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

  I didn’t want any. In fact, I was genuinely terrified of the stuff, the result of an antidrug lecture given to my seventh grade by a North Carolina state patrolman that was for some reason delivered during art class. Marijuana leads to worse sins, the officer said, looking over my shoulder at my painting of Palomino ponies at sunset. “And horses aren’t pink, little lady,” he said menacingly.

  I didn’t do any coke that night, but Jimmy snorted both lines noisily. He split a Heineken between two plastic motel cups. “Rossini sounds good, Blairie, sounds like you got me beat,” he said. I naively thought he was serious. In the next room, I’d listened to him practicing the same music to audition for the Cincinnati Symphony next week. Orpheus booked hotel rooms in score order. Flutes were assigned to adjoining rooms, all the way down through cellos and bass. I would always be in a room next to the other oboist.

  It was nearly 2 A.M., and I rode the wave of Jimmy’s sudden energy, my schoolgirl crush growing by the minute despite knowledge of his family situation. He sure wasn’t behaving like anyone’s husband and father. We left the hotel and dodged across the highway to a bar. One Dewar’s, then another, then a third. The yellowed arm of Jimmy’s tux shirt crept around me as the bar owner drove us back to the Holiday Inn at closing time. The sun was rising as we fell into bed together, ripping off our clothes.

  It was nearly 7 A.M. and the bus was leaving. We’d have to wait until Cincinnati.

  Back at the Allendale, Jayson insisted on coming by to gouge cane. I was exhausted and napped through the evening as Jayson sat at my reed desk. Cane shavings flew from the new machine I’d bought, which my teacher had adjusted especially for me. By using cane prepared with this special gouge of Robinson’s, Jayson was looking to find some secret key to my teacher’s success. My eyes fluttered open, and I could see him quietly sifting through drawers in the desk, occasionally shooting a look in my direction to make sure I hadn’t seen.

  “Why are you so tired? It’s not like there’s jet lag from Florida,” he said, when I awoke.

  After months of sleeping with Jayson, I had grown weary of being used for access to Joe Robinson. Jayson used jokes and charm to cover up his shtick, throwing me vague promises whenever he sensed my frustration. I’d realized sometime back that he would never divorce his wife. He was a busy boy too, spending plenty of time with another attractive oboist my age. Since it was the early eighties and everybody in every profession was swinging, he couldn’t possibly have a problem with my other boyfriends, I figured.

  I wasn’t much more ethical than Jayson, since I kept our relationship going despite my dissatisfaction. I still had trouble meeting single men my own age. At Manhattan School, the rumor that I was gay persisted and no one approached me. In the freelance world most everyone was considerably older. At some level, I knew that keeping Jayson in my life would keep the gigs coming in. Without considering my plan in depth, I also sensed the amount of work I was offered would double if I added Jimmy to my dance card. I imagined touring the world with Orpheus, then earning big money sitting beside Jayson on all his New York studio dates. Both men were married, so it wasn’t as if I was expected to be faithful.

  I dozed, waiting for Jayson to finish gouging and join me in bed. He was zipping up his oboe case and packing away tools. In my torpor, I vaguely heard the floorboards creak and sensed the lights going dark. When I woke in the middle of the night, he was gone without a goodbye.

  The Cincinnati Symphony vacancy was for associate principal oboe, and it was my very first orchestra audition. I’d heard the event would be held behind a screen. The process of winning an audition for one of the country’s larger orchestras was completely different from the routine of networking (and trading sex or drugs) for gigs in the New York freelance circle, where union regulations prohibited auditions for most orchestras.

  Fifty-one orchestras fell into the “larger” category and were organized within the American Federation of Musicians as the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians. By organizing, these groups could trade information and function somewhat collectively when negotiating their individual contracts. ICSOM members include a range of orchestras. The New York Philharmonic is a member (in 2004) with its $51 million budget and fifty-two-week season, but ICSOM also represents smaller orchestras like the thirty-nine-week Syracuse Symphony, which runs on a budget of only $5.3 million. The fifth oldest orchestra in America, Cincinnati’s symphony falls in the middle range. Its $31 million budget includes nine weeks of paid vacation during a fifty-two-week season and pays a minimum of $85,000 to one hundred musicians.

