Nicholas Daniel is one of the worlds greatest living Oboists,

being the only player of his instrument to win the coveted BBC
Young Musician of the Year award, in 1980. He is a founding
member of the Haffner Wind Ensemble and Britten Sinfonia, a
Professor at the Musikhochschule in Trossingen, Germany, and
has performed on nearly all of the worlds greatest stages,
including as Concerto soloist at the BBC Proms. He is also
comfortably queer, living with his partner Piotr and their two
gorgeous cats. Here in a NoHeterOx exclusive, Catz 2nd Year
Musician Dan Shao gets to pick his brains on Queerness and
the Classical Music industry.
You came out as gay quite a while into your career, and are
famously open, if you dont mind my saying so. You have
continued to do incredibly well, foraying into the world of
conducting and scaling new heights as a world-class oboist and
instructor. This should act as an inspiration to young people
worried about any possible detriment associated with being
queer in the classical music industry.
Are there any insights concerning your coming out experience
(any the ways in which people responded) which you would like
to share?
ND
Obviously coming out is still, sadly, a big thing for almost
everyone. I wish it weren't, but it was for me and it was for the
older of my two sons. My own evolution to it was slow burn,
yes, and afterwards I realised that before I could evolve in this
way there had been many things deep inside myself that
needed to be aligned. When my kids were young I fell quickly,
absolutely madly and deeply in love with my now husband
Piotr, and it was utterly simple to identify myself as gay from
that point. It was not simple in my life, practically speaking, but
as it was the easiest and most natural thing to feel. I believed it
must be right because it felt so true and that all would be well.
In almost every sense all IS well, and in myself there is a clarity
and simplicity that I had no idea I was missing.

It was absolutely noticeable in my playing and conducting first,

before I told anyone. Close friends were asking what was going
on just from hearing me perform, identifying a new directness
and simplicity in my communication as a musician and a new
ease in myself. This to me was quite surprising, but on
reflection I realised that as it's an artist's job first of all to be
honest with themselves, this new clarity was a quantum jump
in my self understanding.
In my evolution to openly gay I was never anything but honest
with myself but there is another deeper honesty that involves
listening to oneself on another level and being brave and
adjusting to what you discover and feel. I envy those that have
a clarity about being gay early in life, but the glacier of self
understanding that constantly reshapes and reforms the artist
works in all of us all the time. Yes it can be destructive, but
that's part of renewal. The more we can listen and understand
ourselves and subjugate our egos the more there is to learn
and enjoy.
Coming out itself was unbelievably natural and easy in the end,
although the fear of people not accepting it or being angry with
me for what happened in my previous marriage was very big.
Absolutely all my friends and family were completely
astonishingly good about it. My 80 year old Auntie, when I told
her said "oh yes I hear there's a lot of that about, dear' and
accepted it completely from the outset. A close friend who I
work with in my Festival in Leicester said "I love anyone who
loves you", and my now ex Mother in Law, who was also 80 at
the time, was the first person to insist that all the parties
should meet and said that she knew and trusted that I would
never have done this unless I really meant it, as she had known
and loved me for 25 years and therefore accepted it. My sons,
after a while, said that I just seemed the same except more
'me' and more relaxed.
There were only two people who openly said hurtful things to
me, and they, perhaps oddly, purport to be Christians. Oh, and
there was the badge of honour of being called a "fuckin fagit'

