Sleazy tales from the classical pit

chas smith · Post by **chas smith** » 9 Jul 2005 10:25 am

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Sleazy tales from the classical pit

"Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music" is a troubling report by a freelance oboist turned journalist

By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

A young musician, quickly rising to fame in the late '70s, seemed to have it all. She was beautiful. She was an extraordinary player. She was muse to at least one great composer. She was highly ambitious. Some significant music exists because of her. But in the early '80s, she suddenly vanished from the scene.

Several years later at a concert in New York, I ran into a friend who had known her. Normally unflappable, he looked shaken. He had just stumbled over her. Literally. She was on the street in the Bowery, homeless. She told him her story.

She had fallen on a slippery floor and broken her wrist. The fracture was complex, and when it healed she had lost a bit of mobility. She had also lost her edge on the competition and simply given up. She looked terrible but refused help.

My reaction to this tragedy was that music and musicians had let her down. Couldn't someone along the way have helped her realize her worth, shown her that there is more to life than a self-centered soloist's career?

The music business, however, is a sea full of sharks. In a well-publicized new memoir, "Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music," Blair Tindall uses a more earthy metaphor. Reading her exposé will definitely not increase your respect for the classical music establishment and how it treats many of its underlings. This is a troubling report from the front lines by a freelance oboist turned journalist.

Yet "Mozart in the Jungle" ended up making me sympathize less, not more, with victimized musicians. It's far too easy to blame the music business for all that is wrong with classical musicians. Such censure is very old news.

Bach grumbled about his bosses, be they prelate or prince. Mozart parodied his patrons. Beethoven felt downright oppressed by publishers, concert promoters and the fickle public. Mahler tore his hair out over such things. Schoenberg was treated badly. Leonard Bernstein played the game better than others but was angst-ridden all the same. John Cage kept his sense of humor but still had plenty to complain about and advocated anarchy.

Tindall's is a tawdry tale. But what is scandalous in it may not be what she intends. I know the sharks' motives, and I don't expect them to be on the side of music. But I do expect musicians to be on the side of music. One of the best things about music is that its most devoted practitioners have, throughout history, found ways to keep their art alive and thriving whatever the obstacles. Indeed, it's the fate of those like the homeless musician in the Bowery who help us appreciate the success of the winners.

A veteran freelance musician in New York, Tindall tells of a rat race. She lived in the Allendale, a cockroach-infested building on the Upper West Side favored by musicians. She went from gig to gig to gig. She substituted in the New York Philharmonic, played in opera and ballet pit bands, in various chamber orchestras. The pay for such gigs is not good, but a really busy freelancer can make $1,000 a day by playing, say, a morning orchestra rehearsal in Brooklyn, a Broadway matinee, a late-afternoon session for a jingle recording and an evening concert with the Hudson Valley Symphony in Poughkeepsie.

The problem is that there are few really busy freelancers and that a schedule like that will kill the spark of almost any musician. So Tindall describes a life of desperation. She slept with first-chair oboists who would then hire her for the second chair. She, of course, would lose the chair when the affair ended.

Like a lot of her colleagues, she went to performances drunk or stoned. Playing for such Broadway shows as "Les Misérables" proved so mindlessly repetitive that she read books and magazines not only during her rests but even while performing. Musical revelations were few and far between. The norm was a round of lecherous teachers and conductors, petty treatment from colleagues and general sleaze.

This was hardly the life Tindall imagined when she started on a career in music. And she believes she was duped by the system. Classical music doesn't mean much to the average American's life, and she condemns the major orchestras, opera companies and performing arts centers for acting as if it does. They can't sustain their high budgets, and they get by, in part, by taking advantage of the little guy, the musician. She should have been warned. She should have been trained by her exclusive, high-tuition conservatory to know something of the world, not just of the oboe.

"Music," she learned the hard way, "had not become the glamorous and elite profession of Cold War fantasy but an overpopulated, stagnant and low-paying business." Conductors make 10 times, 20 times what musicians in the orchestra make. Nonprofit arts administrators get paid huge salaries. For what?

It was enough to drive Tindall to the brink of suicide, although a hunk she met on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas managed to lift her depression for a while, showing her a glimpse of a world outside music.