  The audition’s anonymity was supposed to bypass the kind of nepotism I was enjoying in the New York freelance scene. Screens were also intended to prevent discrimination against women and minorities, although, in 1983, American orchestras included fewer than 2 percent blacks and Latinos, partly due to a dearth of music students from those ethnic groups. A unique job interview, the screened audition also overlooked appearance, age, and even résumé and experience. Success in blind auditions for the ICSOM orchestras depended solely on performance.

  The screened audition had changed the way orchestras hired their musicians, and not everyone agreed with it. “Several of the majors have had a tradition of filling vacancies with students of their own players, students who have gotten to know the orchestra over a long period,” wrote orchestra consultant Philip Hart, a comment that described my situation as substitute for the New York Philharmonic.1 On the other hand, a screen could help me. The number of women employed by orchestras had grown dramatically since blind auditions became commonplace, although the increase could also be attributed to a 1970s explosion of working women across all industries.

  As I pushed open the Cincinnati Music Hall’s stage door, the butterflies in my stomach grew. I tried ignoring my jitters, taking a deep breath and summoning up the obnoxious, if false, confidence I’d adopted recently. Jimmy was leaving. He’d already been eliminated, so we agreed to meet up after my preliminary round. Inside, the warm-up room buzzed with sixty more oboists playing the hit tunes of the oboe world: the Brahms Violin Concerto, Strauss’s Don Juan, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, Rossini’s La Scala di Seta.

  After I warmed up, the personnel manager led me to a small lounge where a folding screen blocked most of the room. The setup felt strange, as if I would be performing for an empty space. As I riffled through the music, a male yawn on the other side of the screen broke the silence.

  Picking out the reed saved just for this moment (in reality, the only one that worked), I tried a scale to test the room’s acoustics. It was dead, with all that carpeting. Everyone was in the same boat. But everyone had not just played with the New York Philharmonic, I boasted silently to myself, but my hands had started shaking with stage fright.

  First came two minutes of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto. “That’s enough,” droned a disembodied voice. “Now the excerpts.” I opened the orchestral parts. They were all difficult, technical “finger gymnastics,” the quantitative stuff of classical music. I loved the showiest excerpts and had practiced with a metronome until they were faster than anyone else’s.

  My heart was pounding as I tore through “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” and then “Tuileries,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Despite a brain foggy from nerves, I thought my tempo, technique, and tone were perfect.

  “Let’s hear that one again,” the voice said. I repeated the solo, two lines of carefully measured sixteenth notes. My hands were shaking a little less now; I had nailed it.

  “Look carefully at the music,” the voice said. I sped through the excerpt again, cocky now. They want to hear me do it three times in a row!

  “Thank you,” the voice said, seven minutes after my audition had started. They hadn’t even needed to hear me for my full ten minutes! I strutted confidently down the hall back to the warm-up room.

  Settling in to wait for the audition results, I listened to the other oboists warming up. B
ored, I flipped through the Chicago Tribune as a man slowly practiced “Tuileries.”

  “Hey, you’re playing a wrong note,” I said, tossing the paper aside. He peered at his music.

  “No, it’s definitely an A-sharp,” he said, turning back to his practice.

  So that’s why they wanted to hear it three times!

  I sulked in the lounge where the seven other oboists in my round were waiting. They talked about reeds, guzzled coffee, and looked suspiciously at one another. The music hall was supposed to be haunted and built on a potter’s field, said one, who was sure she’d felt a ghost in the audition room. I wondered if she was trying to freak out any opponents in the next round. The lounge door swung open.

  “Numbers thirty and thirty-four, stay for the semifinals,” announced the personnel manager. “The rest of you, thank you.”

  I bolted quickly from the room to avoid seeing anyone, tears stinging my eyes. After walking back to the Marriott, I was pouring my second Dewar’s from the minibar when Jimmy arrived.

