Anna Kate Mackle & John Shaw

April 1, 2025

IM  -  

Harmony and Dissonance: Music, Marriage, and Eastern Music Festival Contract Negotiations

It’s not uncommon to find couples working in the same orchestra, and most orchestras in the US can count at least one such partnership among their ranks. Rarely, an existing couple will win auditions for jobs in the same orchestra. More often, they meet on the job, which makes sense when they share the same schedule and strange working hours, factors which can make it difficult to meet others outside of the orchestra.

Harpist Anna Kate Mackle and her percussionist husband John Shaw, both of Local 427-721 (Tampa Bay, FL), fall into this category, having met after both started playing in The Florida Orchestra (TFO) in Tampa Bay. They are both also longtime faculty members and orchestra musicians at the Eastern Music Festival (EMF) in Greensboro, North Carolina. EMF is currently facing difficult contract negotiations with an intractable board and management.

Mackle, originally from New York City, grew up in the New Jersey area and received her master’s from the Cleveland Institute of Music after attending Baldwin-Wallace University for undergraduate studies, winning positions in both TFO and EMF in 1999. Shaw grew up in the panhandle of Florida, near Pensacola. He completed his undergrad studies at Florida State University, then attended Temple University for graduate work. He won the principal percussion position in TFO in 1996 and joined EMF faculty in 2008.

International Musician sat down with Mackle and Shaw recently to talk about navigating daily life while also working closely together. No surprise: it can require some complicated calendar planning, especially where kids are involved.

International Musician: Others might wonder how you manage working with someone you also live with. You get up together, go to work together, work together, then go home together and talk about work. Does that make things difficult?

Shaw: It’s worse than that. We sit right next to each other in the orchestra. But TFO actually has a lot of couples, at least five off the top of my head. Being able to talk about work with your spouse is both a blessing and a curse. There are admittedly times where we have to tell each other we’re just going to talk about something else. We try not to obsess over it. But also, it’s easy and beneficial to be able to talk to your partner about problems in the orchestra, because they’re in the same situation so they obviously completely understand.

Mackle: We also just enjoy spending a lot of time together, which certainly helps.

IM: Your kids are older now, but when they were all at home and in need of adult supervision, how did you figure out things like child care with two full-time orchestra jobs?

Shaw: We have three kids. The older two are from my first marriage, and our youngest daughter is ours together. She’s 18 now and a freshman at Florida State University. When the kids were younger, finding babysitters was challenging because we work so many nights and weekends.

Mackle: John has a huge teaching studio at St. Petersburg College, so many of his students wound up becoming our sitters. When the kids were old enough, they would often come to work with us and hang out backstage at the hall, listening to whatever we were rehearsing. I have a great memory of our youngest daughter sleeping backstage in my harp cover while [Local 802 (New York City) member] Yo-Yo Ma was playing on stage.

IM: What is the division of labor like when running a household?

Shaw: From the start, we just naturally gravitated toward things we didn’t each mind doing. It’s a solid approach. Anna Kate likes to cook, and I’m decent with numbers, so I took care of the household finances. School activities were handled by whichever of us was available on any given day.

Mackle: Hard to believe before smartphones, we did all of this with a paper calendar, sometimes even dividing halves of concerts between us when one of us was off.

Shaw: For sure, smartphones are terrific. Having an easily updated and shareable calendar is indispensable for syncing our work and teaching schedules. Any couple can use that.

IM: Do you try to maintain any kind of separation from your work and home life?

Mackle: We try, but sometimes it just ends up creeping in. Once our daughter was in the other room listening to our conversation, and chimed in. She knew exactly who in the orchestra we were talking about. That was a wake-up call.

Shaw: For my part, work generally stays at work. I don’t keep any percussion instruments at home. They’re all in my studio at the college, and I practice there. As principal percussion in TFO, I have to take care of part assignments for the section, stage plots, and equipment rentals, so that’s a bit of homework. Anna Kate does have a harp at home. But that’s kind of nice, washing dishes while listening to harp music.

IM: Is there anything you’d recommend to other orchestra couples to hold onto that healthy balance?

Mackle: Try to keep a sense of humor about things. Also, find some time for yourself. Everyone needs that. Running is my main outlet. It doesn’t use any of the same muscles as playing the harp, so I can do it even on concert days, and it gives me mental and physical goals outside of music.

