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

by Blair Tindall

  Indeed, a full-time symphonic job evolves into monotony for many players. Orchestra musicians saw away like factory workers, repeating the same pieces year after year. Once a player is employed by a desirable orchestra, career advancement is severely limited. Perfectionism and injuries wear musicians down. Nighttime and holiday work disconnect them from mainstream life. Players complain they forfeit autonomy to an omnipotent conductor who works a third of their schedule, is paid as much as twenty musicians, and gets credit for the music they make.

  The orchestra musician’s plight caught the interest of Harvard researcher Richard Hackman, who was studying the job satisfaction of workers employed in a variety of industries. Orchestral musicians were near the bottom, scoring lower in job satisfaction and overall happiness than airline flight attendants, mental health treatment teams, beer salesmen, government economic analysts, and even federal prison guards. Only operating room nurses and semiconductor fabrication teams scored lower than these musicians.

  “All in all, membership in an orchestra is now seen as a dead-end street—a well-paid job, to be sure, but nevertheless a dead end,” summed up pianist and critic Samuel Lipman.2 Many such musicians feel a low-grade depression, sensing their professional lives are beyond their control. Seymour and Robert Levine, a father-son duo (Seymour was a Stanford psychologist, his son Robert a Milwaukee Symphony violist), described the syndrome in a Symphony Orchestra Institute article, using research by psychologist Martin Seligman:

  Subject to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst, we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are actually going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.

  The resulting frustration would overflow during contract negotiations, the musicians’ grand moment of leverage to spell out the limits of a conductor’s authority, restrict rehearsal hours, control time elapsed between performances, and establish protocol regarding employment and termination. The musicians’ seeming pettiness, as seen in the New York musicians’ trial board complaints, represents the only power available to intelligent, educated performers who are dissatisfied with creative and professional stagnation after a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice.

  The triteness of their demands, however, can lead orchestra administrators to devalue the musicians’ training and commitment.

  Some orchestra managements, for example, treat their players almost as if they were a class of schoolchildren always at risk of unruliness [said Hackman]. Research findings show clearly that when you treat people like children they act like children—which, of course, then provides justification for continuing to treat them that way.3

  The complaints of highly paid orchestra musicians looked absurd to the outside world during a rash of 1996 orchestra strikes in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Already earning $100,000 and enjoying up to ten weeks of paid vacation, these musicians parading with picket signs outside their deluxe concert halls seemed a far cry from industrial union strikes at textile and auto mills. The strikes drove away public support for what were perceived as coddled artistes, since raises demanded by the musicians would not be paid from earned revenue but by gifts from their audiences, patrons, and the volunteer board.

  Many of the demands illustrated the entitlements orchestral musicians had come to expect, earned or not. During the 1996 strikes, Philadelphia Orchestra musicians demanded an annual $6,000 apiece for recording, even if the orchestra made no recordings at all. Atlanta Symphony members struck for ten weeks in the same season, when asked to reduce their orchestra size. San Francisco Symphony members walked out for nine weeks, complaining about their “grueling” twenty-three-hour weekly schedule and a change in health coverage.

  It was shocking to hear the spokesman for the San Francisco musicians say that health benefits are the chief issue that put the players on the street [wrote the Orange County Register]. Where have they been? Nearly every American worker has had to accept a reduction in the quality of health benefits as health costs spiral higher.4

  Where had they been? As the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Wolf Report had predicted in 1992, orchestras began separating into two groups: somewhat stable big-city organizations and foundering mid-size ones, orchestras that insisted on playing year-round schedules to half-empty houses instead of shorter seasons that might sell out. Yet ASOL conferences buzzed with talk of growth, though smaller symphonies were costing their communities far more than they returned in alleged public service.

  Orchestras began failing between 1991 and 1996. The San Diego, New Orleans, Denver, and Sacramento symphonies all declared bankruptcy; musicians likened their demise to the end of Western civilization. “Our orchestras are the canaries [in the coal mine]—not there to sing, just to provide a milepost on the march to barbarism,” said a Sacramento Symphony clarinetist after his paycheck disappeared. Yet almost without exception these same orchestras rose from the ashes, only to extract more money from donors before overspending their way into the same straits.

