Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music [Hardcover]

Blair Tindall (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0871138905 | ISBN-13: 978-0871138903 | Publication Date: June 10, 2005

From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to performing with the orchestras of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, oboist Blair Tindall has been playing classical music professionally for twenty-five years. She's also lived the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth, trading sex and drugs for low-paying gigs and the promise of winning a rare symphony position or a lucrative solo recording contract. In Mozart in the Jungle, Tindall describes her graduation from the North Carolina School of the Arts to the backbiting New York classical music scene, a world where Tindall and her fellow classical musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hung-over, live in decrepit apartments, and perform in hazardous conditions. (In the cramped confines of a Broadway pit, the decibel level of one instrument is equal to the sound of a chain saw.) Mozart in the Jungle offers a stark contrast between the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars and those of the working-class musicians. For lovers of classical music, Mozart in the Jungle is the first true, behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the Broadway pit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By age 16, the author of this alternately piquant and morose memoir was dealing marijuana, bedding her instructors at a performing arts high school and studying the oboe. Later, her blossoming career as a freelance musician in New York introduced her to a classical music demimonde of cocaine parties and group sex that had her wondering why she "got hired for so many of my gigs in bed." But the vivace of the chapters on her bohemian salad days subsides to a largo as she heads toward 40 and the sex and drugs recede along with dreams of stardom; the reality of a future in Broadway orchestra pits (where she reads magazines as she plays to stave off boredom) sets in. Tindall escaped to journalism, but her resentment of an industry that "squeezed me dry of spontaneity" and turns other musicians into hollow-eyed "galley slaves" is raw. She mounts a biting critique of the conservatories that churn out thousands of graduates each year to pursue a handful of jobs, the superstar conductors and soloists who lord it over orchestral peons and a fine arts establishment she depicts as bloated and ripe for downsizing. Tindall's bitterness over what might still strike many readers as a pretty great career is a bit overdone, but she offers a fresh, highly readable and caustic perspective on an overglamorized world. Photos. Agent, James Fitzgerald. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

For the author, an oboist and journalist, a certain Upper West Side apartment building, long popular with musicians, is a metaphor for classical music in America today: a Beaux-Arts façade masking an increasingly decrepit infrastructure. Tindall's book, her first, is hardly free of false notes. Paragraphs full of dire predictions and alarming statistics jibe a little too conveniently with her tales of professional disappointment and sexual promiscuity. As Tindall sleeps her way to the bottom, we learn more than we probably need to about the sex lives of some more or less prominent American musicians. But Tindall's central complaint—that the classical-music world has created a crisis by training too many musicians and supporting a culture of exorbitant pay for a few fortunate stars—is difficult to refute.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (June 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871138905
• ISBN-13: 978-0871138903
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #942,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A glimpse of a real world...for some, March 4, 2006

By 

E. Weed (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (Hardcover)

As I write this, there are some 54 other reviews of this book on Amazon, some quite supportive, some vitriolic, some in-between. Ms. Tindall has clearly touched a nerve (or two) in a number of us, no doubt reflecting the importance of classical music to many of us, but also reflecting the disappointment of the realities of career-making in the field for a fair number of us that make the attempt.

I went to music school in the 70's (a few years before Tindal), but gave it up, professionally, not long thereafter. In a word, there were too many talented players, and too few jobs. But I've stayed involved with it since, and some of my closest friends are (or were) musicians.

Tindall seems to have been among that too-large group of players who were very, very good, but not so outstanding as to knock down all doors in her way. As a result, she had a tough experience. She made mistakes. She let professional relationships become personal and sexual, quickly. She engaged in a certain amount of "self-medicating" (mainly with alcohol, as far as I could tell). It took her a long time to realize that she had to pull out of a self-destructive spiral.

But then she did it, and lived to write about it. It's a very human story, and I'm glad she had the courage to tell it.

A real resonance in this book, for me, and I think for a number of others, was how deeply one can dig oneself into the notion that "I must live as an artist/bohemian," in almost complete ignorance of there being many other potentially-satisfying worlds out there. Certainly for me, giving up on the idea of living life as a musician involved many sleepless nights. Then, trying to take on the world of suits and ties and commutes downtown was like learning to live in a foreign country. At least for this reader, Tindall touches some very sympathetic nerves in describing her own journey.

But Tindall steps on some toes in the process of telling her story. She names names, for one, which is going to make some people mad, and strike others as being in bad taste. She spends a fair amount of space detailing what some perceive as the "fall" of classical music in America, which is interesting, but too easy to view as coming from bitterness. (She is also repetitious on this point, which makes it worse, not to mention tedious.) She can be seen as casting too much blame for her predicament on the system that educated her (although it deserves some of it, without a doubt, from this reader's perspective). And, finally, she describes a fair amount of her musical experiences as being, well, just plain dull, which will probably irritate some readers...although some music-making IS dull.