  “You were in the next motel room all last week,” I scolded Jimmy. “Why didn’t you tell me I was playing a wrong note in “Tuileries?” Jimmy turned up one corner of his mouth and looked at the floor.

  “I didn’t hear it, Blairie.” He looked up, his gaze stopping at my breasts. “Honest.”

  Jimmy dug into his satchel. Oboists carry reed tool kits: knives, mandrels, pliers, sharpening stones, plus cigarette paper for leaky keys. He shook a plastic film canister filled with water for soaking reeds. He put it aside and grabbed a second canister, tapping out some pot to roll a joint. We smoked dope, got naked, and embraced.

  “Blairie, do you want to do the New England tour in March?”

  In that moment, I believed I was a sensational talent. I did not yet admit to myself the link between the sex and the job offers or the triangle of competitors I’d created—the very people I relied on for work. I didn’t care. I was living inside a romance novel.

  Jimmy did a line and turned on the TV. We’d gone back to his room, in case his wife, home with their infant son, called from New Jersey. I dozed, but he never slept.

  At the Cincinnati Airport, security waved me on but opened Jimmy’s oboe case. He watched helplessly as his $3,500 Loree tumbled to the floor. Scrounging through his reed-making kit, which was identical to mine, the guard inspected sharp knives, razor blades, and awls, pulling out a film canister.

  I walked away, as if I were traveling alone. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jimmy was nervous. I held my breath as the guard shook the container, smelled it, and popped the lid open.

  Water poured out.

  At the gate, Jimmy was pale. “Thanks for the support, Blairie, really,” he said, squeezing my upper arm and pulling me just a little too hard down the corridor to the airplane.

  residence at a 1984 New Hampshire chamber music festival, I listened to the other oboist, Randy, practice in the room next door. In the past six months, I’d flown to auditions in San Francisco, Detroit, and Atlanta, never making it past the preliminary round. Preparation had become a full-time job and an expensive hobby, each trip costing hundreds of dollars.

  One of many festivals dotting the summer countryside, Monadnock Music featured different combinations of strings, winds, and piano in rural churches. Flipping through the festival schedule gave the audience a wealth of choices: string trio and piano, or string quintet and oboe, or Benjamin Britten’s Serenade (for nine musicians and tenor).

  A local ex-hippie named Ruth opened her house to us, having added a wing with four extra bedrooms. She baked bread and roasted granola, spooned up with local Stonyfield Farm yogurt. I sat on her sunny deck, looking west toward Mount Monadnock. Randy had driven up in his rented car, a Sunfish lashed to its roof. He brought two violinists, Evan and Rolf, and a cellist named Dan who liked to sleep out back in his tent. Ruth’s house was Allendale North, only with clean sheets, great food, and a far more inspiring view.

  Randy had graduated from Philadelphia’s elite Curtis Institute of Music, which is housed in four Beaux Arts mansions on Rittenhouse Square that were once owned by the Drexel and Sibley families. I’d seen the ornate molding and intricate ironwork inside their wood-paneled rooms during an unsuccessful audition for Curtis in 1978. The school attracts the best young musicians worldwide, with a $60 million endowment allowing every student free tuition for personalized study with high-profile artists. As an alum, Randy had not been a disappointment, landing a job as principal oboe with the New York City Ballet and later becoming a member of Orpheus.

  Though Randy was a professional success, he’d told me he had recently emerged from a serious drinking problem. Like many people who spend their lives steeped in art and emotion, Randy had been drinking excessively, behaving erratically, and risking his gigs before finally stopping cold in detox. For the last few months, Randy had to learn to cope with everyday life without chemicals, his raw emotions contrasting with the order of most adult lives around him. He was thirty-seven, unmarried, and childless. A recent tempestuous relationship with a ballerina had plummeted him into depression, and for hours every day he consumed music like he once drank liquor, taming his moody temper by practicing for hours in screaming renditions of Bach and Handel.

  In the room next door, I scraped reeds, read, listened to Wagner’s Ring cycle on my Walkman, and waited for Randy to finish practicing. Finished, he emerged calm, ready to go exploring on country roads. We turned down narrowing dirt lanes, passing colonial churches, farms, and roaring creeks. He liked getting lost on purpose. With Jayson and Jimmy left behind in New York, I decided to get lost with him.