  The Phoenix Symphony epitomized the small-town inferiority complex. Founded as an amateur orchestra in 1947, the group began to covet international status and expanded into a full-time orchestra between 1978 and 1982, under the direction of conductor Theo Alcantara. The longer season lured musicians, who turned down higher-paying orchestra jobs elsewhere in favor of Alcantara’s promises of future tours and recordings. By 1984, however, the symphony had to beg the city of Phoenix for $650,000 to plug its $1.5 million deficit. Alcantara left in 1989, leaving Phoenix to pay for the mirage he’d built and his musicians to accept a collective $800,000 pay cut.

  According to 1960s cultural theory, a community like Phoenix should maintain a holy trinity of opera, ballet, and symphony in the belief that these organizations would transform their region into a cultural mecca. The arts were expected to attract new dollars from tourism and business relocation and therefore spark local economic development. When the expansion failed in Phoenix, the symphony board was puzzled over what went wrong. “Part of the answer may be that Phoenix ain’t ready for culture,” explained the local paper, noting that citizens weren’t interested in going to concerts every night.

  The mid-nineties strikes and bankruptcies signaled a new trend, as orchestra schedules and expenses, set in motion over thirty years ago, spiraled out of control. A generation of classical musicians had become dependent on fiscal indulgence, relying on elite audiences, foundations, and government money to bail them out without questioning the value of their existence. Orange County Register critic Scott Duncan noted that the operation of even the most established orchestras, blessed with sizable endowments, was slowly bleeding them to death. Hearst San Francisco Examiner critic Allan Ulrich concurred:

  American orchestras in 1997 aren’t exactly a growth industry. It’s like watching the life go out of the last specimen of a nearly extinct species.5

  * * *

  I was going to the newsstand one Saturday morning when I ran into Sam in the Allendale lobby. He and Sue had rented a larger apartment across the street in 777 West End, and now he only used the Allendale place for teaching and practicing. It had been weeks since I’d seen him, and he invited me for breakfast at the Broadway Restaurant, a diner near 102nd Street.

  It was about eleven o’clock, the hour when the Allendale came alive with practicing. A violinist was playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto loudly in a first-floor apartment. Some string players used heavy-metal practice mutes that muffled their sounds out of consideration for neighbors, but not this one. She was not only playing loudly and with a strident tone, but also rushing the tempo.

  “Un-speak-ably sloppy,” said Sam, gesturing with his head toward the violinist’s window and mumbling something about a metronome. “Let’s get out of here.” As we headed down 99th, I could hear at least two cellists practicing Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, Jorge’s contrabassoon, and a new pianist who was playing the Grieg concerto.
I listened for Sydney but didn’t hear any flute at all.

  We passed Marni, the Allendale spinster who ran the record label for women composers. She was wheeling a shopping cart full of boxed CDs to the Cathedral Station post office on 104th Street. As we turned the corner onto Broadway, the pharmacist at Unity Drug, who knew Sam well because of filling his eight standard prescriptions weekly, waved at us. The homeless crackhead to whom passers by gave spare change and food slept against the drugstore’s 99th Street wall.

  As we walked up Broadway, I told Sam about the couple drinking beer during the Philharmonic concert. He laughed and asked if I was back on the Philharmonic’s list. I replied that the gig had been a onetime thing, and he quickly asked instead about my personal life.

  We sat down at the Formica table inside the diner. An enormous man who always sat wedged in a window booth was murmuring to himself more loudly than ever. Sam had been not only understanding but helpful, after the romance between us fizzled. He’d fixed up a blind date for me with a male artist who was my age. I had liked Michael and his red-headed good looks, but the finances of his bohemian lifestyle had frightened me.

  I told Sam that I’d given up on the orchestral audition scene and didn’t even look at the ads in International Musician anymore. I said I wouldn’t want an orchestra position even if I could win one. Orchestral music now looked to me like a dying profession, tainted with misery and greed.