So, this is an imperfect book, that will step on some toes, but it deals with a very human story, that will be of particular interest to those of us for whom music (particularly classical music) is an essential part of life. It's not the only story of a musical life to be told, by any means, but you can look through a batch of the 54 other reviews and see that it resonants with a number of us.

47 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Monophony, August 8, 2005

By 

William J. Hollin "Bill Hollin" (Missoula, MT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (Hardcover)

OK. So Blair slept her way from gig to gig, and did drugs to be "in" so that she would be accepted by the people who could get her the next gig. BFD. Same story as Hollywood, of which anyone over the age of 6 is well aware, and has been written about more tellingly, and more titilatingly than in "Mozart in the Jungle." I am a 29 year veteran high school music teacher who has sent plenty of kids on to New York and other high intensity places to try to create a career in music. Some made it to wherever they made it by hard work, legitimate networking, and recognizing opportunity as such when presented. (Some call this "luck") Some did drugs and all else Blair describes, but most often, like the author, getting nowhere in terms of a "permanent" job, eventually also having to get "other-educated." If you want to know more about the smarmier side of the Big-City music business, I guess the book is worthwhile, but I caution especially young and impressionable readers that sex and drugs is not the only way to win opportunities as a professional musician, or that New York is the only place in the world where one can learn and practice the skills necessary to become a successful musician.

Most distressingly, I saw no reason for her to describe screwing Keith Lockhart while he was married expect to bring Keith down and thus bring herself up. He's a popular young conductor - though probably over paid - but like any entertainment star, he rightfully negotiates for what he can get. Though he wins huge contracts, that in no way makes him a legitimate target for her personal disappointment at being unable to "find a man."

Although the world doesn't clamor for a full-time oboe soloist, it does clamor for the oboe solo in Swan Lake to be played beautifully, and it was her job to play it as beautifully as possible. Playing beautifully is almost never a theme in the book. Instead technical accuracy seems to be paramount when discussing performing. True, one has to be technically competent, but most audition committees hear dozens of technically competent players, but can't seem to find the player who can combine technical competence with deep musical understanding. Having myself also played the French horn since a kid the 70's, (though never getting to her level on the "totem pole"), I know well the malcontents and complainers who make going on gigs I go on a major drag. I'm kind of glad she went into journalism. At least she made room for someone else who really want to play for playing's sake, and might bring some fresh musical artistry into an orchestra pit or onto a concert stage.

Also, like some of the other reviewers here, I believe that her problem was she wanted to play her oboe for all the wrong reasons, most tellingly for the attention she desperately craved. She should have wanted to play because so much of music is beautiful, and she wanted to be a part of THAT. Had she been so inclined, perhaps she would have been able to create for herself a lifetime career in music, and found the happiness that she probably still hasn't found.

I'd say read the book, but check it out of the library rather than spend the $16.32.

60 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars variations on a too tired theme, August 20, 2005

By 

Chris B "zerocard13" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music (Hardcover)

This is a very dichotomous book. It's really bizarre to read a book about classical music that's been marketed primarily on its sex appeal that includes a chapter that kind of bemoans the tendency of classical labels to hype its artists based on, you guessed it, sex appeal.

I found that I was fascinated by her explanations of the classical music scene, the finances and ins and outs of Broadway v. the classical world and the very strange dichotomies inherent in a society that praises cultural awareness without doing much to support it. For that, I'm glad I read this book and would recommend it to other people.

I also really liked her descriptions of the music, the moments when she'd briefly explain the creation of a symphony or the mood of a movement that made it much more comprehensible. I loved reading about her tours and her performances. Her descriptions of pre-performance jitters were vivid and intimately familiar for me. It was a joy to find that she was able to find the words that had eluded me for so long.

But then we'd come crashing back into the autobiographical details and I'd wonder if I hadn't read this book already. But it had been about piano players and bar keepers and restaurant owners and movie stars and small town actors and cooks and clerics and a cavalcade of other extras. The only difference between this book and others stems from the fact that almost everything she talks about takes place in the world of classical music, a realm that has a cachet completely different from rock and roll or Broadway or Hollywood. There is this expectation that the orchestra is somehow presented to us without interpersonal drama or hanky panky behind the scenes, which is what initially makes this book so appealing. Sex in the percussion section? Heavens!

Sadly, once it's made clear that this isn't the case, the book spins out its cliches one after another: nepotism, older teachers seducing or taking advantage of naive students, sex and drugs exchanged for favors, lousy apartments, crazy roommates and so on.

How strange it is to realize that I've read enough of these books by now that it's no longer titillating or even interesting to hear about drug parties, orgies and the torrid liaisons that take place behind the scenes. It feels less like an expose and more like a sad presentation of nostalgic exhibitionism.

I found myself wishing that she would leave more and more of her personal life out of her own autobiography. I wanted to hear more about her music and less about her lovers. The kitchen counters were great, I'm sure, but what about that time when she was playing with Zubin Mehta?

I finished the book knowing I wasn't the intended audience for this book. But it's such a schizoid composition, I'm not really sure what its audience is.