In his studio, Robinson closed the door tightly, starting our first hour alone in a windowless basement room. I was eager to show him what I could do, to demonstrate the finger technique and sight-reading skills that translated easily to the oboe from seven years of weekly piano lessons. I placed the Mozart Oboe Quartet on the music stand, but Robinson was more interested in my reeds and tone. Dressed in polyester golf slacks and two-tone shoes, he sat at his Formica-topped desk, making crowing sounds on my reeds. Then he shook his head pitifully.
“First, you’ll learn to breathe properly. Play a D like this.” The room rang with a sound so beautiful, it was pure tone. As I imitated him, Robinson gazed at my torso.
“Guess your little lungs are still developing.” He chortled, rising for a closer look at my developing breasts. Next, he guided my hand to his abdomen, demonstrating how his belly expanded when he inhaled. “Right below the belt,” he said, to illustrate proper breathing technique. This didn’t feel right, but I figured it must be what private lessons were all about. At least he gave me two of his reeds, which worked perfectly.
After my lesson, I found Audrey practicing in her cubicle. I told her about my lesson, and how the physical contact made me squirm. She said her own teacher, Mark Popkin, demonstrated the breathing technique without touching her at all. She also thought my assignment sounded dull—one note, this way, that way—when she was getting to learn Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Bassoon Concerto.
Audrey and I walked down the hall to check the orchestra seating, which had been posted on a bulletin board. Although I was only fifteen, my playing was more advanced than some of the older of the ten oboe majors, so I had been assigned to play English horn—a larger, lower version of the oboe—on Samuel Barber’s overture to The School for Scandal.
Since NCSA was also a college, its orchestra was more mature than any I’d yet played in. The musicians’ average age was somewhere in the early twenties, and their playing sounded strong and confident. Marian, the college-age first oboist, gave the tuning note, A, as oboists traditionally do, because their sound is focused and easy to hear. Hungarian conductor Nicholas Harsányi tapped his music stand to get our attention, and the orchestra’s group tuning session quieted.
Harsányi, a former violist turned orchestra leader, gave the downbeat with his baton. He wasn’t the greatest conductor and had partly relied on the connections of his wife Janice Harsányi, a widely respected soprano, to climb the career ladder. Despite some unclear motions on his part, the orchestra responded and I became part of the most spectacular sound I’d ever heard. The melodies being played all around me reverberated through the hall but also created a physical sensation that I’d never felt while sitting in the audience; it was as if I were standing before a thundering stereo speaker. Unlike listening to music from afar, sitting in the center of a live performance was even more exciting than the vertical plunge of the roller coaster. This was thrilling!
My initial adrenaline rush of excitement quickly grew into uncontrollable nervousness as I realized that I would soon be called upon to play a solo in the piece. I wasn’t having fun anymore. I became even more terrified and could barely breathe, as the musical score called for fewer instruments to play as my big moment approached. My hands were trembling as if I was freezing, and Harsányi had a nasty expression on his face that challenged me to mess up. He was not conducting very clearly, either, and held up his hand to signal softer and softer dynamics (a musical term for degrees of loudness), preparing for the dreaded moment when I’d have to play this borrowed English horn, alone in front of college-age musicians. Because of his imprecise flailing, I wasn’t even sure where we were in the music. Little spots of music swam on the page. My heart thumped when Harsányi pointed to cue me, as if to say, “There —her.... Look, everyone!” I gasped in a breath of air and as I started playing, my D-major arpeggio wavered.
“Stop, stop!” Harsányi scowled as fifty pairs of eyes stared at me. “Louder. Don’t rush. Why you rush? How old you are?” I’d had stage fright before, but my pounding heart and quivering body were worse than ever now. I felt like a firecracker with its fuse spitting and jumping, about to rocket to the ceiling, explode, and shower ashes everywhere. I gulped, feeling faint.
“Fifteen,” I squeaked. Harsányi snorted. I noticed John, the concert-master, trying to catch my eye.