  We sat in silence for a few moments after giving the waiter our order. A violist I knew passed the diner window wearing a shapeless black dress and laden down with several bags plus her instrument case, heading for the 103rd Sreet subway. Her face was pinched and she was in her own world. I probably look just like that on my way to the show each night, I thought.

  “Do you have enough money?” Sam asked at last, with a concerned expression. Cash flow, at least, was fine because of Miss Saigon. I felt ridiculous, complaining to someone in Sam’s physical state, especially since he’d accomplished so much. Sam and I were growing apart. I was stuck in a dead-end career while he was immensely successful.

  The waiter brought Sam’s grilled cheese sandwich and my huevos rancheros, which I sprinkled liberally with Tabasco to try and cut through the wine hangover from drinking with Sydney in my apartment last night. Sam and I watched Marni pass the restaurant on her way home, now dragging her empty cart. Strands of dyed red hair fell over her face as she trudged along. Sam looked back to me and reached for my hand.

  “I’m worried about you,” Sam said. “What are you going to do now?”

  CHAPTER

  17

  The Age of Anxiety

  SYDNEY AND I drove past the rusty carcass of the 1964 World’s Fair as planes bound for LaGuardia roared overhead. Sydney reached for the radio, tuning to Friday afternoon traffic news. We didn’t want to waste a minute after taking off work for a weekend in the Hamptons. I would have to interrupt my night and weekend work schedule if I wanted to meet more men, and we’d set aside forty-eight hours to do it.

  “Music?” Sydney asked. She twirled the dial to 96.3, the New York Times-owned classical music station WQXR. Karl Haas droned on in a tone of voice usually reserved for misbehaving children.

  “Ugh.” I reached absently to punch a preset button and the pompous voice gave way to shrieking electric guitars.

  I’d forgotten: WNCN had officially “rocked out.” Despite archives that included treasures like Vladimir Horowitz’s last interview and over fifty episodes of a show hosted by composer Aaron Copland, the station had announced that New York had one too many classical frequencies and then broadcast Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Ten minutes passed with the sound of a ticking time bomb before AC/DC crashed on air with “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting Around to Be a Millionaire).”

  News radio audiences had grown by a half million per year during the 1980s, but classical figures hadn’t budged. After WNCN’s demise in 1993, the FM frequency of WQXR had remained New York’s only commercial classical music station. Its operations director, Loren Toolajian, had a suggestion for the producers of other classical radio shows around the country: “Lighten up! Establish a relationship. Don’t act as though it’s a sacred, holy, mystical thing.”

  WNCN had done just that at first, with inventive and casual classical programming, and as a result had increased its total audience. The station’s average-listener age was getting younger as well. However, these gains weren’t enough to satisfy the station owner, who changed format to cash in on the male eighteen-to-thirty-four demographic. The station had gone under once before in 1974, when it launched a new quadraphonic rock station with “Roll Over Beethoven,” but the FCC had forced it back to classical for another two decades after listener complaints.

  I grabbed the knob again and tuned to Top Forty WPLJ. Sydney stiffened. So did I, but in order to make conversation with the non-classical-music crowd, we should learn some modern cultural references, I thought. It was our version of Campell’s Mozart Effect, only with pop music instead of classical. We settled in for the three-hour drive.

  Last month, the musicians’ booking service had called me to record karaoke music. The studio turned out to be the size of a tiny closet, and I squeezed behind boxes of moving blankets to the microphone. Two men in the recording booth had fiddled with their computer. Since some studios weren’t yet equipped for digital music, engineers had been toting their Mac-plus computers to sessions since the 1980s, along with an electronic piano and the MIDI interface necessary for the keyboard. Loaded with samples that real instruments had recorded, these machines were making arrangers and multiple musicians virtually obsolete.

  An eight-bar solo from “Penny Lane” sat on the music stand. I put on the headphones but heard nothing. “No click?” I asked, referring to the metronomic beat that usually played through the headphones so that the musician could play precisely with prerecorded tracks. “How fast does this go?”

