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

by Blair Tindall

  “Remember, it’s just a game,” said the man.

  I labored over the first diagram but wasn’t sure, so I chose the solution that seemed right. I went through all twenty examples and finished within the time limit, although I was reasonably sure most of them were wrong. My brother would be great at this, I thought. He got all the math genes.

  “You got all but one right,” said the man.

  The tests went on through the day, exploring things I’d never considered, like design aptitude and memory for numbers. I was in the rare state of having so much fun I didn’t want to quit. George Wyatt, the Johnson O’Connor associate who was counseling me, spread the computerized results across his desk. I had invited Sydney along, hoping she would be able to help me decipher his advice and perhaps get some ideas on finding fulfillment for herself as well.

  “You’re one of the lucky ones,” George said, pointing out that most of the black bar diagram lines stretched well past the eightieth percentile mark, and many of them went into the nineties. “You’re good at almost everything.”

  I was surprised to see scores in the ninety-ninth percentile for “Ideaphoria” (a creativity measure), musical abilities, and several memory skills. Other high scores included observation; memory for numbers, design, and language; “Graphoria”; and one of the spatial visualization tasks. I’d done reasonably well with manual dexterity and numbers and scored sky-high for extroversion. I’d bombed at logic and analysis.

  “You’re an extreme example of someone trying to fit a square peg in a round hole,” George said. He explained that he’d counseled other musicians, some of them quite famous. The ones who were happy as performers possessed almost the opposite profile from mine. Introversion and low deaphoria” enabled people like performers and researchers to work alone, concentrating for hours on perfecting a minute task.

  My classical music training had squeezed me dry of spontaneity. I had no idea what I liked or where my true strengths lay. Locking myself away from others in a practice room, I had drilled on scales and phrases, reproducing someone else’s music instead of creating something of my own.

  George’s analysis was encouraging. He told me I was strong in “people-influencing” skills, and listed professions that would maximize these aptitudes. If I stayed in music, George said, I’d be happier switching my focus to music composition or conducting, where I would be generating new ideas instead of refining someone else’s work. Teaching, advertising, journalism, and international business (because of a foreign language aptitude) would all be careers where I might find satisfaction.

  Sydney said she could see me doing all the jobs George mentioned, especially something like business or advertising. Those were the two that interested me too, and George and I discussed various business schools.

  “Wow, you could really get out of here in style, going to Harvard or somewhere,” Sydney said, as George handed me the results and invited me to come back for a complimentary follow-up. Sydney and I went out onto 62nd Street and headed to Madison Avenue for a cab. I asked her where she thought her own aptitudes lay. Sydney was intelligent. I could imagine her in some influential position, perhaps directing a nonprofit organization or a chamber music festival or becoming a business executive. We reached the corner and climbed in a taxi.

  “Hey, thanks for coming with me. It really helped,” I said. “Would you ever want to do this aptitude-testing thing?”

  “Me? Oh, no.” Sydney laughed artificially. “I’m just a gig slut.”

  I winced. Sydney could be so much more. If she were truly passionate about music and freelancing, I could understand staying in the business. However, she complained incessantly. It was clear that Sydney’s window of opportunity had closed. Her career wouldn’t improve much from here. I tried to imagine how despondent she must feel to describe herself with such words.

  We rode through Central Park in silence. Sydney had met a wealthy entrepreneur on a blind date set up through friends. They’d dated for long enough that she was going to move into the million-dollar duplex he owned in Greenwich Village, where she would pay him rent. She didn’t behave like someone in love. In fact, she was starting to act more like Betty in her acceptance of an unhappy life. Maybe she was still holding out for a magic dress of her own.

  CHAPTER

  21

  The Medieval Baebe

  WHEN SANFORD ALLEN had called to hire me for a week of film sessions back in 1991, when he was concertmaster of Aspects of Love, I turned him down. I told him I was planning to audition for the Denver Symphony. The Denver gig only paid $18,000, but at that time I had deemed it more serious than commercial work. Sanford hesitated. “The film,” he said dramatically, “is Malcolm X.” I canceled my airline ticket to Colorado.