“Again. Letter E.” This time, I played, but I was too nervous to remember anything about my eight-bar solo.
Rehearsal ended, and Harsányi clumped off the podium. Heading backstage, he groped through the string section toward Noelle, who was packing up faster than a jackrabbit. On the way, he elbowed me in the boobs, pausing to let his forearm luxuriate on my left breast. Kristin scurried behind the tuba and Audrey ran for the basses, the bassoon case across her chest as a battle shield.
Older girls had already warned me to take the maulings if I wanted any more orchestra parts. I was learning about the subjective nature of music and how our superiors—counting on bewildered outsiders not to interfere—could twist creative issues to control us. Musicality was subjective, and a lack of cooperation with a teacher, whether sexual, academic, or interpersonal, could be described as bad intonation, boring phrasing, or even weak talent to an administrator with no knowledge of music. Problem students weren’t invited back the following year, allowing faculty broad “artistic freedom.”
John, the concertmaster, lingered onstage. I blushed as he leaned over my stand, smiling intimately. “Nice job,” he said, inviting me to the college dorms after lunch I accepted, even though high school rules forbade it.
“People call me José,” he said, switching on Bugs Bunny cartoons in his dorm’s TV lounge. “Tequila?”
I glanced at my watch Music theory class had started five minutes ago. My insides warmed from the alcohol as José talked.
A Juilliard dropout, José had freelanced in New York until NCSA offered him a scholarship His life in the big city sounded thrilling. He’d played with several different orchestras at places like Carnegie Hall, and he’d recorded some soundtracks for movies and television shows. It was glamorous, he said, but he’d come here because he needed to finish his college degree. He could always go back to New York.
As a talented boy, José had risen quickly after the first violin lessons, hungry for the attention he never got from his alcoholic parents. He never fit in because of his mixed Latino-black-Russian background. The neighborhood kids rejected his music as white, and he’d hardly ever seen another black classical musician. Everyone told him violin was his ticket out of the ghetto José forged ahead to Juilliard but dropped out after a suicide attempt.
José was the most exotic person I had ever met, and I returned to drink tequila with him every afternoon. After a week, we moved the party into his room to smoke dope. He lit incense and showed me his violin, made in the eighteenth century by France’s finest luthier. I peered through the F-holes, where he showed me the label that Nicholas Lupot had pasted there in 1795 before gluing the spruce top in place. Worth $170,000, the violin had been passed down and played by generations of musicians before a wealthy collector donated it to José.
By violin standards, José’s fiddle was modest. The finest cello, made in 1730 by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari, fetched $4 million; a 1735 violin by Guarnerius del Gesu cost $3.5 million. Even bows could cost more than fifty oboes; the best nineteenth-century French model, made of dense Brazilian Pernambuco wood and horsehair, brought over $100,000. Because rarity and age price these instruments beyond the means of most musicians, they rely like José on collectors to lend or donate them. José slid the case beside his only other pair of shoes.
I kept returning to José’s room in the afternoon until he finally invited me over after dinner. In his room, I took a long draft of rum and another hit from the bong as José shuffled through records. First we listened to a Brahms symphony. Then Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night crackled loudly from the stereo. Swooning, I slumped against
him as he stroked my hair; I hadn’t seen a classroom in weeks now. Passion fueled music for me—not theory, solfège (a sight-singing subject), or high school English—and I was in love.
José took off the same black turtleneck and dashiki he wore every day, the odor of his unwashed body mixing with cheap musk. We kissed, embracing as the climax of Brahms’s G-minor quintet washed over us. José peeled away my top gently, caressing my shoulders, nuzzling my neck and pulling back the covers. I could see another woman’s menstrual blood smeared on the bottom sheet, but I let him push me back on the bedding. When he thrust himself into me for the first time, it didn’t hurt too badly.
“Thank you,” I murmured dramatically. José froze.
“Oh, come on, you’re not a virgin,” he said scornfully.
