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

  In 1950, the Chattanooga Philharmonic paid $600-$1,000 to play its October-April season. Its musicians rehearsed in the evenings for its twenty concerts, with many players combining the salary with a local university scholarship to finance nonmusical degrees. In the same month, the Boston Pops advertised for “a doctor who is an instrumentalist, probably a string player, to join this group to be of good enough standard to take his place on one back-stand position in the string section; attractive offer.”

  The New York Philharmonic became the first American orchestra to go full-time, starting in 1964, when it paid musicians $10,000 a year. Many other symphonies were able to expand their seasons in 1966, when the Ford Foundation approved $80 million in matching grants to establish endowments for sixty-one orchestras. Seemingly overnight, classical musicians could view an orchestra job as full-time employment, complete with health and pension benefits and paid time off for illness and vacation.

  American orchestras started hiring more women too, after largely barring them from their ranks for much of the twentieth century. Some conductors had complained that females made the stage look like a kitchen, and they would faint from the foul rehearsal language anyway. Critic Donal Henahan described the scene in 1983, a year after I began subbing in the Philharmonic:

  Younger readers may not believe it, but symphony orchestras were not always bastions of tolerance and enlightenment. Traditionally, in fact, both here and abroad they were the musical equivalents of those all-male clubs where old gentlemen still gather to nurse their gout and to lie to one another about their war records and their sexual adventures.1

  There had been exceptions. In 1935, the Philadelphia Orchestra hired a lone female cellist, Elsa Hilger, who occasionally substituted in the principal chair during her thirty-five-year tenure. A few more women filled vacancies during World War II, taking over spots for male musicians who were serving in the military. In 1952, a woman won a principal position in an American orchestra for the first time when flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer, a descendent of suffragist Susan B. Anthony, joined the Boston Symphony.2

  Some European orchestras still prohibited women from auditioning at all in the 1980s. In 1983, musicians of the then all-male Berlin Philharmonic had vetoed hiring its second female member, Sabine Meyer, a twenty-three-year-old clarinetist. (The orchestra’s first female musician, a Swiss violinist, had been hired months before.) Countering their action, music director Herbert von Karajan canceled all but six contracted appearances with the orchestra and cut out additional orchestra services that would have been lucrative for its players.

  The New York Philharmonic hired its first female member, a bassist named Orin O’Brien, in 1966. By 1982, the number of women had grown to eighteen. There were even more at other symphonies; of fifteen hundred American orchestras, large and small, women made up 40 percent.

  Times had changed since the exchange-floor days, when few women would have arrived looking for work as musicians. I tucked the union card into my wallet. All the older New York musicians I’d met talked about the “good old days,” an era of varying dates which was thought to have been preferable to modern times. For really old guys, it was the silent film epoch, when theaters hired live orchestras to accompany movies. Middle-aged men spoke wistfully of radio stations that kept an orchestra on the payroll and of the time when every orchestra was recording standard repertoire for the first time on the new long-playing records that came out in 1948.

  Unlike older players, classical musicians of my generation didn’t speak of the past. Never had musicians enjoyed more diverse, well-funded, and plentiful opportunities. The 1980s were unquestionably a golden age for the music profession, and I was right at its center.

  I sipped the herbal tea Sydney made me and studied a poster-sized photograph of her meant to advertise a concert series. In the image, she beckoned like the Pied Piper, feet bare, playing her flute in a white dress, her luxuriant mane blowing in the wind.

  Sydney’s two telephone lines had been a boon for her as she wearily fielded calls, putting one contractor on hold for another. Three months of checks were piled two inches deep on her desk.

  “If only they’d give me a minute to myself!” she moaned.

  Six years younger than Sydney and living in New York for four years, I was still a full-time student. However, once I started playing in the Philharmonic, the calls came quickly and I was also swamped with work. I was hired for oratorios with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, run-outs with Philharmonia Virtuosi to Florida, and Brandenburg concertos with the Y Chamber Orchestra. Orpheus, the conductorless chamber orchestra, had just hired me for their tour of Florida.

