Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 3

  Back at school, I noticed that my classmates toiled harder over their textbooks than I did over my oboe, yet they didn’t receive the same special attention. I’d found my magic dress. If I played the oboe reasonably well, I was rewarded without having to do the difficult academic work required of everyone else.

  There was only one hitch. I needed to spend hours making reeds, or my oboe would make no sound at all. Reed-making became the conduit to my elevated status. I didn’t visit my secret creekside spot anymore, or canoe, or even read much. I certainly didn’t study.

  My adolescence had boiled down to swamp grass. Arundo donax is the bamboo used for wicker furniture, paper pulp, cellulose for rayon fabric, and reeds for the oboe, bassoon, clarinet, saxophone, and bagpipes. In my case, two pieces of the cane are tied together in a bundle and scraped until they vibrate, making a sound when the oboist blows through the reed’s opening.

  A brown paper bag arrived from Antibes, France, every few months, packed with cane tubes that clinked like wind chimes. After measuring their diameter, I sliced lengths from the tubes, cutting them to uniform length and shoving a special gouging machine’s carriage back and forth to scoop out a U-shaped channel. Next, I bent the resulting cane strip in half, paring it to a tapered shape before tying it to the cork-covered silver tube. This step involved manual dexterity, twanging fishing twine, and a finished product that sometimes gaped where the cane didn’t quite meet, a problem remedied by pasting slimy so-called fishskin (a specialty item used by goldsmiths) over the space. I tried to forget the membrane actually came from ox gut.

  Only then did I start scraping, thinning the cane enough to vibrate. My knife tore the reed’s ragged tip. I blew on the reed to test it. Nothing. I kept scraping, finally getting a loud honk, more like the primitive rhieta I heard in Morocco. Time to start over.

  The mess soon blossomed in my pink bedroom—three different lubricant oils, steel filings, and mountains of bamboo shavings. The process took hours, only to be repeated when the reed wore out, which was almost daily.

  Not surprisingly, my next report card featured a D-plus in French, almost balancing the D-minus in algebra. I managed to hide it from my parents. What musician needs math? I had become isolated from everything at school, considering myself in a superior class: a musician. My only friends played instruments too; we were a proud bunch of geeks.

  I was the girl chosen last for kickball teams. My classmates in the locker room huddled away from me with talk of hairstyles, makeup, and training bras I thought was silly. My music crowd wouldn’t have been caught dead at school dances or football games. Instead of the platform shoes and hip-hugger jeans that were popular in 1974, we wore piano scarves and music-note earrings. I was especially proud of the OBOE POWER T-shirt I’d had custom-printed.

  The local music clique ranged in age from twelve to eighteen. Dedicated and diligent stay-at-home moms like mine drove us in carpools to band competitions, piano recitals, and youth orchestra practice. I chose a pianist named Forrest for my boyfriend. I was fourteen, he was eighteen, and his disowned brother was the national head of the American Nazi Party. I couldn’t get enough of Forrest, smoking pot in the tobacco fields behind his family’s farmhouse and swooning over his compositions. When he applied to college at the North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA), I auditioned for their high school division.

  My parents had offered to send me to private school, hoping I’d attend Exeter, the New Hampshire prep school where my brother had gone to study four years earlier among sons of Supreme Court justices and presidential advisers. My grades weren’t promising, but because of Bruce’s performance they had said I could come. At Exeter, I’d get a fine education, study with a Boston Symphony oboist, and bargain my way into an Ivy League college with a music scholarship.

  My parents tried to help me make the right decision. Exeter sounded like a sure path to success, but NCSA’s oboe teacher, Joseph Robinson, wooed me with a flattering personal letter. Maybe he was something special, since a chorus director at the Transylvania Music Camp had already urged me to seek him out. Mom and Dad were careful not to discourage me, in case I turned out to be a colossal talent. Times had changed. In the 1970s, unprecedented arts funding might also make a career as a professional classical musician possible for someone of my generation, where it would have been considered absurd in my parents’ day.

