Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Blair Tindall

  We began our first orchestra rehearsal in the school’s art deco Borden Auditorium. A time capsule, the hall had been designed by the Empire State Building’s architects in 1931 and not altered since. Manahan drilled the orchestra’s first violins on Bizet’s Symphony in C. The fiddlers scratched away, falling apart as winds and brass watched silently. Although Manahan was a dynamic conductor, most of his violinists lacked passion, talent, or ambition and weren’t about to win one of the few orchestra jobs available once they graduated.

  The Manhattan School orchestra was far less polished than the one I’d played in at NCSA. I needed to find a way to gain experience, and fortunately, good oboists were in demand elsewhere. Just down Broadway, Columbia University’s shortage proved a boon and I joined one of their student orchestras. Before long I was not only playing regularly in their symphony but performing as a soloist in J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin with violinist Ralph Morrison, who was a literature undergraduate already holding down a Broadway pit job and heading off to a job in the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

  The plucky group of Columbia University musicians partied hard, its lively dinners in West Side apartments bursting with talk of history, politics, culture, and literature. Manhattan School’s students paled in comparison, with nothing but musical mechanics on their minds. I was happy to meet some smart new men, too. Though my roommate and I had rebuffed Manhattan School’s piano tuner by lying about being lesbians, our ruse backfired when he spread the gossip around school. Since everyone assumed we were gay, no male student had yet showed any interest in either of us.

  I was already spending little time at Manhattan School when I won one of three oboe spots in the National Orchestral Association (NOA) in a highly competitive audition. NOA was a training orchestra for the crème de la crème of New York’s best young players, and I was honored to suddenly find myself among them. Founded in 1930 by philanthropist Mary Flagler Cary and maintained by the Cary Trust, the group even paid me and its other musicians a small amount, funding performances of several concerts at Carnegie Hall with soloists like Richard Goode and Ruggiero Ricci.

  Leaving NOA rehearsals, which met three afternoons a week at Juilliard, I discovered the real action took place at Lincoln Center. In the evenings, I’d seen Leonard Bernstein walking to work. It felt like I was watching a movie, especially when I saw the violin star Pinchas Zukerman racing across the plaza and Luciano Pavarotti gliding by in a stretch limo; none of that excitement infected Manhattan School. Here, clarinetists, violinists, and trumpeters rushed to their stage doors at 7:30 P.M. I couldn’t wait to join them.

  All those worlds collided at the Allendale, where students from Juilliard, Mannes, and the Manhattan School could fraternize with music professionals. On any night, impromptu chamber music parties erupted, given a little Mozart sheet music, some kung pao chicken from Hunan Balcony, and a joint. One night, I played through the Mozart Oboe Quar-with my neighbors, beers at our feet, and so it was not surprising when we all ended up in bed together. Much of New York’s classical music community did this with equal abandon, as the lines between music and passion blurred.

  Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument. Neurotic violinists, anonymous in their orchestra section, came fast. Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists’ sensitive fingers worked magic. French horn players, their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely get it up, but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything at all. One of them even specialized in making instruments from refrigerators, auto taillights, and other castoffs he’d found at junkyards.

  Oboists crossed an incestuous line, speaking a language of reeds, articulation, and the challenges of playing Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Because of our obscure shared experience, the relationship between oboists could be comfy as old flannel, giving the deceptive illusion of safety between competitors.

  I had first met Jayson at a reception for musicians of the newly-formed American Philharmonic. Twisting his wedding ring, he whispered to me that I should pretend to be an old friend, so no one would know that he’d hired me purely on the recommendation of my teacher, Joe Robinson. I felt privileged to have landed the gig and to be in on the intrigue of Jayson’s con game. Jayson would have done anything to make Robinson happy. As principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, one of America’s five biggest symphony orchestras, Robinson was in a position to hire freelancers like Jayson to substitute in his orchestra on a week-to-week basis. Since New York Philharmonic players were also offered lucrative studio work before freelancers were called, Robinson might recommend Jayson for jingles and film soundtracks as well.