  I was excited to be hired for such a high-profile film, especially because the quantity of recording work had been shrinking with the evolution of computer audio. Almost every television commercial I recorded in the early 1980s had featured an orchestra larger than thirty pieces, but subsequent jingle dates often called for fewer musicians as digital technology improved enough to replicate our sounds. Everyone hoped they were just imagining the trend, and Malcolm X, a multisession recording employing a huge orchestra, bolstered our hopes for the future.

  Spike Lee’s film used fourteen three-hour sessions paying $250 each. Recording during the day, I still performed shows at night, which promised the most lucrative week I’d ever worked, at $4,550. Plus, royalty income would come in annually once the film was released in video and broadcast format. Despite the inroads of digital audio, recording was still pretty big business at the time, with our busiest jingle contractor estimating that his 1992 musicians made $2.5 million at RCA alone.1

  I’d been to RCA Studios many times. I recorded a Pepsi jingle for the Super Bowl, an ad for Ritz Bits, the film soundtracks for Mad Dog and Glory and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, and a St. Luke’s recording of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Buried inside a seven-story structure attached to RCA’s headquarters at 44th and Sixth, the gargantuan Studio A could fit Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand with room to spare.

  Recording detritus hunkered in corners of the two-story room: booms, cables, foam-padded sonic dividers, chairs, stands, a drum kit, and a portable isolation booth to keep louder instruments from bleeding into the mix. The orchestra seating was set up lengthwise to accommodate a full string section.

  Beside the podium, a video monitor crackled gray, the onscreen digital timer set to zero. Curved blond-wood panels lined the room’s upper perimeter. The ceiling could go up and down in three pieces with the touch of a button, and a double-thick glass panel separated studio and recording booth. Inside, engineers ran the show from a sixteen-channel console. The studio was so extravagant that, when it opened in 1970, musicians stood up and applauded after the first session.

  In 1975, Sam and Bobby had recorded the album When You and I Were Young, Maggie in Studio A. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and crooner Harry Connick, Jr., used it too. Broadway cast albums of West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Crazy for You, La Cage aux Folles, and every Stephen Sondheim show were made here. Film soundtracks for Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and When Harry Met Sally were done here as well. Recording continued even after Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) bought RCA from General Electric in 1986. One engineer, Max Wilcox, rated the studio’s acoustics second only to London’s Abbey Road, and Broadway music director Paul Gemignani declared it first choice in New York.

  When I walked into the 1991 Malcolm X session, a French hornist was warming up and string players were unpacking their fiddles, rubbing rosin (a processed tree sap that is sold in hardened cakes) on their bows for friction against the strings. Some thrived in the recording business, never bothering with performance gigs because studio work paid so much better. Broadway violinists, usually drab in graying jeans and sweaters, now sported Italian shoes, tight wool pants, and blouses with one neckline button undone too far.

  Others filt
ered into the break room between the mixing booth and the studio, where RCA supplied bagels, sandwiches, pastries, coffee, a stocked fridge, and free phone. Musicians were talking about the news of RCA Studios’ impending closure, saying that Malcolm X would be one of the last dates here. Two months earlier, BMG announced they’d consolidate their New York-based companies, abandoning their $250 million mortgage here for a modern $119 million building.

  The studios would be razed, then filled with IRS auditors’ desks at a cost of $30 million. Half the technicians and engineers would lose their jobs, but the city showered BMG with an $11 million tax break for the move, enabling a taxpayer-funded operation to replace the profitable business. “It’s just stupid, dumb, and shortsighted,” recording mogul David Geffen told Newsday. Wilcox called its closure “a disaster.” Gemignani thought they must be joking.