  They left the decision to me. I was scared, and too embarrassed by my bad grades to talk about the options with them openly. At fourteen, I couldn’t see myself as a professional anything, especially since I knew very few southern working women in the 1970s, except for schoolteachers. I was a teenager and could only see a few months into the future.

  My music friends were confused by similar decisions too, since few parents and teachers were equipped to offer them guidance. Perhaps the adults felt discomfort about their unfamiliarity with classical music, fearing they would be labeled as ignorant. There was a sense that we possessed a divine gift they could never understand.

  I considered my choices. NCSA, a boarding school about eighty miles away where Forrest was headed, was known for its loose academic standards and rowdy campus environment. There was drinking. There were drugs and high school pregnancies, which meant high school sex. It sounded very adult. It also sounded familiar, since I would be around other kids who were praised for being creative, wacky, and playful, even if they didn’t accomplish much.

  On the other hand, if I went seven hundred miles north to New Hampshire, Forrest would break up with me. On top of that, Exeter had strict rules and tough academic standards. I’d already gotten a sense that I was good at music and nothing else. Surely I was too stupid and undisciplined to make it at Exeter. I couldn’t imagine passing the difficult courses that Bruce had aced.

  My teenage mind reviewed what information I had. At fourteen, I had no idea how people eventually became doctors, lawyers, or professors. I didn’t particularly want to become a professional musician, but at least I could survive that way for the next few years, enjoy even more attention, and see what happened. This vague, unguided process was how many of my young friends ended up in musical careers before they were old enough to decide their life’s work.

  My parents didn’t look happy, but they accepted my decision to attend NCSA. I felt that my life had already hit a dead end, but Mom and Dad said they believed in me, no matter what.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Cunning Little Vixen

  BRUCE DROVE ME the eighty miles to Winston-Salem, passing shantytowns, abandoned industrial buildings, and rusty trailers. Ragged curtains hung in the window of Spoon’s bar, just before we turned right at the Mack Truck dispatch into NCSA’s gates. A high fence circled the grounds, separating students from the slums outside.

  It was a modest campus: a few scattered dorms, a student commons, a main building, a geodesic dome, and an old gym converted into a black box theater. Now part of the state university system, NCSA offered students from across America and abroad specialized training in classical music, ballet, modern dance, acting, stagecraft, and visual arts from seventh grade through college. Its precollege division was the country’s only state-supported live-in high school for the arts. My tuition cost $17 per year, with room and board totaling $1,400 in 1975 dollars.

  Because the school provided one of the nation’s only training programs for high school-age performers, its alumni already included a handful of success stories after only ten years of operation. Flutist Renee Siebert and violist Dawn Hannay had joined the New York Philharmonic, baritone John Cheek sang at the Metropolitan Opera, pianist Margo Garrett was teaching at Juilliard, and others had launched solo careers, like cellist Sharon Robinson and flutist Ransom Wilson. The school had attracted excellent instructors like violinist Elaine Lee Richey, who had won the 1958 Naumburg Prize, and the entire Clarion Woodwind Quintet, which had transplanted itself from New York City.

  I thought I glimpsed Forrest as we got out of the car. I didn’t
want to see him; he had dumped me over the summer. Bruce and I turned away and waded through a sea of tiny girls in black leotards to the student commons. At the registration desk there, a sweet old lady squinted at her typewriter. She was just the sort of volunteer whom arts groups often credit as helping them stay afloat. Like many women of her era who were interested in culture, she probably didn’t work and believed her involvement could help her husband’s business networking when they attended concerts and fund-raising events with other local supporters.

  “Birth date, dear?” she asked.

  Suddenly, here was a practical application for math. “Two /two / fifty-seven,” I said calmly, changing my age from fifteen to eighteen. Bruce’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything. At his prep school, students were forbidden even to ride in a car. Here at NCSA I’d be buying beer before I could drive. My heart thumped in the silence, but the grandma pecked away at the yellow ID card and fed it into a laminating machine.