  The American Philharmonic gave its first performance in the autumn of 1979 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, under Rohan Joseph, a Sri Lankan conductor of questionable ability who had launched the orchestra. Fortunately, Rohan’s musicianship was counterbalanced by enormous talents of persuasion, as he schmoozed wealthy board members into bank-rolling his project and talked musicians into volunteering their services.

  I was too naive to understand how freelance musicians landed gigs through networking. What I did know was that the concerts I played at Carnegie Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center over the following months trumped anything I’d play at school as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. What’s more, I shared every aspiring performer’s dream: to join a professional orchestra that promises to grow. I overlooked the fact that by rehearsing for free (we were paid only for concerts), we perpetuated the classic scenario of artists subsidizing a performing arts group, the only way such a group can come close to paying its own way without substantial funding.

  Jayson, who like Robinson and me was also a Southerner, was extraordinarily friendly. At thirty-four he was considerably older, but had taken the job as a way of improving his résumé with a principal oboe position. In addition, other freelancers who might hire him for work would hear and see him play the prominent oboe solos in orchestral music.

  Although Robinson wasn’t particularly supportive of me or any of his other students, he liked knowing one of us was already playing at Carnegie. At the same time, Jayson flattered Robinson by taking a few oboe lessons. The two men became closer by playing golf afterward. Jayson was likable, and Robinson soon added him to the New York Philharmonic’s sub list.

  Jayson was moving in on me too. After rehearsing Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony at a public school on West 77th Street one afternoon, he invited me to his place to make reeds. First, we shared drinks at the fireplace bar at One If by Land, a romantic restaurant housed in Aaron Burr’s historic coach house on Barrow Street. By the third Chivas, I had melted against him on the sofa, gazing at the candlelight reflected in his eyes. Winding down Grove Street, we climbed five flights to his walkup across from Chumley’s. His dancer wife was out west, on a six-month tour with American Ballet Theater.

  I unzipped my bag of reed tools. Jayson reached around, taking the kit with one hand while unbuttoning my blouse with the other. Ambidextrous but gym-phobic, he was all love handles and bad posture, but none of that mattered as we climbed past the makeshift closet, where his wife piled leotards and dance skirts, and up to their loft bed. We flailed away, laughing as we kept hitting the ceiling. I looked up to Jayson as an older mentor in love and work.

  The tryst was the first of a three-year affair. I devoured books about loving a married man: the tragedy and, for the lucky, the triumph. Every time we spent the night together, I got another gig shadowing him in the second oboe chair. With his wife gone half the year, it was only a matter of time until he left her.

  Jayson had something very different in mind. His marriage included an influential father-in-law, an iconoclastic architect who ran a utopian colony in Arizona, a man with social connections that would serve any performing artist well. I was simply part of his grand networking plan, though I offered fringe benefits that Robinson and his father-in-law did not.

  Our liaison was already unimaginably
glamorous and romantic to me. At a fundraiser in the swooping modern building at 9 West 57th Street, Jayson and I swam nude in the skyscraper’s pool, taking in the glittering skyline. Tipsy and dripping, I joined him in a formal woodwind octet performance for couture mogul Xavier Guerrand-Hermès and his friends. When Betty hired us both for a Basically Baroque church gig, we spent our break making out on the chaplain’s darkened office floor.

  “The section that lays together plays together,” Jayson panted, his hairless chest heaving. We slipped quietly by Betty’s music stand as she screwed tuning pegs back and forth on her double bass, sawing away purposefully with a gargantuan bow.

  “Bach,” she declared, eyebrows knitted sternly. “A lot of fun, this cantata. A lot of fun.”

  I sat quietly next to Jayson in a 57th Street studio as we recorded music for the first feature film produced by Mary Tyler Moore Productions, called A Little Sex. The plot paralleled New York’s early eighties lifestyle, which was iconic for its sexual promiscuity. In the film, a young married man struggled to stay faithful while being challenged by temptations of the flesh.