My head throbbed when I woke at noon, and I trundled down to the infirmary to ask about birth control pills. The nurse gave me a parental consent form for a prescription that would cost four hundred dollars for a year’s supply. I couldn’t ask my parents to sign it; they would yank me out of school if they knew I was having sex, and I’d go back to being half outcast, and half star in public school. My parents were also generous with my $40 monthly allowance, but it wasn’t enough to cover such an expense. Instead, I found the city health clinic, weaving through Winston-Salem’s ghettos on a series of city buses. With no birth control counseling at NCSA, I could see why the high school girls kept a kitty for emergency abortions.
Tucking the free pills in my oboe case, I mapped my after-curfew escape route from my dorm room to visit José. Since one resident assistant always tipped us off to surprise checks, the staff never found anyone missing, which further preserved our cherubic image. Just in case, I stuffed my bed, covering a small pillow with a brown silk blouse so it would look like my head and adding a fake rubber hand that just peeked from under the covers.
The front door would have set off sirens, so I slid through an open window, shinning down vines to the sidewalk and skirting the campus fence. I was caught twice. A third meant mandatory suspension, but it would never have been enforced. The school did expel a few problem students, but I was safe. The music department needed every oboist for performances.
After I got caught breaking curfew, José started disappearing for days on end. I went to hear him play a master class (an instrument lesson in front of an audience that observes the instruction) with his teacher, Vartan Manoogian. It was a stressful situation for José, who, as the orchestra concertmaster, was expected to set a good example for the other violinists. Hung over, José slouched and his intonation faltered, his thin tone wavering on Bach’s virtuosic Chaconne. After his third memory slip, José stopped, dangling the Lupot violin and bow from his left hand. Manoogian’s watch ticked in the horrible silence.
“I ... I’m sorry,” he muttered, and stormed out of the room. His open violin case lay orphaned as he ran to a basement cul-de-sac outside another teacher’s studio. He swung the fiddle overhead, arcing against the cinder blocks; varnished spruce splintered and the dense ebony fingerboard, tailpiece, and bridge exploded in a spectacular encore. Amid the broken strings, the instrument’s guts were exposed for the first time in two centuries.
José surfaced after a few days, looking rougher than I’d ever seen him. “Whore,” he snarled at me, and positioned himself at my practice room window. There he kissed his new love, a smug brunette violinist in her mid-twenties named Teresa, who gloated over a sixteen-year-old who’d squandered her virginity.
The couple exploded in laughter as I left my oboe behind and stumbled out back to the abandoned train tracks, landing in a tangle of damp kudzu. Closing my eyes, I leaned against a fat oak trunk. An owl hooted through the humid air and honeysuckle.
Gradually, I calmed down and tried to think about my future. I was halfway through the eleventh grade and had no idea what I would do when I graduated. Parts of playing music were intoxicating, almost addictive. However, most of it was dull and didn’t look like it could lead anywhere, except in the case of a few exceptionally driven students.
I had joined the musicians’ union at fourteen, in case someone offered me a gig. With my membership, I received the American Federation of Musicians’ monthly newspaper. Scouring the help-wanted ads in the back, I saw only four or five oboe jobs advertised in a year, and most of them were in places like Wichita, Kansas, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, and provided so little salary that the musician would have to work a day job to survive. Was I the only person who noticed the lack of employment for students like us?
I looked at the College Music Society’s newsletter too, which advertised university jobs. Most of them required a doctorate. The music professor’s career looked like part of an endless cycle to me, as musicians without performing gigs taught more and more music majors who wouldn’t be able to find performing work either.
My brother was about to graduate from the University of North Carolina in math, Phi Beta Kappa. He excelled in all subjects and had developed a deep understanding of the university’s huge mainframe computer, to which his teachers and professors had given him special access ever since elementary school. His options for the future were broad. He might go to law school. In the late 1970s, he would certainly be in demand for a computer job.
I, on the other hand, felt like my future had disappeared. I loved music but had come to hate the oboe, especially because I couldn’t make reeds well. I wanted to talk to my parents about it, but I was ashamed that I’d chosen to attend high school at NCSA instead of Exeter. With my poor academic record at NCSA, I couldn’t transfer to Exeter now. I wondered if any college at all would take me.