  The high school dorms swarmed with new arrivals. An abundance of ballerinas skewed the gender ratio three to one in favor of girls. I knew several of them from my hometown, along with a bassoonist named Audrey. Beautiful and talented, Audrey had found solace in music since her family recently lost their home.

  I met my dorm mother, Sarah, a type of arts groupie I already recognized. Flummoxed by our talent, she would forget we were just kids. Greeting each student, Sarah looked nervously at the floor, as if meeting famous musicians backstage, and moments later changed character, squealing with delight to introduce us to one another.

  Meeting my new classmates over freshly baked cookies, I was struck by two things. First, many of the girls looked fragile, like translucent china. Second, I sensed something mature and guarded in nearly everyone—something I never felt in my classmates at home. These young people shared an ability to take care of themselves, as if they’d been on their own forever. There was a determination to perform, and reinvent themselves onstage, that I knew as well.

  Now that I’d left home, perhaps I’d undergo a metamorphosis. I was weird: a bit chubby, wore glasses, and spoke with a southern accent. I hoped that by the end of three years, I’d have turned into a beautiful swan, performing for my adoring audience. I wasn’t sure how this happened to people, but I remembered how Arleen had been instantaneously transformed from a plain schoolteacher into the powerful Queen of the Night.

  Sarah introduced me to a blond boy about my age whom I’d seen unloading a long rectangular instrument case from his lime-green Datsun station wagon. I’d assumed he was someone’s brother, since his preppy appearance looked out of place among students more flamboyantly dressed, but I quickly learned not to judge my classmates too quickly.

  Geoffrey’s button-down shirts betrayed his blue-blood lineage; his famous segregationist family and his bassoon completed the picture. His sad tale went beyond his unwanted heritage; Geoffrey’s father had died recently in a plane crash. His mother, a painter, suspected he was gay and sent him to NCSA instead of to the military school Geoffrey had considered. Geoffrey had only played for a few months, and he hadn’t decided if he wanted a musical career.

  Then there were the Treticks: Clifford, Noelle, and Drew. They were all under three years of age when their violinist father died and they were separated to live with various relatives. Reunited for the first time, the three made music fiercely in memory of a father they knew only from recordings.

  Clifford, the oldest and a talented flutist, filled a paternal role not only for his siblings but also for all of NCSA. He ran the film series, had a master key to the campus, and could start any car in the parking lot with his lock picks. He was glad to be rid of last year’s roommate, a messy Arkansas ballet dancer named Patrick Bissell, who’d swilled beer and blasted rock music night and day. In Patrick’s place was a brooding violinist whose wealthy father ran a midwestern juice drink empire.

  Noelle was enrolled as a ballet major, though she also played her father’s eighteenth-century Italian violin. She drew me into the dancers’ circle in our dorm, a secret world filled with little girls living out ballerina fantasies. They came from small towns across America to study with the well-known ballet masters at NCSA, hoping to sign with scouts from big-city dance troupes. In the ten years NCSA had operated, it had become known for one of the finest ballet programs for young dancers.

  Noelle’s roommate, Elisabeth, came from Lubbock, Texas, where her parents had settled to teach after finishing European operatic careers. Elisabeth needed to leave home young. If ballerinas weren’t hired by a major dance company by eighteen, they’d never make it professionally. Her mother let her go to NCSA but feared she risked Elisabeth’s academic education in the process.

  Next door to me was Kristin. She’d brought her French horn from a Montana town of 250, where, at best, girls returned home to a husband and farm after attending a local college. One snowy night, pianist Lili Kraus had played eighty miles away in Great Falls, the only big town between Billings and Calgary. Kristin was a little girl, then; she had barely noticed the music for staring at Kraus’s sequined ball gown. A princess had come to the prairie. In that moment, Kristin decided she would find a dress just like that to transport her to a better place.

