Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical
Music
by Blair Tindall.
Grove Atlantic. $24. 318 pages.
Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and
Fall
by Joseph Horowitz.
Norton. $39.95. 606 pages.
Two compelling new books — one a salacious memoir, the other a sober cultural history — attempt to explain the perceived demise of the grand artistic empire called "classical music."
Blair Tindall's Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music, an in-the-gutter, name-dropping memoir by an oboe player-turned-journalist, has become the talk of the classical community.
Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall is stimulating and rich in anecdotes, moving from 19th-century Boston and New York to contemporary California.
A North Carolina native, Tindall entered New York's freelance pool of musicians and played wherever she could, from the giddy heights of recording with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to the spirit-crushing repetition of eight Broadway shows a week.
From the start, she slept with men who might advance her career, including her teachers, fellow oboists, accompanists and a few famous conductors. "Why, I thought, did I bother with an answering machine?" she writes, cataloguing her lovers. "I got hired for many of my gigs in bed."
More bourgeois than bohemian, Tindall complains of the lifestyle and living in a shabby apartment building. Eager for a prestigious job, she took a few lessons from Atlanta Symphony oboist Jonathan Dlouhy and auditioned, unsuccessfully, for a spot as an ASO oboist. Later, she reveals that while she likes listening to classical music, she had "never honestly been interested enough in the field to make it my career. I simply got hooked as a teenager because it earned me attention."
At her best, Tindall is an engaging storyteller. She puts the reader onstage with her at her first New York Philharmonic rehearsal, where she's a substitute. Anticipating an especially prominent note in a Tchaikovsky symphony, she knew first impressions matter. "My low note, not even part of the melody, must come out cleanly, softly, in tune, and with a dark tone."
Yet her training hadn't prepared her for stage fright. "My mouth muscles were tiring," she continues. "I was losing control. And I was scared out of my mind. I braced for the low C-sharp, knowing I needed to blow slightly harder and open my teeth a little farther apart. That way, the reed would vibrate just enough to attack the note delicately.
"Spleeee-YAHHHHHHH!"
Despite such humiliating flubs, she weaves her professional and personal misjudgments into the institutional dysfunction of classical music — as if the art form itself reneged on promises made to her. Tindall plumps up her argument with abundant data on why many orchestras have trouble supporting themselves. The way she makes her case, however, the numbers seem misleading or beside the point.
Among her other problems, it's not surprising that Tindall doesn't like contemporary music, which renders her a rather one-faceted performer. For her professional debut recital, for example, she brags about programming a world premiere, yet never mentions the composer by name.
Tindall is clueless to what is perhaps the biggest failing of today's classical music scene: When living composers are not the focus, concert-hall culture — musicians and audience alike — loses touch with broader society. Stagnation is inevitable.
That's where Joseph Horowitz comes in. In his
Classical Music in America, Horowitz argues that the music won't become imbedded in American culture until American composers are part of it.
We had the chance long ago — when Antonín Dvorák pointed to African-American and Native American sources and George Gershwin adopted a jazz idiom. Instead, we got suckered into the mass-marketing maelstrom, which led to a mummified, "sacralized" culture centered on star performers delivering an increasingly tiny repertoire of European classical hits.
Horowitz's thesis, persuasive on many levels, is not a Grand Unification Theory. Author of several highly influential books and an artistic adviser to several orchestras, he falls into the same trap as Tindall. Both dwell mostly on symphony orchestras, which tower above the American music scene the way dinosaurs — big, slow — once trod heavily across the plains. What the authors overlook is the vitality of the early music scene or composer-based new-music groups.
They also miss the simple fact that far more people get music from CD and online than from the concert hall — and thus have access to a gigantic, all-embracing repertoire. The instability that makes one generation fret is sure to inspire another. Young composers, for example, are likely to find smashed musical boundaries exhilarating. The current situation, described in both books, is that stodgy symphony orchestras, outposts of a once-glorious empire, have piloted themselves toward the margin. For some of these institutions, it might lead to an early extinction.
Too close to their subject, Horowitz and Tindall also
fail to put the "fall" of the musical fine arts — about which people have been complaining since before Mozart's time — in today's context. Seismic cultural shifts are realigning almost every art and entertainment industry, from museums
to movies to TV. Only when new paradigms stabilize will we know if reports of the death of classical music are exaggerated.
