WAUS Artist Spotlight: Joshua Roman
By: Simon Luke Brown
I recently had the opportunity to speak with acclaimed cellist Joshua Roman ahead of his upcoming performance with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra. I was delighted to do so having grown up familiar with his name, as one of the most cherished alumni of the Oklahoma Youth Orchestra, where I was concertmaster for two years. I had seen him play with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic twice while in high school. And string players always look forward to talking shop with other string players. Right away, I asked him about his musical youth in Oklahoma.
He spoke about being the only kid around who played cello, while growing up in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Yet this didn’t mean his youth wasn’t musical. “A lot of my friends played guitar,” Roman says, “So we would be hanging out and while they were strumming all kinds of music I would be playing along on my cello!” This seems to have been the genesis of what has enabled him to engage in collaboration with artists of all sorts and shapes.
“I would say my formal musical education was completely classical,” recalls Roman, “but from the beginning I was always exposed to more non-classical influences too.” He told me about being the bassist for a middle school jazz band, taking that role almost by accident! “Somebody came into the room where I was practicing cello and said ‘Hey, do you play the bass?’ ‘No…’ ‘Well… do you want to learn??’” And a week later, he was a full member!
Roman attended the Cleveland Institute of Music for a five-year program that delivered both a bachelor's and master’s degree to its graduates. About a year later, the 22-year-old was Principal Cello of the Seattle Symphony. “I was at a bit of a dead end after I graduated,” he admits, “I didn’t really leave the apartment much, was really depressed, and… I could only get the cheapest things at the grocery store, and even that was too much! But it was during that time that I started to figure out how to say what I wanted to say with the cello, not just what my teachers were telling me to do. As I practiced the excerpts for the audition, I thought ‘How would I play this passage, leading this section and how would I want it to sound in relation to everything else going on around it?’”
He acknowledges that this phenomenon is difficult for a student to replicate while in an academic setting. “The incentives just aren’t there,” ponders Roman. “Teachers aren’t going to be inclined to teach for that kind of self-discovery and students aren’t going to be inclined to seek it while studying with those teachers.” It’s a fascinating look at a rather unsung element in artistic maturity – what happens after school?
Despite winning such a prestigious job at a rather young age, Roman says his goal was always a solo career. “I never won a big international competition myself, but I noticed that the winners would have great careers for 5 years, and then the next batch of winners would get those careers for the next five. I gave myself 5 years for the Seattle Symphony and then I’d try to strike out on my own,” he says. However, when the time came to renew his contract at the end of two years, he had enough events planned that he felt he could resign. “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, hands down,” says Roman “but I always knew I wanted to do this, and it was the right moment.” He was soon managed by Opus 3 Artists.
Roman says that his routine these days actually involves less practicing than one might suppose, given his occupation. “I have a rule that I don’t pick up the cello unless I really want to,” he declares. There’s always time for improvising and self-discovery in his practice life, which has professional implications as we will soon see. “I used to think that the way to solve problems was by throwing hours at it. I felt I had to practice a certain number of hours or times before I felt comfortable with something. I was responding from anxiety.” He has since taken a less-fearful approach, spending more time using his imagination and curiosity. “And the paradox is, even though I’m spending less time practicing – I’ve gotten so much better since I did that!”
Part of the impetus for this paradigm shift was his experience contracting Long Covid, which has proved life-changing for Roman. He got the disease during January of 2021. “Everything was shut down; there were barely any concerts I had to cancel,” he remembers. Yet it was not a pleasant experience. “I went from being able to run a mile in 6 minutes to not being able to walk up a flight of stairs. To this day, walking upstairs is difficult, sometimes impossible for me.” This obviously changed his musical life significantly. “I would say, I’m still not back to the schedule I had before Covid,” Roman muses, “though part of that is just an ebb in the industry itself.” The effect on his practice life was also substantial. “I decided I would not do anything on my cello unless I had the energy to do it,” he recalls. “I’ve gotten much more efficient and intentional whenever I pick up the cello. I wouldn’t say that Long Covid was a blessing in disguise (‘cause I still absolutely hate it) but I guess there were results that were useful.”
In closing, I asked him about a concert of his I attended when I was in high school and the same Oklahoma Youth Orchestra that Mr. Roman himself grew up in. He was playing the Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major by Joseph Haydn with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, and I was up in the balcony. The second half of the concert featured the Symphony No. 2 in D major by Jean Sibelius a work I had been carefully learning, as I was going to be playing it soon. At the cadenza of the first movement, Roman soared away on his cello, doubtless (I thought) playing his own cadenza rather than some standard one. Suddenly, in the midst of the cadenza, I heard the utterly recognizable theme of the first movement of the Sibelius Symphony, teasingly played by Joshua. I think I was the only person in the whole audience who laughed! “Do you do that often??” I queried him?
“When it’s appropriate for the music,” he laughed. “I decided at one point that I would improvise all of my cadenzas. In retrospect, it was a risky choice to do that with the San Francisco Symphony the very first time I played that piece, but I’ve been doing it ever since! Not every piece fits that bill, but in something like Haydn, it’s perfect! That’s the sort of thing that I think makes those pieces special and relevant. Improvisation or inside jokes like that exist only in that moment experienced by only those people at that concert. It’s something I like to provide.”
Don’t miss Joshua Roman live with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra this Saturday March 28, 2026/ 7:30pm in the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend, IN.