  The poster of Sydney reminded me of Arleen Auger, in her Queen of the Night costume back when I was seven. Sydney and I really were living out the fantasy of my magic dress. We rushed between Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in beautiful evening gowns that were as much our work uniform as other young women’s blazers and skirts. Everybody wanted us; the phone never stopped ringing. The demand for my skills made me feel as if I floated above people I saw on the street; I figured they were office drudges.

  A typical day started at a morning rehearsal with the New York Virtuosi, moving on to a matinee substituting in a Broadway pit, followed by a one-hour jingle date at studios in the art deco Edison Hotel. At night, a concert at Carnegie Hall with a freelance group like the St. Cecelia Chorus and Orchestra. Together, the gigs could add up to $400 or more in a single day. One French horn player boasted one-day earnings of nearly $1,000. At 8 P.M., he played the overture at the Philharmonic; at 9, the second piece at New York City Ballet; around 11, he slipped into costume for stage band at the Metropolitan Opera.

  The work came in like magic. Unlike soloists, freelance musicians don’t use agents but rely on word of mouth, especially through others who play the same instrument. Although full-time groups like the Philharmonic were required to hire through audition, tryouts for freelance orchestras violated Local 802’s bylaws.

  Typically, another flutist would ask Sydney to substitute for her or play second flute. As a freelancer, Sydney’s personality was strong enough to hold her own yet savvy enough not to threaten the principal player who hired her. They always liked what they heard and saw and always invited her back. The flutist would approach the group’s personnel manager and ask that he call Sydney directly in the future.

  New classical music groups like Orpheus and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s that had been founded in the mid-1970s filled up with musicians just a few years older than I, the music students who were graduating while arts funding was on the upswing. With matching grants spawning the creation of more arts organizations and more donations, the money seemed limitless.

  When my first recording jingle check arrived, along with hundreds more from the Christmastime gigs, classical music suddenly looked lucrative. Now I needed to shop for some professional items.

  Since work—no one called it playing —came through telephone calls at home, I used some of my $860 weekly Philharmonic check for one of those new cassette answering machines. I spent $150 on a crinoline-lined embroidered floor-length black skirt trimmed with velvet. Another $200 went for four black concert blouses, and I put the rest away to save for a new reed-gouging machine, which cost $900. Maybe it would solve my reed problem.

  I fussed with the roses I’d brought Sydney, a thank-you for a big favor she’d done for me that morning by fetching my music. Arriving at Philharmonic rehearsal at 9:45 A.M., I realized I’d left the only copy of handwritten sheet music to a contemporary music piece at home. Even though I woke her, Sydney promised to let herself into my apartment and taxi it down to Lincoln Center. For the first fifteen minutes of rehearsal, I glanced at the first oboe part for inspiration and hoped the composer—who was conducting this rehearsal of his own music—wouldn’t notice. At last, the door behind the double basses cracked open, and the music was passed to me by the cellists and violists.

  Music director Zubin Mehta was celebrating Wito
ld Lutoslawski’s seventieth birthday by conducting the Polish composer’s Concerto for Orchestra, which had become something of a classic along the lines of Béla Bartók’s work by the same name. The composer himself rounded out the program by conducting some of his more recent music.

  While Lutoslawski’s Concerto invoked romanticism with its lush harmonies, his Novelette was jarringly atonal, the sort of work that was sometimes thrown into a subscription package to hold the audience captive for music they surely wouldn’t like. The musicians didn’t particularly enjoy it either.

  “Shit, I thought that would never end,” said the orchestra’s blondest first violinist after the first concert, as she slipped off her expensive velvet jacket and hung it in her locker beside ruffled blouses and long skirts.

  The violinist’s locker was a reminder of the Philharmonic’s dress code, which required floor-length skirts with long-sleeved, high-necked blouses and simple jewelry. Anyone wearing pants was sent back to the locker room to change. Men didn’t have it much better, buttoning themselves into mandatory white tie and tails.

  Climbing onto the M-104 bus across from Juilliard after the concert, I stumbled on the front hem of my puffy taffeta skirt. A Chanel-suited woman clutching her Philharmonic Stagebill stepped on the fabric trailing behind me and glared, unaware we’d spent the last two hours together.