Tindall admits that she never really had the fire for a career. She had found she was good at playing the oboe and liked the attention it brought, and she just kind of went along with the flow. In her book, she demonstrates little knowledge of, or even interest in, music.

The most worldly of her circle of desperate drudges was the late pianist Samuel Sanders, best known as violinist Itzhak Perlman's accompanist. She admired Sanders for his intellectual sophistication. But her touchingly sympathetic portrait hardly touches on intellectual sophistication. Instead, she tells us that "Prizzi's Honor" was one of his favorite movies, that he collected toy soldiers, that he and Perlman exchanged baseball scores and made merciless fun of each other's infirmities (Perlman crippled by polio, Sanders with a bad heart).

At the end of the book, Tindall does offer a ray of hope for the corrupt world of classical music by mentioning Michael Tilson Thomas' championing of new music with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen's bringing musical relevance to Walt Disney Concert Hall. But she seems to miss the point. They and most of the conductors and performers who matter today do so because they are deeply engaged with art, music and the issues of their times.

It was not out of character for conductor Simon Rattle to once take a year's sabbatical to study literature. It is no coincidence that a refined classicist such as the pianist Alfred Brendel is a quirky surrealist poet or that the versatile Russian violinist Gidon Kremer has written several books. Has anyone noticed that a new, powerful urgency in Daniel Barenboim's conducting coincided with his political activism?

Perhaps for a hard-working, underpaid freelancer, taking a year off to read English literature at Oxford or Cambridge, having the time to write a book about music or finding six weeks to spend coaching young Arab and Israeli musicians, in an effort to promote peace in the Middle East, is as much an unobtainable luxury as living in the Dakota, the New York building favored by such musicians as Bernstein and John Lennon.

Then again, maybe it isn't. Tindall, using savings from playing on Broadway, attended journalism school at Stanford and has written a book. She claims that journalism gives her a satisfaction she did not get from her career as a freelance musician, and she now sees herself as a kind of savior, spilling the beans about classical corruption.

The beans are worth spilling. There are serious inequities in the system and a lot of jerks who manipulate musicians and the public for their own profit. But there are musicians who engage in the world in a meaningful way — and not just the Rattles, Tilson Thomases and Salonens — who get out and make music that matters, who change lives.

That level of engagement, though, seems never even to have been an option for Tindall, whose focus was on her career. Now, no longer a victim, she's found her own way to exploit the system. "Mozart in the Jungle" is part of the problem, not a solution.

Michael Johnstone · Post by **Michael Johnstone** » 11 Jul 2005 9:21 pm

This is bound to be a spellbinding thread...

Eric West · Post by **Eric West** » 11 Jul 2005 9:34 pm

From reading it, they don't know how good they've got it....

EJL

Bill McCloskey · Post by **Bill McCloskey** » 12 Jul 2005 2:56 am

Here's the other side of the story:

My brother-in-law Ron Wasserman grew up in a family of musicians. His father, Herb Wasserman, was a working drummer in New York, and his mother Joan Wile, a song writer and singer. He saw them struggle growing up. Ron also went to Julliard. He subed Broadway shows and eventually landed a gig with the New York City Ballet as second bass. After many years he took over the first bass position.

He continued to work and over the years began to expand his career by teaching himself how to arrange and compose. He began arranging a piece for the ballet by addapting Appalacian Spring, the popular record, for the Ballet. Last year he received his first commission “Lament and Restoration,” a 9/11 memorial concerto.

When the Ballet was being thrown out of Saratoga a few years ago, he helped organize a Save the Ballet which resulted in the ouster of the official trying to shut it down. When the Ballet orchestra went out on strike, he along with my son, walked the picket lines.

He is now receiving a commision from the Ballet itself.

The music world is not easy. You can show up drunk, sleep with the oboist (although you have to sleep with anyone, sleeping with the oboist seems like a particularly dumb thing to do) or you can work your butt off, show up on time, keep expanding your career. In fact, it's just like anyother job I can think of.