  Behind the glass window, director Bruce Paltrow bent over a huge mixing board, gesturing toward a video monitor. The film was Paltrow’s first. An engineer cocked his head, changing the balance by sliding bars along the console. The recording studio was cutting-edge, its owners recently having invested in the latest analog equipment. It was 1982, and digital technology was not yet advanced enough to be used much in recording studios. Even though IBM’s first home computer hit the market earlier that year for $1,595, it was really for business accounting and college term papers.

  Between film and jingles, recording had become a significant source of income for musicians in the 1980s. Studio work had been around since the 1930s, but an expanding global economy had caused explosive growth in the field. The money was so good, several members of the New York Philharmonic quit their contracted positions to play only recording gigs.

  A copyist was distributing our parts in handwritten manuscript form. A few composers tried printing out their music using programs from new personal computers, but the dot-matrix printouts were virtually illegible. The computers reduced a copyist’s graceful arcs of slurs and clef signs to a pileup of angular lines.

  Although the film’s cast had finished shooting, some of them had come to watch the session, including John Glover and Wendie Malick. Before we started recording, the actors and musicians viewed one scene on a video monitor set up in the studio. For me, art eerily imitated life as I watched Malick playing a frosty, calculating oboist named Philomena who beds the married man, played by Tim Matheson.

  Philomena’s movie apartment was everyone’s idea of a classical musician’s pad: slick, expensive, painted in ocher with a few plants scattered about. Its enormous rooms must have been shot in one of those expensive prewar buildings that had thick soundproof walls. I watched Matheson’s character luxuriate onscreen in bed after their tryst as Philomena crossed the movie bedroom in pink panties and an open shirt to “play” soulfully on her oboe. Jayson would record the actual oboe solo she was acting out.

  Jayson tried to catch Malick’s eye. Earlier, he’d bragged to the other recording musicians about teaching her to fake playing the oboe in that scene. He left out enough details that I, and the other musicians, wondered if he’d had any sexual success. In the early 1980s, classical musicians were venerated as the ultimate in sophistication. Jayson was working his musician image for all it was worth, but Malick remained polite but distant.

  Surrounded by movie people and expensive microphones, I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Millions of people would hear my oboe playing on this film soundtrack. I didn’t want anyone to know it was my first recording gig, so I imitated Jayson, donning the studio headphones asymmetrically. My left ear started clicking. “Four, three, two,” the producer counted off through the phones. We played the music in front of us, an arrangement of Handel’s Water Music measured with a click track, metronomic audio beats used to time our performance so it would fit the video segment.

  Jayson looked wistful as Malick put on her coat and slipped out of the studio as the session ended. My adoration of him was starting to turn sour. He and I took the elevator down to 57th Street and split a cab uptown. As we approached the Allendale, I wished my place resembled Malick’s film apartment in even some little way. My plants were dead. My parquet floor needed refinishing, and a tannish stain was turning brown on the bathroom ceiling. I remembered tracking a fluffy mound of cane shavings across the floor that morning, and I knew the bedroom smelled of rancid oil from honing my reed knife.

  As Jayson and I walked into the Allendale, I saw the pianist Samuel Sanders hail the taxi we’d just vacated. He didn’t recognize me from our unpleasant backstage encounter four years ago, but I ran into him periodically. I’d been seeing him a lot recently in my neighborhood, always nervously flagging down cabs at the corner of 99th and West End. I figured he was working with some musician who lived nearby.

  Jayson and I took the elevator upstairs. I unlocked my apartment door, and flute music soared out. In the living room, I caught a glance of my current roommate, John-Sebastian, playing flute duets with Sydney. Jayson blanched. Would Sydney tell Jayson’s wife? We sealed ourselves in my bedroom, but Jayson fidgeted nervously, nothing like Philomena’s movie lover. As he undressed, the unflattering physical comparison was unavoidable from his concave chest and love handles on down. I looked away, focusing on the window across West End where the torsos once thrust away in the sliver between shade and sill. The sex had stopped last year. Now the woman nursed a baby.