  At the end of one lane near Hancock, the waters of Lake Nubanusit spread out in front of us. We swam in the sunshine that afternoon and decided to return at night.

  After playing a concert, we drove back to the lake. Wordlessly, we peeled off our clothing and slipped into the water’s strange warmth, floating beneath stars piercing the sky. I’d never seen so many shades of blue and gray. Our relationship changed when Randy finally reached out for me, yet our embrace felt childlike and pure.

  Randy and I returned several times, in secret trips powered by our post-performance energy. Our platonic status was growing into something larger, and we concocted a plan worthy of our wild emotions. We would return tomorrow night for a midnight sail. It was crazy. No one sails at night, but surely no one had felt these intense stirrings either, Randy said.

  We played our concert, a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress at Peterborough Town Hall. The libretto was by

  H. Auden, based on eighteenth-century illustrations by William Hogarth. A lurid fable, the opera describes the moral descent of Tom Rakewell, a young man whose life blows apart after receiving an unexpected windfall. Rakewell falls into the clutches of the devil. He abandons his values and true love in exchange for a life of gambling, sexual deviance, and marriage to a bearded lady, at last landing in the lunatic asylum at Bedlam. I hoped the plot had nothing in common with our real life.

  We rushed from the concert to his car, retracing our route to the tiny beach. The lake suddenly seemed truly vast, its shores shooting up sharply from its edge in peaks that looked larger than I remembered. I felt danger. I wanted to back out, at the same time that I wanted to sail into the darkness. In the car’s headlights I made out a rusted sign:

  KEENE STATE UNIVERSITY WILDLIFE PRESERVE

  NO TRESPASSING. NO FIRES. NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING.

  Randy nosed his car into the bushes to park. Without the moonlight I could barely see his silhouette dropping his tux pants, pleated shirt, bow tie, and cummerbund in the back seat. I peeled off my chiffon gown and pulled on jeans as Randy untied the Sunfish from his roof. Together, we heaved the 130-pound sailboat to the beach and slid its hull into the inky water. We loaded his tent into the cockpit and pushed off into darkness, rocking perilously as we rigged the sail. Something dropped overboard. It was so dark, I couldn’t see my own hand or R
andy’s, only a black velvet background and the sound of water.

  We floated without wind or direction for an hour. At last I heard the rustle of trees, perhaps a deer in the bushes, as the centerboard scraped a sandy bottom. Without flashlights, we blundered through the brush to what felt like a clearing and struck camp, pitching the tent blindly. Inside, our breath beaded on the nylon walls. I felt for Randy’s face in the blackness. We had already crossed a boundary musically, a natural dance that sparked when we played together. Gracefully, it now evolved to lovemaking, slow and sensuous.

  Streaks of pink light were streaming through the birch trunks circling our tent when I woke. Randy was sleeping peacefully, his long dark hair tangled over his face. I felt a warm glow that was turning to love as I watched him. Randy was a real lover, unlike Jayson and Jimmy. Though twelve years older—I was twenty-five—he was unmarried. I adored his discipline and serious nature. My fantasies unfolded as the tent’s olive skin turned spring green in the rising sun, and I fast-forwarded through an imagined life together. We could have a beautiful child.

  Picking hatfuls of wild blueberries, we crashed through brambles, sated, then thirsty. I couldn’t wait to go public with our relationship, but Randy said no. “It’s our little secret,” he murmured, stroking my hair. I was sick of “secrets” after my illicit affairs with Jayson and Jimmy, but Randy said that, if anyone knew, our relationship would look like nepotism. Didn’t I want to work with him on more gigs?

  The next weekend, we stayed the night at The Ram in the Thicket, a romantic local inn with organza bed canopies and claw-footed tubs in its rooms. In the restaurant, Randy ordered coffee for himself and brought me a Courvoisier, which he asked me to describe in detail. Outside the veranda a doe grazed. Other couples whispered in the candlelight, exchanging intimate glances. Other couples! Was I finally part of a real couple?