Artistic Decision Making

Tina Ward has been a clarinetist in the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra since 1970. Tina has served on various orchestra committees, including the SLSO Musicians Council, and has been chairperson of the Artistic Advisory, Community Partnership Program, Media and Travel Committees. Tina has also been the SLSO’s ICSOM delegate and a member of the Community Partnership Advisory Board. In 1999 she was an American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) Orchestra Management Fellow and completed assignments with the Kansas City Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she has researched artistic leadership models in orchestras around the world and has co-authored articles in Harmony and Symphony. Currently, Tina is a member of the Board of Directors of the ASOL. In addition, she is an active chamber music performer and clarinet teacher.

Tina Ward has been a clarinetist in the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra since 1970. Tina has served on various orchestra committees, including the SLSO Musicians Council, and has been chairperson of the Artistic Advisory, Community Partnership Program, Media and Travel Committees. Tina has also been the SLSO’s ICSOM delegate and a member of the Community Partnership Advisory Board. In 1999 she was an American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) Orchestra Management Fellow and completed assignments with the Kansas City Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she has researched artistic leadership models in orchestras around the world and has co-authored articles in Harmony and Symphony. Currently, Tina is a member of the Board of Directors of the ASOL. In addition, she is an active chamber music performer and clarinet teacher.

Tina Ward has been a clarinetist in the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra since 1970. Tina has served on various orchestra committees, including the SLSO Musicians Council, and has been chairperson of the Artistic Advisory, Community Partnership Program, Media and Travel Committees. Tina has also been the SLSO’s ICSOM delegate and a member of the Community Partnership Advisory Board. In 1999 she was an American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) Orchestra Management Fellow and completed assignments with the Kansas City Symphony and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she has researched artistic leadership models in orchestras around the world and has co-authored articles in Harmony and Symphony. Currently, Tina is a member of the Board of Directors of the ASOL. In addition, she is an active chamber music performer and clarinet teacher.

Carla Johnson was appointed President and Executive Director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra in March, 2004. She spearheaded the strategic planning process, which resulted in the adoption of a five-year Strategic Plan in March 2005, and balanced the operating budget for the third consecutive year. Ms. Johnson oversaw the construction of the 2005-2006 season, which added three new series in the new Ferguson Center for the Arts at Christopher Newport University in Newport News; the new series helped push sales to an institutional record of over a million dollars in subscription sales. Having worked for over nine years with the Saint Louis Symphony Community Partnership Program, it is her particular goal to bring community engagement to Hampton Roads, and to that end she has begun a number of initiatives in schools, churches, and other community centers in the area.

Ms. Johnson is currently serving on the Collaborative Data Project Task Force and is an alumna of the Mellon Orchestra Forum.

Ms. Johnson received a B.A. in Honors Political Science and French Language, with an equivalent of a dance minor, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her Masters in Arts Administration is from Brooklyn College.

With husband John Hickox and daughter Zoë, Ms. Johnson resides in Norfolk, Virginia; son Ian is off at the University of Virginia. While Carla Johnson is completely devoted to music and organizations which make the music, her passion is gardening because plants either live or die, but they don’t negotiate.

Charles Ullery has been principal bassoonist of the SPCO since 1975. Prior to that, he was a member of the San Francisco Symphony and the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco. He is a frequent soloist with the SPCO. Many composers have written works for him, including Michael Daugherty, Daniel Sturm, Russell Platt, Jay Reise, William Wallace, Erika Foin, Akmal Parwez and Daniel S. Godfrey. Ullery has appeared at the Sarasota Music Festival, the Utah Festival, the Rockport Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Carnegie Hall Festival. Since the summer of 1976, he has been principal bassoon of the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra in Jackson, Wyoming. In the summer of 2004, Ullery taught at the Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific in Powell River, British Columbia, and at ARIA at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He spent the 1987-88 season as a faculty member at Oberlin College in Ohio, and currently is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Minnesota. He especially enjoys teaching high school students out of his home. Ullery graduated cum laude in mathematics from the University of Arizona at age 19, and started graduate work at UCLA before entering the Army.

Christian Woehr was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1951 into a large and unwieldy family of musicians. Five days into life, he split for Pittsburgh, where his dad had a new gig playing horn with the Pittsburgh Symphony. At the age of 7 his cellist mother asked him if he wanted to play the viola. Eager to please, he said “Sure! What is it?”, thus setting the pattern for a lifetime of clueless commitments. Within a year or two, already struck with the pathetic nature of the viola repertoire, he was attempting to write his own music. Possibly his first completed work, a Gavotte for solo viola, received actual monetary payments of 25 cents per copy from his teacher Albert Hirtz, a Pittsburgh Symphony musician who understood the motivational force of cash. The $1.50 earned from this project remained Christian’s largest compositional fee for the next 20 years.

Surviving the excruciating self-taught compositional efforts of Christian’s childhood, his family string ensemble (a full string sextet with additional horns) was quite happy to see him off to college. After the Eastman School of Music, where his principal teachers were Francis Tursi in viola and Warren Benson in composition, Christian came face to face with career/cash realities, and put away the pencil and paper for a while to learn the viola parts to Don Juan and the Mendellsohn Scherzo (for orchestra auditions). After a miserable year in the Columbus Symphony, he returned to Rochester, his marriage over and his bow arm still stinking.

Attacking the latter through the teaching skills of Heidi Castleman, he eventually landed the Principal Viola job in the Rochester Philharmonic. Forced to play slightly above his physical talent level, Woehr again learned that his true love lay in composing. He began writing works for viola and multiple violas, and more importantly, organizing concerts with the combined viola resources of the Eastman School and the Rochester Philharmonic. In 1984, ERVE (the Eastman Rochester Viola Ensemble) made its triumphant way to the World Viola Congress in Boston, playing all-Woehr. The crowd adulation (unrealistic though it may have been from an audience of several hundred violists) sealed Christian’s compositional fate.

In 1986, during a downsizing period of the Rochester Philharmonic (no more chips and beer on runout buses, plus the abandonment of Carnegie Hall concerts) Woehr got a call from St. Louis. He went, and won the audition for Assistant Principal Viola of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, a job which has left him with somewhat more time and energy for composing (all part of his long-range plan). No doubt due to life-lessons learned, Woehr continues to hesitate to give up his orchestral day job for composing. But his opus grows in quantity, scope, and quality, with performances by orchestras, chamber music festivals, and colleagues who commission him for his uniquely fun style of writing. He isn’t getting rich off composing, but the few bucks he gets from ASCAP every 3 months does keep up the faith.