  Jayson slid on top of me, and we began to kiss. As we embraced, he stole a glance at my alarm clock once, twice, and then froze when the flute duets stopped. His wife would return home from her own ballet performance in an hour, I guessed. As he grabbed his shirt and rushed for the door, I thought about rising to serenade him like Philomena. It wasn’t worth wasting a good reed.

  As morning light filtered through the stained glass, Dennis Keene, music director of Fifth Avenue’s Church of the Ascension, sat in the front pew waiting until it was time to start rehearsal. He often hired the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to accompany his chorus. After only a few years, its young musicians had turned their passion into exciting, edgy performances of Baroque and classical music.

  Playing in St. Luke’s for the first time today, I thought about how much better my career was going than my disappointing affair with Jayson. Just then, Jimmy slid into the principal oboe chair, rolling up the cuffs of his tux shirt. Twenty-seven years old, he was magnetic and sexy, and I was drawn to him immediately. There was something darkly intriguing about him, a fragility hidden behind his confident façade. As we started playing Bach’s St. John Passion, Jimmy’s sinuous bobbing and weaving put me at ease. I’d saved my one decent reed, and it sounded dark and rich in the church acoustics.

  Like many other freelance classical music gigs in New York, this job paid a set union wage called “single engagement concert scale.” In 1982 the rehearsals, which were usually two and a half hours long, paid around $18 an hour, and concerts were just under $100. In addition, scale included contributions to the union’s pension fund and its health benefits plan, although it was difficult to do enough work to qualify.

  Sydney was playing today too. I observed her carefully, because I wanted to emulate her professionalism and style. Sydney was a trusted musician whose preparation never failed her. Marking her part meticulously, she checked intonation, watching and blending with the principal flutist’s tone. I thought she’d probably move up to principal when he left for his new gig with the San Francisco Ballet.

  We took a break after an hour and a half of rehearsing. By the time I snapped my oboe case shut, the other musicians had already cleared out. Jeweled light dappled the silent nave. I peeked through a door into the church office and then out onto the street. Out of twenty-five musicians, not one was on the corner. No
r were they buying coffee in the deli or using the pay phone. I went back inside and studied my reeds in the quiet.

  At exactly eleven-thirty, voices burst the silence as bodies raced through the sanctuary and back to their seats. French horns and trumpets warmed up kinetically. The morose, sedentary principal flutist babbled. Behind me, a bassoonist sniffled, and Kleenex made the rounds, from cellos to harpsichord. “Hey, where were you?” Jimmy asked, as he slid into his chair.

  Soporific arias sped at uncharacteristically fast tempos, and even the viola da gamba, a soft string instrument, played with abandon. The group energy transformed what had been a slow-paced rehearsal. Self-expression won out over precision as players added unique touches. One hunched over her modern viola, holding the bow with a peculiar center grip usually reserved for Baroque instruments. She hee-hawed her laugh at a bassist who could double for Jack Nicholson at his most diabolical.

  “Dennie,” said Jimmy, “can you play a little softer?”

  “Jimmy? What do you think?” he replied, smirking.

  “Honey,” whined the violist, addressing her husband, who played harpsichord, “you’re too fast!” Although the harpsichordist’s name was Bob, the entire group had been calling him Honey for some time.

  Billy chimed in with comments about the tempo, along with Stevie, Jennie, Markie, and Davey. The group’s familiarity was charming; they behaved like a family. Packing up after rehearsal, people seemed sleepy and grouchy. I caught up with Sydney halfway down Tenth Street.

  “Where did everybody go?”

  “Out. You know, out,” she said, touching one side of her elegant nose and exaggerating a sniffing sound.

  She pulled a luxurious rope of golden hair from under her flute bag strap and it cascaded over her shoulders. We walked toward the subway. I felt silly in my dress-for-success uniform of tweed jacket and 1980s bow-tied blouse, especially next to Sydney. She was artful and luminous in a burnished suede jacket, fashionably cut trousers, and a silk scarf. Two men in reefer coats stopped talking, their mouths agape. One bumped her arm, pausing to look her straight in the eye. She smiled, and we continued on our way to the subway.