It was nearly dinnertime. I drew a long breath and straightened my clothes. I would have to pretend, just like everyone else here, that we were all headed somewhere special.
“My boyfriend dumped me.” I sniffled, standing in Mr. Dunigan’s doorway after woodwind ensemble.
Philip, as I soon called him, pulled me inside the studio and locked the door. He was forty-three, recently separated from the young flute student he’d married. With his reputation as the campus Casanova, I knew he wouldn’t reject me like José had. I was sixteen, the age of consent in North Carolina, and NCSA didn’t prohibit faculty-student liaisons even with high school students.
Philip told me I was beautiful and to stay away from José. In his bachelor flat, he lit a candle and turned on the stereo, preset to the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The opera’s couple drink a love potion, dying together in order to seek pure love in the afterlife. “I can translate,” whispered Philip, pushing a strand of hair off my face:
The sun concealed
itself in our bosom;
the stars of bliss
gleam, laughing.
Heart on your heart,
mouth on mouth,
the single bond
of a single breath.
Philip slid both arms under me and carried me to the bedroom as Isolde sang her final paean to divine love. He opened my dress and sighed contentedly. The scene felt a little weird, since Philip was old enough to be my father. At least he was good to me, unlike José.
As the weeks went on, he taught me how to make love and enjoy my own body. He also made me do my homework and gave me a copy of Lolita. Afternoons we’d cut through cotton fields on his BMW motorcycle, roaring up to my dorm just before curfew. We cooked together in his little kitchen. Afterward, he played Brahms for me, then Bach and Puccini. We lay on his living room floor, listening to all of Tristan, following a score checked out of the library.
That summer I toured Italy with the student orchestra, and Philip served as chaperone. In Assisi, we walked the through the Basilica and followed Giotto’s frescoes. Candles flickered from wall sconces as we embraced in the crypt of St. Francis before a concert.
Settling in Spoleto, Philip and I ate with the other musicians in a restaurant where the old men played bocci under a trellis. Lamb roasted on an outdoor fire. Each day, we feasted on l
inguine with truffles from the winter harvest, drinking young red Montefalco from crude water glasses. Fat and sleepy, we climbed to an olive grove during the city’s afternoon nap. As the late sun streaked through Roman aqueducts, I straddled Philip, my hair tangled with crushed leaves, my skirt stained with fruit. The sky turned slate and we sipped Vecchia Romagna straight from the bottle as Philip combed twigs from my long hair with his fingers.
The trip was romantic, but when we tried to resume our relationship in the autumn of my senior year, it felt dirty. Maybe I wanted someone like Philip to take care of me, a father figure. We tried to make love, but I recoiled from someone who suddenly looked like an old man. Philip was so much more interested in sex than I, our lovemaking almost felt like a violation. He sadly let me go. For the rest of the year, he treated me with kindness and respect. I returned to dorm life and new adventures.
For the 1977 fall homecoming, NCSA played Winston-Salem State, a teachers’ college first established as a Negro university in 1892. As always, homecoming was our only football game of the year. Our male dancers’ muscles rippled as they stretched at a portable ballet barre, wearing NCSA PICKLES jerseys and pink tutus. NCSA’s mostly homosexual team of male ballet dancers with graceful posture lined up opposite a crew of burly African-American men. The head cheerleader’s falsies slipped precariously as he egged them on. With so many gay men around willing to don skirts, only a few women managed to land on the cheerleading team.
While the tutus pummeled their opponents, I wandered up to DeMille Theater to prepare for a photo shoot to be used in the school’s annual brochure. On the set of the drama department’s Midsummer Night’s Dream production, I held my oboe and tried to smile, wearing my high-collared black jacket and floor-length skirt. The group included twenty-seven other students: ballerinas, a visual artist, actors in costume, and modern dancers. None of us looked happy. “You kids seem so old,” lamented the photographer.
Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music Page 4