  There was almost no alternative in Manhattan for recording groups this large. Carnegie suffered from rumbling subway noise, with traffic and sirens bleeding into the mix. Some groups traveled up to the State University of New York in Purchase, whose performing arts center allowed large orchestras a quiet recording space, albeit inconvenient to Manhattan. The only other possibility was Manhattan Center at 311 West 34th Street, built by Oscar Hammerstein in 1906 as the Manhattan Opera House. The ornate Grand Ballroom on the seventh floor, which was used in 1926 by Warner Brothers and Bell Labs to record the New York Philharmonic playing the first soundtrack for a commercially released film, Don Juan, was heavily booked by the Philharmonic and the Met because it was surrounded by interior walls and therefore removed from traffic, airplane, and subway noise.

  Saxophonist Branford Marsalis slipped inside the studio to listen. He and Terence Blanchard, the jazz trumpeter who composed the film’s music, would record the film’s jazz tracks separately. Two copyists scribbled intently in the RCA booth, where Terence conferred with Spike Lee. Studio musicians almost never see the music until moments before they must record it, so sight-reading skills and ability to deal with pressure are important. This gig was no exception.

  I gave the tuning note, and Terence climbed the podium. An assistant finished handing out the hand-copied manuscript of “Malcolm’s Letter.” Everyone donned headphones, and Terence began conducting.

  Recording “La Rosa Y El Sauce” at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on trumpeter Jon Faddis’s Grammy-nominated album, Remembrances, in 1998. Musicians, left to right: Bill Easley, Blair Tindall, Jon Faddis, John Clark (behind Faddis), Jim Pugh, Lawrence Feldman, George Young, Paquito D’Rivera, Roger Rosenberg. (Alan Nahigian)

  Lyrical violins began the cue, trading the melody off to me, then to a solo English horn. Violins reentered, weaving in a second theme, while the French horn soared above. The music ebbed, grew, and finished three minutes later in a transcendent wash of strings. Not only did this score support the story line, it was deep, rich, melancholy, and expertly crafted.

  Recording commercial music in this studio, we were used to playing inaudible long tones dubbed “footballs” for hairpins (<>) marking their dynamics. Maybe I had expanded my narrow definition of “real music” beyond the classical genre, but Blanchard’s score was a pleasure to play.

  Next, the copyists passed out “Going to Mecca,” which wove Eastern harmonies through themes from the first tune. As the cues went on, Terence’s elegant score embraced Stravinsky, Brahms, and Mozart, using the jazz musician’s harmonic fluency.

  On the last day, Terence dismissed everyone except me. He’d written the final cue while I lunched on Korean barbecue at Woo Lae Oak.

  Alone with Spike Lee watching the clock, my belly rumbled from lunch, ruining the take. On take two, the parking garage elevator abutting Studio A roared to life, a problem that had plagued recordings in this studio from the time it was built. On take three, I finally played a perfect solo, as the dying image of Denzel Washington’s character flickered across the monitor.

  I felt sad leaving RCA Studios, knowing I would probably never return here. Recording the soundtrack had been fulfilling, and I had wished the project would never end. Jobs like this were few and far between—and rapidly becoming scarcer.

  The musicians’ union, for all its victories in gaining better pay and recognition for its members, had historically fallen short when it came to capitalizing on technological evolution. From the invention of audio recordings, musicians had regarded canned music as a threatening replacement for their services as live performers.

  In 1928, some 22,000 musicians playing for silent movies had lost their jobs. “Talkies,” the union argued, constituted an “anticultural” force. In 1938, Muzak was labeled a “musical robot” for replacing cabaret performers. By 1942, AFM president James Petrillo declared an allout ban on recording, arguing that radio station orchestras were being displaced by canned music. Newspapers called Petrillo the “musical Hitler” when small radio stations that couldn’t afford to pay orchestras failed as a result of the ban, choking vital communication during World War II.

  The Justice Department filed an unsuccessful antitrust suit against the American Federation of Musicians, making it the first labor union investigated by Congress. The 1942 recording ban lasted until 1944, resurfacing again in 1948 for nearly a year, until musicians at last accepted the fact that recorded music would be a permanent part of their professional lives.