Shaw: It’s also important for the relationship to remind yourself not to get caught up in the idea that your career is your whole identity. In the end, it’s a passion and a mission, and it’s what we do, but at the same time, we have to be real people outside of that and have interests we both share that aren’t related to the orchestra.

IM: Speaking of those outside activities, what keeps you busy outside of TFO?

Shaw: Aside from teaching, I’m an avid chess player. I spend a lot of time studying and playing it on my phone or with others. We both love baseball games, so we go to see the Tampa Bay Rays a lot.

Mackle: We also have a chamber music group, the Mackle Shaw Duo. We’ve commissioned and performed a lot of new music and recently received a grant from the New World Symphony in Miami for another commission.

Shaw: If I played flute, there would be lots of existing music for us. But there’s not much out there for harp and percussion. It has been a fun experience to meet composers and discover what they can do for this combination. We’re hoping to further explore the possibilities for harp with tuned percussion instruments.

IM: EMF has been stuck in difficult contract negotiations in recent months. Are you on the orchestra committee?

Mackle: John is. He’s the committee chair. We’ve both done committee work at TFO, but separately. I actually don’t think it’s a good idea for couples to do that together. Other members of the orchestra could wonder if you’re stacking the deck on the same side of an issue. I believe it’s healthier to have independent minds from a cross-section of the organization.

Shaw: It’s also better for our emotional health if only one of us has to go through negotiations.

IM: Along those lines, can you give a brief rundown of the issues at EMF?

Shaw: The real problem with EMF is that a few people at the very top of the organization want to completely change how the festival operates. One of their key goals is to cut faculty. They don’t have a deep understanding or appreciation for the critical importance of fundraising. In the nonprofit sector, you need more contributed than earned income. They’ve always tried to operate on earned income, with the biggest source of that being EMF student tuition. That’s a difficult business model to sustain. They think cutting faculty will fix the problem, but we’ve never been able to get them to show us how that would be successful.

Mackle: There’s not a lot of transparency. They don’t view us as stakeholders in the same way they do the audience, patrons, and students.

IM: What has been EMF’s stance in negotiations?

Shaw: Basically, their only offer has been less people on the payroll along with a different pay structure, which they portray inaccurately as a raise. They also want to completely eliminate the festival orchestra, which is staffed by the faculty.

IM: And now the organization has canceled the entire summer season, resulting in the AFM filing an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board. Where do you go from here?

Shaw: We think they always knew they were going to shut it down, but didn’t want to tell us. There was, and is, no viable reason for them to cancel it. The director stated that they needed to do it before students arrived, but he never said why. We’ve told them we’re willing to play and talk, but the truth is, this isn’t about money. Long-standing board members have been pushed off the regular board and onto an honorary board that doesn’t have a vote, and they are not being allowed to help with fundraising or contribute in any meaningful way. If EMF really wanted to do the right thing, we could still go ahead with the festival. Sometime soon, though, we are going to run out of time to do that. In the meantime, we’re trying to raise awareness about our current business model and stress that it needs to remain as it is.

Mackle: Also, the entire EMF faculty found out about the cancelation on social media. Management never told us directly.

Shaw: It has always been expected that the entire faculty would be back every year, help recruit, and adjudicate incoming students. Then, they announced that they wanted us to come back this summer with 18 fewer people, down from a faculty of 61. And, of course, that means the students would also suffer. EMF can give no reason why the model needs to change when they’ve been managing to make it work for more than 60 years. We have a lot of supporters who are outraged. Frankly, there needs to be a change in leadership.

IM: How has the AFM been instrumental in the organizing efforts?

Mackle: We couldn’t do any of this without the union. None of us really knew how to do it.

Shaw: I’ve been an AFM member all my working life, and I still didn’t know how to approach all the various complicated aspects of this. Staff and officers at both the AFM national office and Local 342 have been a fount of knowledge about what to do.

IM: Is there anything you’ve learned that you could share with other entities going through the negotiation process?

Shaw: I’d say one of the crucial things for any organization is for the people who support it, either through donations or service on the board, to be close to the artists who are working on the front lines. Here in TFO, for example, we are very interactive with our board.

Mackle: We have four musicians serving on the TFO board, and a musician on every board committee and subcommittee.

Shaw: Serving on the board helps us better understand what they are doing with fundraising, and it helps the board, in turn, understand that just because musicians work under a collective bargaining agreement, we are not adversaries. The collective bargaining agreement is in place for their protection as well. It ensures that everything is laid out clearly, and everyone in the organization knows exactly what is expected.

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