The Only Girl in the Orchestra

8/4/2026

Born of Hollywood Silver Screen stock - George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill, Orin O'Brien studies ballet as a child before taking up the double bass and trailblazing for her sex to become the first woman to play for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Of course there isn't a great deal of archive of her actual performances and so we are left to survive on a sparing collection of photographs and plenty of Beethoven from the soundtrack as this half hour really only narrates what she is up to in her later years. Having retired after half a century playing, and having been on the board of the acclaimed Juliard school for a decade, she is now teaching and seems to have her late teen pupils eating from her hands. However, with her apartment succumbing to a nasty looking black mould, she is