Ray Still

Ray Still
Photo of Ray Still in the 1980s
Background information
Born	(1920-03-12)March 12, 1920 Elwood, Indiana
Died	March 12, 2014(2014-03-12) (aged 94)
Instruments	Oboe

Ray Still (March 12, 1920 – March 12, 2014) was an American classical oboist. He was the principal (first) oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 40 years, from 1953–1993.

He was born March 12, 1920 in Elwood, Indiana, and moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He started studying the clarinet at 14, and volunteered as an usher at Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts, where he heard the Belgian oboist Henri de Busscher, whose “singing” style inspired him to switch to the oboe at 16. His first oboe teacher was Philip Memoli, who played second oboe to de Busscher in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. From 1941-1943, Still was a member of the US Army Signal Corps Reserves and studied electrical engineering at Pacific States University. He was in the US Army from 1943–1946, and worked mainly in radar. Still enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York in the summer of 1946 and attended for almost two years. He studied oboe at first with Bruno Labate, and later with Robert Bloom, the principal oboist for Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, even though Bloom did not teach at Juilliard.

Still’s style of oboe playing had elements of both the more relaxed European style and the more controlled American style, with the singing tone he admired in de Busscher, Labate, and Bloom. For example, one of his students, Michael Rosenberg, has played in German orchestras, where the American style is not popular. The American style came primarily from Marcel Tabuteau, who had taught Robert Bloom at the Curtis Institute; Still said that up to the early 1970s, he was the only principal oboist in a major US orchestra who had not studied with Tabuteau. He was most flattered when reviewers compared him to great singers, as a reviewer in London did when he played oboe concerti with the Academy of London in 1985, or to great jazz musicians, as a reviewer did in a review of his recording of the Bach Wedding Cantata.