David Mason · Post by **David Mason** » 12 Jul 2005 5:17 am

Chickens are big business here on the Eastern Shore. After one guy catches them, another one kills them, and another one semi-guts them (just the big chunks at first), the carcasses are scalded by pressurized steam in a big sealed chamber to blast loose the feathers. I know a guy who was really, really pleased to get a raise from $9 an hour to $10 an hour to clean the feathers and goo out of the steam chamber after each blast. I wonder who he had to sleep with?[This message was edited by David Mason on 12 July 2005 at 06:28 AM.]

Jim Cohen · Post by **Jim Cohen** » 12 Jul 2005 5:49 am

Why, David! What a charming analogy!

jim milewski · Post by **jim milewski** » 13 Jul 2005 2:54 am

so those who prefer Grey Poupon know a little of the depravity of man

Charlie McDonald · Post by **Charlie McDonald** » 13 Jul 2005 5:26 am

Musicians--what chickens.

Bruce Clarke · Post by **Bruce Clarke** » 13 Jul 2005 12:02 pm

Man,proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority; most ignorant of what he's most assured. His glassy essence, like an angry ape,plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep. William Shakespeare.

Bill Cunningham · Post by **Bill Cunningham** » 10 Sep 2005 7:13 am

Thanks, Chas. I read it.

Ignorant country boy that I am, I've always had a view of "serious" musicians as nerds so it was interesting to me.

There was only one oboe in the small county high school band where I attended, and the girl that played it was no Blair!

erik · Post by **erik** » 10 Sep 2005 7:43 am

Like so many (myself included), her problems resulted from her many poor decisions. Does her expose mention the values her parents instilled in her from childhood?

David L. Donald · Post by **David L. Donald** » 11 Sep 2005 8:57 pm

The classical world is a cut-throut as any.
And the technical expertise needed is staggering,
even before a sense of "personal style" is even allowed.

Some are meant to get there, most no chance.
But the needed drive to practice enough
to even get the door open for an audition,
calls for a mono-maniacal obsession of a high order.

No wonder that when it don't happen,
because of staggering competition,
that many of these truely driven people
fall down when the dream shatters.

They have worked gruelling hours daily for decades,
only to see it all for naught.

I got a basic understanding of the symphonic world,
playing bass in a 3rd tier down symphony in NYC in the 90's.

Some players were moving up to better gigs,
most were just hanging in by their toes,
glad to be playing quality music.
Me too.

[This message was edited by David L. Donald on 11 September 2005 at 10:00 PM.]

Rick McDuffie · Post by **Rick McDuffie** » 13 Sep 2005 6:22 pm

Hear, hear Erik.

Hello there DD! How's Siam?

David L. Donald · Post by **David L. Donald** » 13 Sep 2005 6:57 pm

Saim's simply super!

My lady is in residence, and happy as a clam.
I'm losing lots of weight.
And the band is doing very well.

In under two weeks we are playing with , UB40 and
the legendary Jerry Lee Lewis
including (courtesy of The John Lee Hooker Tribute) Zakiya Hooker (daughter of the great man),

UK’s Jools Holland & His Big Band,
UK's Blues immortals The British Blues All Stars,
with Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac,

British Ukele, Canned Heat, UK's Laurence Cottle Big Band ,

New Orleans jazz from the Preservation Hall Dixieland Band,

Big Brother & The Holding Company
as well as tropical Big Band sounds from Da Lata.

Thailand’s burgeoning Blues scene contributes with
Sek Loso, The Soi Dog Blues Band, Cannonball and FLOW.

My band is FLOW the only Samui band doing original music.

Just hoping my S-14 Sierra gets here in time to practice Uni,
before we host the after hours jams for the 10 day music festival.

And getting back to classical music.
Also I have started working with a Japanese classical guitarist,
doing celtic music but with a minorish latin flavored twist.
I play mandolin, he's on nylon guitar,
and I have a spanish drum box coming from Madrid,
so will also double hand percussion.
He does have excelent classical technique and pouts an interesting flavor on the multi-ethnic music we are doing.
From Irish to Klezmer.

So yeah Siam is treating me well.[This message was edited by David L. Donald on 13 September 2005 at 08:01 PM.]