in a twenty-minute piece the name of which she could still recall, Boismortier’s Quintet No. 1 for five flutes. There at Town Hall, she made her next important musical decision: not only was it enough to play the flute and to play it well, it was important for her to perform before people who would hear her play and derive from her playing the same enjoyment she herself did. In short, she decided on that thrilling night that she wanted to become a professional musician.
In the summer of 1962, when Joanna was just eighteen, and shortly after she’d graduated from Fieldston-Riverdale, she went with her father to Rome. She had already applied to the Juilliard School, and had been accepted, and was looking forward to beginning her studies there in the fall. “In New York City,” she said, “anyone truly interested in becoming a professional musician — a classical musician, that is — goes either to Juilliard or Mannes. The Mannes College of Music, do you know? Both very good, but maybe Juilliard’s a bit more competitive. Anyway, that’s where I went. Juilliard, I mean. This was 1962, the fall of 1962, the school hadn’t yet moved to Lincoln Center, it was still uptown on 122nd Street, near Riverside Drive. I used to love that old building. I mean, it doesn’t compare with the facilities at Lincoln Center, I’m right there at the State Theater, you know, I drop in every now and then to say hello to Julie, he’s still teaching flute at Juilliard, he’s marvelous. I told you about him, do you remember? Julie Baker? He’s the first flutist with the Philharmonic.
“Anyway, he was teaching up there at the old Juilliard, and what I did for four years was play flute. Well, not only flute. You have to take piano as your second instrument, all students in the music department do. But flute was my major, and there was L and M, that’s literature and materials, and then orchestra — there were only two orchestras then, the Concert Orchestra and the Repertory Orchestra, but now there are four — and music history, and chamber music, if you were assigned to it, though that was mostly for string musicians, still I played a lot of chamber music at Juilliard.
“What it was, if you were a student there, you were supposed to be serious about music, so it was music, music, music all day long every day of the week. Either lessons, or else practicing, or else performing with this or that school orchestra or, you know, a friend might be giving a little recital, and he’d ask you to play with him, or you’d get together with some other musicians and just play things you loved, you know, like, oh, God, you know, the Mozart flute concertos or, God, there was a girl there, she was just a lovely harpist, do you know Mozart’s Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp? God, I used to love playing that with her, we’d spend hours on that, I absolutely adored it.
“But you see, I loved all of it. I mean, even the dumb exercises. All of it. Taffanel and Gaubert, or the Andersen exercises, or the Marcel Moyse stuff, all the exercises I use now when I’m warming up before a performance, but which then, meant a lot to me, when I was developing technique. I’d go to the hearing room, the school had this room with record players and earphones, it still has one at Lincoln Center, with the same person behind the desk, and I’d listen to, oh, God, I don’t know, tons of stuff — do you know the fourth movement of the Brahms four symphony? There’s some beautiful flute stuff in it. Or Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony? The third movement? There’s some very hard stuff there for two flutes, I mean, it’s hard for me even now, but then it was impossible. Or, you know, the flute solo in Daphnis and Chloé, or Strauss, well, Strauss, yes, everything in Till Eulenspiegel. And there’s L’aprèsmidi, I’m sure you know that one, the flute solo at the beginning, Debussy? No? You don’t know Debussy? Oh, well.
“I don’t want you to get the impression that all I did was play music all the time, or think about it all the time. I was twenty-two when I got out of Juilliard, and by then, well, you know, I’d, uh, picked up a little experience along the way with this or that man, I’ll tell you about that sometime, but not right now. The thing was trying to get a job when I got out. You see, if you’re a fiddler, I mean a good fiddler, you’ve got a shot at something like thirty, thirty-five chairs in the orchestra — sure, there are what? eighteen fiddles in the first section, another fifteen in the second? That’s thirty-three, am I right? Thirty-three chances for a job in any given orchestra. In New York, we haven’t got that many orchestras, you know. Cultural center of the world, sure, thank you, Mayor Lindsay, but all we’ve got is the Philharmonic and the American Symphony, which is only so-so, and the National Symphony, which doesn’t really count because that’s semi-pro, and then the Met and the City Opera, and that’s about it.
“Well, wait, you’ve got your ballet orchestras, but those are mostly pick-up jobs, the Joffrey, you know, and the Harkness, and the New York City Ballet company. There’s nothing that says you can’t leave New York and get a job with the Chicago Symphony, which, by the way, is the best orchestra in America, or the Cleveland, or wherever, but if you live here then you want to stay here and work here, even if it means subbing in a Broadway musical when a musician gets sick. My point is, there are only three flutes in an orchestra. Count ’em. Three. So, if you’ve got four or five true orchestras here in New York, that’s fifteen jobs. And you’re not going to get one of those jobs unless a flutist dies or moves to London.
“So there I am in 1966 with my B.M. from Juilliard, and all I want to do is perform, and there’s not a job anywhere on the horizon. Julie suggested that I call Arthur Aaron, he was contractor for the American Symphony, and Dino Proto who contracts for the State Theater, and he was nice enough to prepare the way for me so that when I called and told them I was a flutist looking for a job they didn’t just say, ‘Oh, really, how nice, what a surprise!’ I auditioned for both of them, and they were very complimentary, but they really didn’t have anything at all, and they told me to get back to them in six months or so. Well, Dino said that. Arthur Aaron didn’t have anything, and he wasn’t expecting anything, either. You have to understand that when a musician lands a chair in an orchestra, he stays with it. He doesn’t go job hopping, the way you do in advertising or publishing. Jobs are hard to get. So I called Dino back in six months — this was now getting to be 1967 — I didn’t call him Dino in those days, it was still Mr. Proto. His name is Secondo, anyway, his first name, but everybody who knows him calls him Dino — and he still didn’t have anything for me.