  During the 1950s, the musicians’ union found benefits to recording music by negotiating reuse and royalty payments on recordings and film soundtracks, with television recording following in 1960. Payment for reuse of theatrical films on television and video sales was enacted in 1972.

  Recording became problematic again in 1979, when Local 802’s president attacked “musical rapists” who secretly recorded the Philharmonic’s live performances. Digital technology exploded two years later, when Sony and Philips introduced their first CD players, the technology mushrooming into computer audio applications in studios and Broadway pits.

  By the mid-1980s, a computer protocol called musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) enabled composers to create full orchestral arrangements from their electronic keyboard. Since the synthesizers using MIDI contained sound “samples” from acoustic instruments, composers could manipulate the data with musical “word processors,” cutting and pasting representations of sound waves and replacing an entire orchestra with one $3,000 computer.

  Drummers had already lost significant studio work to the drum machine by the 1980s. Ten years later, the issue became virtual orchestras—a computerized tool that could replace entire bands with a synthesizer and a single musician. Picket lines erupted, nearly putting one nonprofit opera company out of business.

  The 1980s launched not only a digital age but also a time of corporate mergers. Bertelsmann bought RCA in 1986, and Sony acquired CBS Masterworks in 1989. Warner Classics gobbled up Erato, Teldec, Finlandia, and Nonesuch. Polygram Classics included Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, and London. The classical labels had never been profitable, but they gave the record company that owned them a little cachet. Virgin and Warner-Elektra optimistically started new classical music labels, and chain record stores remodeled to add huge classical departments.

  Compact disc sales skyrocketed as classical fans replaced their favorite records with more durable, cleaner-sounding CDs. After the hoopla of compact discs faded, classical recording’s market share plummeted from a 7 percent high in 1987 to 2.8 percent eleven years later.2 Despite individual successes (over 3 million copies of the Three Tenors CD sold since its release in 1996), pop sales dwarfed classical discs. Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” sold almost 30 million worldwide. In one 1996 week when the Three Tenors were hottest, the operatic trio sold only 2,000 copies.

  New recordings became prohibitively expensive, with American union rates driving the cost of symphonic recording some 60 percent higher than in London. Recording executives railed at domestic orchestras and took their business to the Europeans, who were considered to be more sensitive to changes i
n the recording market.

  Movie companies also sidestepped union expenses like scales and residual payments by recording films abroad, or with one of the few orchestras not covered by a contract with the musicians’ union. The musicians received payment for the dates but nothing for broadcast and video—a payment that had once exceeded six figures annually for some players.

  Pure classics nose-dived, and executives tried revving up the classical recording industry for a younger demographic. Crossover artists, who wove classical music with jazz, New Age, and world music, were courted. Blind heartthrob Andrea Bocelli and teen songbird Charlotte Church sold millions.

  Record companies began looking for pop marketing strategies, which usually meant easy-listening compilations or trendy young soloists. Beginning with Nigel Kennedy’s funky interpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, creative musical and personal statements broke free of stuffy classical music decorum, sometimes with embarrassing results. During his live appearances, Kennedy, a Jimi Hendrix devotee, bounded onstage to make a fashion statement:

  He appeared wearing wrinkled parachute pants hiked up to reveal mismatched socks and shoes of a sickly greenish hue. From the midriff up was ... a shabby, sleeveless jacket covering a sloppy pirate’s shirt tied with a sash. The hair was as usual: strange tufts rising over an almost-shaved skull, as if borrowed from some sorry overcoiffed dog whose breed hails from remote mountainous regions of central Asia.

  —Atlanta Constitution, 20003

  Using sex to sell music was the next logical step; it had worked before. During the nineteenth century, Verdi and Donizetti wrote scantily clad dancers into their operas, Composer and pianist Franz Liszt was the rock star of the mid-1880s, parading his luxuriant mane, flamboyant suit, and Hungarian sword onstage. His groupies rushed backstage, collecting discarded gloves, hankies, even broken piano strings. It was possible, by inspecting the moisture on the audience seats after a concert, to tell which chairs had been occupied by women.