on Hollywood Boulevard in LA. That went STRAIGHT onto

Facebook.
DS
A big topic of discussion within the LGBT+ community today is
the perpetuating of limiting and essentialist gender roles by
LGBT+ individuals; on Grindr you neednt search far to find
people wearing the badge of masc looking for masc, and the
trope of the classic lipstick lesbian is still a prized one. Of
course both of these labels are extremely limiting, with the idea
of people glamorising projected straightness (which is
ultimately at odds with their sexual identity) seeming truly
problematic. Within the Western classical music tradition, there
still seems to be a certain fear of the body, and indeed of any
LGBT+ sexual identity, despite an apparent contradiction from
the huge number of queer composers and performers in the
canon. As Susan McClary points out in Feminine Endings,
music can often reinforce gender roles: People learn how to be
gendered beings through interaction with cultural discourses
such as music. Projected straightness seems to be the norm
here as well.
Have you felt any kind of pressure from the 'academy' to mould
your sexual identity, be it covert or more blatant, and if so, has
it come more from a straight or queer crowd?
ND
I would always resist any hidden or blatant pressure to mould
me in any way. That's nobody's business but mine, so I suspect
nobody has tried, perhaps seeing quite quickly it would be a
waste of energy. I found in the early days of people hearing I
was out that straight women wanted me to behave in a certain
way with them, and I was pretty uncomfortable with that. I love
that straight women often feel very comfortable with gay men
and it's a whole new dimension to explore, but suddenly
becoming something different didn't feel like me. I know that's
not really what you're asking about, but pressure from 'the
academy'? Absolutely not at all. I think that sometimes the

tension of 'whether it matters' can send a message that

somehow it does. The more we can relax and enjoy who we are
and be ourselves the less tension there is in other people.
I have strong role models in this respect with Benjamin Britten
and Peter Pears. Their lives were lived openly queer at a time
when it was considerably trickier than now. I knew Pears well
and was lucky enough to have his support and encouragement
when I was starting out. Their combined talent and their love
for each other is still very inspiring to me.
DS
Around the mid-1980s, feminist and queer angles on the
humanities began to become more an more accepted,
pioneered by scholars such as Michel Foucalt, Eve Sedgwick
and Judith Butler. Susan McClary argues that Musicology has
lagged behind Literature and Film studies in terms of Queer
analysis; indeed it took until 1994 for Philip Bretts seminal
Queering the Pitch to be written, and the book still does not
enjoy a position at the centre of Musicological discourse.
There has been huge uproar in the music world concerning
Schuberts unknown sexuality, stemming from Maynard
Solomons 1989 article, which suggests that the Schubert
circle largely consisted of homosexuals. He advised against
relating it to his music, yet many scholars have controversially
(and perhaps problematically) linked the perceived femininity
of Schuberts music to his queerness. Schuberts sensuality,
and thus feminine weakness, can apparently never reach the
structural greatness of masculine Beethovens logic, perhaps
summated by his fairly to modulate to the dominant at the
end of the Unfinished Symphonys exposition. Bollocks to that!
Do you feel that sexuality can manifest itself musically, in
either performance or composition, and if so how?

'PERHAPS problematically??' No perhaps about it, that's a

problematic attitude indeed and a load of tosh. Some of the
strongest musical structures I know come from Schubert AND
ANYWAY what a hugely offensive argument to say that
femininity equates to lack of 'structural greatness'. What
shocks me is that these opinions come from post 1989 not
1889. I would have thought that the combination of musicology
and 'queer analysis' was an absolute minefield!
I am sure that sexuality manifests itself in composition and
performance. Any good to great composer (writer,
choreographer, visual artist-creator) MUST have at least a
subconscious understanding of the archetypes of masculine
and feminine in themselves and their music, and in the
beautiful play between them. A composer like Oliver Knussen, a
straight man, has extreme delicacy and refinement (perhaps
typical feminine attributes, hmm I'm in the minefield already)
and controls his materials and structures brilliantly, as does
Elliot Carter. Thea Musgrave, a straight woman, writes with a
structural clarity and directness from the essence of the
individual phrases to the overall structural clarity. With the
wonderful married team of Helen Grime and Huw Watkins, both
superbly gifted composers, the interplay with themselves and
between the two of them in this respect is fascinating. Watkins
is a volatile, singing voice, Grime is thoughtful, expanding
perfect structures that explode less frequently but also
powerfully.
I'm giving examples of straight male and female artists
because they could arguably be expected to be more strongly
polarised: clearly not so.
In the same way that it's a major aim of mine to get people to
forget the medium of the oboe when I perform and listen just to
the music and the communication, I think music has the great
asset that it HAS to steer between sexual identities in order to
reflect all of life as well as it does. As performers our job is to
internally become the music and therefore we have to travel
between those identities with great fluidity. I would say again
that the less resistance we can find in ourselves to connecting

with these aspects of living, the better we will be able to

understand them.