  Opening in 1965, NCSA was conceived as a college music conservatory to keep southern talent at home. Until that time, students of music were lured away to Juilliard or even Europe, because appropriate training was unavailable locally. A high school was later added, as were dance, drama, and art departments.

  The project was politically contentious. Politicians ridiculed using public money to finance a place to “learn people tippy-toe dancin’,” but governor Terry Sanford prevailed, a triumph for a state ranked forty-fifth in education spending. Funds trickled in, starting with a telethon in which the Ford Foundation matched donations dollar for dollar to raise a total of $1 million in twenty-four hours. North Carolina’s tobacco, furniture, and textile wealth provided additional support to train performers, artists who were expected to fill the arts centers that America’s tycoons were just starting to build.

  Spending big money on a school for the performing arts in the mid-sixties required a high degree of faith in the rapid growth of American culture and the employment it might provide. At the time, few classical music jobs existed outside of education. Symphony players worked day jobs to survive, since their orchestras played only partial seasons. In 1961, only nine of America’s top twenty-six orchestras worked more than thirty weeks a year, with only four of the nine providing hospitalization insurance.

  Despite this lack of practical application, the number of university arts degrees ballooned. “Anyone who can play the scales is rushed off to Vienna to study music,” said playwright Thornton Wilder, as the 1960s culture boom intensified. The number of theater majors tripled between 1960 and 1967, with dance, music, and art departments showing similar growth. Arts academies became popular; professors argued in favor of specialized institutions like NCSA, complaining that dilettantes were diluting college arts departments.

  “These programs,” wrote Alice Goldfarb Marquis in Art Lessons, a 1995 history of public arts funding, “grew without regard for how the arts sector could support such vastly increased numbers of certified arts graduates.”1

  Navigating uncharted waters, NCSA found few students at first. It recruited beginning ballerinas, banjo pickers, and an Appalachian girl playing a bent flute. These students had never heard a symphony orchestra, yet administrators insisted they would want to join one. “Will there be jobs for that many?” one Raleigh women’s club member wondered, pointing out that New York already overflowed with aspiring performers who worked at menial positions outside the arts to make ends meet.

  By focusing on professional training, the school created a boundary between amateurs (the arts’ most loyal supporters) and freshly minted virtuosos with uncertain futures. NCSA additionally snubbed regional arts, even the rich Moravian music that had been played in WinstonSalem’s Czech c
ommunity for two hundred years, its epicenter a mile away in the restored eighteenth-century village of Old Salem.

  Novelist John Ehle, one of the school’s first advisers, was inspired to design its narrow curriculum by a speech Robert Frost delivered shortly before he died. Frost had argued that artists, like successful athletes, must develop their talent early and in the company of others like them. In his address, the eighty-six-year-old Frost said that a young artist’s “passionate preference” must not be wasted on a comprehensive education. In the spirit of the day, Ehle’s plan promised to cloister students in a creative laboratory, removed from society’s influence.

  The noble intentions of NCSA encapsulated what would later plague classical music in America: explosive growth without a realistic mission, few accessible resources, and the simultaneous isolation and elevation of a foreign art form above the comprehension of those who were expected to support it.

  The school succeeded in providing spectacular artistic training and was truly a gem for young students who were certain they wanted a career in the arts and possessed the talent to achieve it. However, many high school students were undecided, and NCSA provided minimal academic preparation. The school slighted general studies, gambling teenagers’ basic education against an uncertain future in the arts. Its students, some as young as twelve, learned little about history, social studies, business, math, and science. In this loose unstructured environment, literally fenced in and removed from outside oversight or regulation, many students celebrated Frost’s “passionate preference” through sex, drugs, and alcohol.

  Joseph Robinson, my new oboe teacher, had parlayed a Fulbright scholarship to study German arts funding into a summer of lessons with French oboist Marcel Tabuteau, winning a job with the Mobile (Alabama) Symphony in 1966 and moving on to the Atlanta Symphony before landing at NCSA. Thirty-five years old, Robinson also had degrees in English, economics, and public affairs from Davidson College and Princeton University.