  Stuffing yards of my voluminous skirt beneath my thighs to fit in one bus seat, I watched a young woman across the aisle with pity. Wearing eighties Flashdance regalia—torn T-shirt and leg warmers—she held a new Sony Walkman, bobbing happily to music I couldn’t hear. Now there’s someone who’d never buy a Philharmonic ticket, I thought, proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from the Beatles to Blondie.

  I rustled off noisily in front of the Metro Theater, which had been converted to a porn palace. Blow Some My Way and Here Comes the Bride were playing. Scurrying past the homeless man who’d staked out the northwest corner of Broadway and 99th with a broken beer bottle, I hurried up the block. Reaching the Allendale, I stopped to listen. I heard Sydney’s distinctive Powell flute, playing long tones, her sound marred by the banging keyboard player. God, when would that awful pianist move out? As I stared up at the Allendale’s rutted bricks, Jean, a neighbor who was a massage therapist, caught up with me.

  “Wow, look at you!” she said, her eyes following my puffy skirt to its floor-length hem.

  I wiggled with pride in my fairy princess outfit, feeling as if I were playing a movie role, in costume and living among the romance of all these bohemian musicians.

  “I can’t play my high school flute with all you pros around,” Jean said, as she got off the elevator. “I’m getting rid of it.” I started to say something, but the elevator door slammed between us.

  CHAPTER

  8

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  “I’LL TAKE IT,” I said. I folded the sofa bed back and plumped its cushions. The man who’d advertised the secondhand couch flirted with me while I rooted for money. He asked where I’d seen the ad and what I did for a living.

  “Classical music,” I said, adding that I’d seen his notice on a bus stop. “I play the oboe in freelance groups.”

  “You don’t play in St. Luke’s, do you?” I pulled myself erect, proudly mentioning the St. John Passion in the Village. Expecting the usual awestruck reaction, I was surprised when he became agitated instead.

  “But you’re not really one of them, are you?”

  I bristled. Didn’t he know that St. Luke’s considers itself the best group in town?

  “I heard that concert,” he continued, voice rising as he mentioned the cost of buying two tickets. “The musicians really turned me off. The weird violist, all her private jokes with that creepy guy playing bass.” His words spilled out angrily. “It was as if they were excluding the audience, the paying audience!”

  I shrank into the corner as the movers I had brought rolled the sofa into the hall. The cute man, now scarlet with rage, stood by the door, his body language suggesting that I leave immediately. He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself before continuing.

  “I will never, ever, go hear you people again,” he said. I stumbled out the door, which closed quickly. Three locks clicked behind me.

  * * *

  Bums were sleeping on grates on West 41st Street behind the Port Authority Building. Buses rumbled overhead. Passing the post office employees’ entrance and their favorite bar near Ninth Avenue, I opened the door to Carroll Studios. Inside, the schedule listed rehearsals for American Composers’ Orchestra, the Bach Aria Group, and a new Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George. Orpheus was in the first-floor studio.

  A few musicians were arranging chairs inside the room. Four timpani crowded in the corner, behind a rack of black metal music stands, a wooden harp crate, and piles of quilted mover’s blankets. Bending over a box of music, Julian Fifer, who lived on the Allendale’s twelfth floor, waved at me. A few years back, he’d organized Orpheus as a democratic alternative to mainstream symphony orchestras. Sydney’s bassoonist ex-boyfriend was a member too; he had returned from his new job in California to play this tour.

  Following a centuries-old tradition, Orpheus played like an enormous chamber music group, with the concertmaster, or first violinist, acting as the conductor. Everyone took responsibility for leading and programming the performances, and seating revolved according to the players’ own wishes. Like St. Luke’s, Orpheus took the stuffiness out of classical music and replaced it with the same electricity Leonard Bernstein generated. Its twenty-six spirits accelerated toward their blissful collective outcome during concerts, a phenomenon rapturously described as a “headless wonder.”

