Gabrielle Castriotta was born in Hartford, CT but moved to Houston, TX at the age of 12. There, she attended St. John's School, studied oboe with Linda Gilbert, and played in the Houston Youth Symphony, Virtuosi of Houston, and Rice University's Campanile Orchestra. She was a semifinalist in 2000 and 2001 for the Houston Symphony League Concerto Competition, was a founding member of the Houston Symphony's Teen Council, and interned in that organization's public relations department.
Gabrielle attended Northwestern University where she studied with Scott Hostetler (English horn, Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and Michael Henoch (Assistant Principal Oboe, Chicago Symphony Orchestra). Gabrielle also took English horn lessons with Grover Schiltz, former English horn for the Chicago Symphony, and participated in master classes with Ray Still, former principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony, while at Northwestern. In addition to a Bachelor of Music in Oboe Performance, Gabrielle also received a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern. She studied Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy during the summer of 2003, and she wrote her senior thesis on the interaction between the text of the Finnish epic, The Kalevala, and the music of Jean Sibelius's early symphonic work, Kullervo.
While at Northwestern, Gabrielle also participated in the Partnerships Through the Arts (PTA) program, which joined various Chicago performing arts groups to the Chicago public school system through students at Northwestern University. The program asserted that arts education, in addition to enriching children's lives, helped students learn better in general. The Chicago Chamber Musicians performed at an elementary school once a month and provided a teaching artist to teach basic music classes to the students. Together with another Northwestern intern, Gabrielle helped the teaching artist and introduced instruments, composers, and musical terms to classes of 4th-graders and kindergarteners, and worked with an after-school recorder class.
After graduating from Northwestern, Gabrielle continued her oboe studies with Allan Vogel at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, where she received her Master of Music in Oboe Performance in May 2008. While at USC, Gabrielle participated in the Thornton School's Outreach Program, where she taught clarinet sectionals at a local high school and introduced the oboe to local elementary school classrooms. She currently plays English horn for both the Young Musician's Foundation Debut Orchestra and the American Youth Symphony and teaches Middle School Wind Ensemble at Crossroads School in Santa Monica.
Gabrielle has participated in the 2009 Banff Centre Master Classes for Winds, the 2008 Sarasota Music Festival, the Youth Orchestra of the America's 2005 tour of South America, where she was coached by Alex Klein, as well as Domaine Forget and the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival. She has appeared as a soloist with the North Shore Chamber Orchestra in Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante, and has participated in master classes with Nicholas Daniel, Stephen Taylor, Ariana Ghez, Bert Lucarelli, Thomas Stacy, Elaine Douvas, Ted Baskin, David Weiss, and Joel Timm. Gabrielle has also studied English horn with Carolyn Hove.
