JJ Silvey

About JJ

JJ Silvey is an oboist, teacher, and scholar deeply invested in the communicative power of music. He is a recent alumnus of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard College’s resident orchestral academy devoted to the curation and critical analysis of music by historically neglected composers. Silvey has been a featured pre-concert speaker in TŌN’s Carnegie Hall series, delivering programmatic remarks introducing audiences to works of Walter Braunfels and Adolf Busch. As a member of TŌN, he also participated in numerous commercial recording projects, most recently for the orchestra’s album The Lost Generation, issued in 2024. Silvey can be heard on the soundtrack for the Oscar-nominated film Maestro, a Leonard Bernstein biopic starring and directed by Bradley Cooper.

A devoted educator, Silvey joined the faculty of Interlochen Arts Camp in 2023 as the Oboe Teaching Fellow and currently serves as a reed making instructor in The Juilliard School’s Pre-College division. He has appeared frequently in summer festivals, including the Bard Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival and School, Chautauqua Institution, Eastern Music Festival, and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, where in 2014 he was named a winner of the concerto competition and performed Handel’s Oboe Concerto in G Minor under the direction of Rossen Milanov. Additionally, Silvey played in the inaugural Hidden Valley Festival of Winds, a summer chamber music series in Carmel Valley, California. He is currently pursuing doctoral study at The Juilliard School as a recipient of the C.V. Starr Fellowship. Silvey is a graduate of the Mannes School of Music and holds dual bachelor’s degrees from Indiana University in Oboe Performance and Law and Public Policy, both with distinction. He is extremely grateful to his teachers, Elaine Douvas and Linda Strommen.