  I sat in the second oboe position. Jimmy, whom I had only seen once before at the St. Luke’s gig, arrived and told me I’d be playing first oboe on a few pieces. As I moved into the principal chair, I thought about the St. John Passion we had played and about the man who had sold me the sofa. Despite the man’s anger, I felt fortunate to be living in a city where so many people cared passionately about classical music.

  A few days later, we flew to Florida for concerts, starting in Melbourne and crossing the state to Tampa and Fort Myers before reaching West Palm Beach. Florida was a hot touring market. In an area filled with music-loving retirees (in the 1980s, many of them European Jews) our Florida audiences would be as knowledgeable and loyal as one in New York.

  The orchestra filed off our bus and into the West Palm Beach Performing Arts Center. The place doubled as a sports arena, but the acoustics were better than in most gyms. For the concert, a red velvet curtain had been hung across the length of its oval space, creating a cavernous and private backstage. Jimmy and I watched the last musicians troop onstage to play a Mozart violin concerto that didn’t include oboes. I heard muffled applause in front of the curtain, then the sounds of tuning up. Jimmy twirled the turkey feather he used to clean spit out of his oboe. He probably suspected I found his mannerism annoying. I fell into the camp of oboists who pulled a cloth swab through my instrument instead.

  “Wanna get stoned, Blairie?” asked Jimmy, reaching into the breast pocket of his tailcoat for a joint.

  It wasn’t that anyone would catch us. All alone, there was no chance we’d be interrupted by anyone, since the only access was from the stage. We still needed enough brain cells to play after intermission, however.

  “You’re not serious.” I laughed, massaging my bare toes on his calf. The concrete floor was cold against my feet. Jimmy unhooked his white bow tie and opened his tux shirt.

  He lit the joint, inhaling with the deep lung capacity of a woodwind player, then clamping his mouth shut while passing it. “I’ve never played stoned,” I said, but I sucked in a long toke anyway. If the other oboist was high, I’d be all right. Maybe my concert jitters would go away. If only there really were a drug for stage fright.

  “It’ll add a whole new dimension.” Jimmy grunted and held the inhaled smoke i
n his lungs. He leaned forward an inch from my face. Was he mocking me? Or flirting? He fiddled with what was left of the joint, making a roach clip by jamming the stub into a tube we used for the bottom half of oboe reeds. He sucked in a long inhale, then put out the joint as the Mozart finished and the orchestra clomped offstage loudly down a plywood ramp.

  After intermission, I felt like a zeppelin straining to break away and float over my chair as I waited for the orchestra to finish tuning. When we started playing the first movement of Schubert’s Fifth, the music quivered with sensation, not only washing over me but through my bones, weaving itself into thoughts and passion. Wow! As I noticed how the piece seemed to be taking forever, my usual stage fright ballooned to paranoia.

  Only twenty minutes more. Breathe!

  The concertmaster raised her bow to start the work’s “Menuetto” movement. The jolly D-major arpeggio in 3/4 time had begun perfectly at each rehearsal, but tonight the violins raced off, then trailed into silence. Ashen, the concertmaster signaled to cut off. I was relieved that the accident happened before either oboe was supposed to be playing, as they stopped and started twice more. Jimmy and I dissolved into giggles through the end of the Rondo.

  The audience leaped to their feet in a wild ovation, accepting rough edges for a chance to hear the risky thrills of Orpheus. Gathering my things backstage, I followed the other musicians out a side door and onto our bus, where Jimmy locked his hand around my upper arm and led me to seats in the rear.

  “I’ll come by your room at the hotel, okay?” As Jimmy barricaded me in the back corner of the bus, Liang-Ping, a violinist, shouted from the front seats to ask how Jimmy’s wife was feeling after giving birth to their first child last month. Jimmy looked sheepish but did not move away.

  Nearly an hour after returning to the Holiday Inn, I’d changed into jeans, but Jimmy was still in his tails when he pushed open the door of my room. He sat in the desk chair, pushed aside the first oboe part to Rossini’s Italian Girl in Algiers, and tapped a pile of cocaine on the glass. Rolling up a $5 bill, he looked at me and raised an eyebrow.