  “Oh, just the usual tempo,” Ron called from the booth. I didn’t know “Penny Lane,” but the tune was pretty. I played the solo on the page with lyrical phrasing. The two men in the booth stared at each other. From their expressions, I thought they must have really liked my interpretation.

  “‘Penny Lane,’ man,” Ron said, irritated. “It’s a lot faster. Let’s try another.”

  I riffled through the Beatles standards, now completely lost. Ron cocked his head, then turned off my headphones while the two men conferred. I felt humiliated. They sent their assistant, a teenage boy who didn’t read music, to sit beside me and give the tempos. I must seem like a geezer to this kid, I thought. I was only thirty-four.

  It hadn’t gone much better at my other nonclassical gig the week before, at the Blue Note jazz club. “It’s the Charlie Watts Quintet,” said the contractor, a violinist friend of Sydney’s who was making a few extra dollars by hiring her colleagues as backup musicians. I’d been to the Blue Note when an old boyfriend took me to meet Chick Corea. But who was Charlie Watts? Soon enough, I discovered he was the drummer for the Rolling Stones. When Keith Richards showed up for the first eleven o’clock show, I discovered who he was too.

  At the sound check, Watts strode to the drum kit, dapper in a suit and perfectly groomed gray hair. “Are you comfortable?” he asked. “Need anything?” Playing with Charlie’s quintet was more fun than I’d ever had on the oboe, playing the solos in “Relaxing at Camarillo,” “Dewey’s Square,” and the other tunes taken from the Charlie Parker with Strings set that Watts’s alto sax player, Peter King, had arranged. I was surprised at how much I liked playing the music.

  Upon discovering that the Blue Note management banished backup musicians to a cellar hallway between sets, Watts insisted we join him in his dressing room. The ten string players and I made friends easily with singer Bernard Fowler and the jazz musicians of Charlie’s quintet: bassist Dave Green, pianist Brian Lemon, and the nineteen-year-old trumpeter, Gerard Presencer.

  Charlie seemed more like a country gentleman than a rocker.
He spoke with pride about his daughter, Seraphina, and told us about the English Tudor he shared with his sculptor wife and their twenty-seven dogs. Except for two rough collies from Elton John, the rest were former racing greyhounds, saved from postcareer euthanasia. Charlie slept with them on the bed, sometimes up to ten at once. He mentioned his obsessions, like color-coding socks to match his Savile Row suits and handmade shoes and a sketchbook filled with drawings of empty hotel beds.

  I stayed late after the week’s final 1 A.M. set, when Charlie threw us all a special party. At four-thirty I was ready to leave. “Careful,” the Blue Note’s bouncer warned, unlocking the front door. I had expected the street to be desolate, but hundreds of people were outside, an hour before dawn. I pushed west along 3rd Street.

  “Who are you?” someone asked.

  “How’d you get in?” another asked.

  “Charlie still in there? Keith?” someone else had shouted.

  Listening to my Blue Note story in the car, Sydney agreed that whenever classical, pop, jazz, and rock musicians ended up together on a gig it was surprising how much we had in common. She peered at the highway signs and pointed out our exit to the Hamptons.

  It was nearly sunset, so I suggested we try happy hour at a new club the restaurateur Jerry Della Femina had just opened. I’d read about it in both the Times and New York magazine. Turning onto Three Mile Harbor Road, we idled on the shoulder for a moment and watched as Jaguars, Mercedeses, and a Lamborghini drove to the restaurant’s front door.

  I couldn’t pull up to the parking valet in this car, which fluttered with duct tape and corroding metal. Sydney pointed toward the Dumpster, which had a comforting familiarity; it resembled the ones that stood by my Broadway theater’s stage door and Sydney’s too. I jammed The Club on my steering wheel and beeped the car alarm. Sydney looked out over the water view as I primped a bit. It took several tries to apply my lipstick, since I never wore it when it would clog up my reeds. Perfume was another guilty pleasure, strictly forbidden in the close confines of pits and orchestras.