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

by Blair Tindall

  While I was playing a production of South Pacific with Robert Goulet at the Golden Gate Theater, Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart called to ask me out for drinks late the same night, as we had done before in New York. Keith was a familiar link to my old ways of thinking. After wine in the Huntington Hotel’s dark-paneled bar, we went upstairs to his room and had sex. I felt empty.

  Keith then invited me for a weekend in Salt Lake City, where he was music director of the Utah Symphony. Without thinking carefully, I accepted. The night before my departure he called to cancel because his wife was suddenly visiting him there in order to get pregnant. We discussed the situation, including the sex act, in a series of e-mails. Keith did not offer to reimburse me for my nonrefundable plane fare but did so after I asked him to: a check drawn on a North Carolina account he shared with his mother. I was relieved not to be going to Utah, since I’d recognized my mistake. I came to California to leave these self-destructive behavior patterns behind. What was I doing?

  I got nothing out of that night with Keith. I no longer wanted to participate in these tawdry scenarios; I now craved a value-driven life, centered around my own accomplishments. My California years enabled me to view the music business with detachment, and the evening provided me with a final turning point.

  It was time to write the book. Almost as soon as I decided, I was offered a Broadway show job in New York, where it would be easier to negotiate a literary agent and publisher. I sold my condo and drove back to New York.

  I reentered New York’s freelance music world in November of 2002, three years after I’d left. I was forty-two. The Man of La Mancha production at the Martin Beck Theater included a pleasant group of musicians assembled by its music director, Bob Billig, whom I knew from Les Miz and Miss Saigon. I also resumed playing City Center’s Encores! series and subbing in the New York City Ballet.

  Sitting in the ballet pit next to Randy, I felt none of the love for him of our summer relationship fifteen years earlier. Now he had three children and a devoted wife. Yet for some reason Randy wrote out a sixteen-page account of the long-ago love affair between us—that he had never publicly acknowledged—and gave it to me. The torrid story was scribbled on the back of a photocopied Trio Sonata by Jan Dismas Zelenka. I tucked it in my oboe bag and listened to the ballet orchestra’s performance.

  Randy’s colleagues were understandably bored after playing The Nutcracker forty-five times every December for decades. Fiddlers sawed away vacantly. During one long rest, an ancient bassoonist belched expressively, the sound rippling audibly into the audience. One flutist propped the Daily Racing Form on his stand and began playing the perky “Dance of the Mirlitons,” possibly for the two-thousandth time in his career. A wind player who disliked him leaned forward and whispered in rhythm, “Take-a-silver-flute-and-then, shoveitupyourass!”

  Walking to the subway after the performance, I saw Juilliard students lounging by the conservatory’s entrance across Lincoln Center’s plaza. Many of them would never find work in music, nor would they be qualified for many other jobs. Unless they had the wherewithal to earn and pay for a second college degree, they would settle for menial retail or office jobs or a dead-end job that required only brief professional training. Except for the occasional star soloist, the luckiest would land a position somewhere like the ballet pit I’d just left. Those who won full-time orchestra positions would worry whether their jobs might disappear. The percentage of orchestras reporting deficits had risen steadily from 37 percent in 1998 to 73 percent in 2003. Only one American orchestra negotiated a salary increase in 2003, with the rest reporting freezes or pay cuts. Some musicians would still be able to earn at least sporadic income on Broadway, since the 2003 theater contract put a moratorium on reducing orchestra size for another ten years.

  Music had not become the glamorous and elite profession of Cold War-era fantasy but an overpopulated, stagnant, and low-paying business. Many of its practitioners were highly intelligent and motivated, but they had ended up in careers that barely supported them and offered few opportunities for growth or creativity. Ironically, these players would perform little of the public service that classical music is expected to provide. They would instead demand handouts and contributions for their survival, without asking the big questions: “Why is classical music essential, and do I really enjoy it?”

  A field trip to the Allendale should become part of the required conservatory curriculum. The Allendale building, a metaphor for the classical music business, looks worse than ever. The missing water tower roof was never replaced, and the water tank finally failed, gushing into four floors of apartments and unleashing a swarm of cockroaches whose century-old nests had been disturbed. Inside, the elevators creak ominously. On my last visit, my old mailbox was labeled KIM, and its lock was still broken. On the street level, the building’s exterior planters were still barren, and a few more cardboard squares patched the basement windows. The ivy had grown long enough to reach the fourth floor, and Jules still stood guard at the door.

  However, the building pulsed with sounds of musicians practicing, as it had for decades. I could hear Bobby White’s distinctive tenor, probably demonstrating phrasing for one of his students from Manhattan School. The string quartet that rehearsed on the ground floor was practicing Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, and an unfamiliar flutist was playing long tones. The plaid curtains in Sam’s old apartment had been removed and a cello case now stood inside the window. I ran into a former actress and massage therapist who had lived there thirty years. She was turning forty-nine and had finally found a secretarial job with health benefits. Another tenant told me that Brunhilde had “renovated” certain apartments with cheap appliances and now charged over $2,000 for them. She said that when the tenant moved out, the appliances appeared on the street to be replaced with new “renovations” and higher rent for the next occupants.

  After waiting thirty years, Betty married her opera-singer boyfriend after his wife died. They live in the Allendale, spending part of the winter in his Florida apartment. Betty quit her ballet job and now pushes his wheelchair up the Allendale’s single step into the lobby. I saw Joan on the street with a new matted dog. A few old tenants trudged by, absorbed in their troubles with their eyes downcast, and did not look up to recognize me.

  Sydney left the Allendale in 1998 to move in with her CEO boyfriend. She and I met at the Cottage restaurant before the show, where the waitress recognized us and immediately brought a half-liter of cheap wine, pouring it to the brim in our two glasses. I lifted the wine to my mouth, but it smelled so nasty I set it down again. Sydney took a sip and sighed. She still looked beautiful; she took good care of her hair and skin and worked out at Equinox. I talked enthusiastically of my book and other writing projects. Sydney was supportive, offering to be my editor. The waitress replaced the empty wine carafe with a new one. By the time our usual steamed chicken and broccoli arrived, Sydney’s voice began slurring into complaints about the show and the paranoia of competing musicians’ motives. “It’s so awful,” she chorused, reverting to the duet we had performed together for so many years. I was singing an entirely new song, however, and had grown out of our friendship.

  Other pieces of my past looked equally absurd in the rearview mirror. I remembered the holidays when I had stayed in New York to “further my career” and play jobs during those busy times. One Christmas, I had sat all alone in my apartment and opened the presents my mother had carefully shipped to me. That evening I had Christmas dinner by myself at the Brew N’ Burger across the street from the Broadway Theatre, thought of my parents and brother sitting cozily in our North Carolina living room, and then went inside the theater to spend Christmas night performing Les Miserables.

  My education now looked like a farce as well. Critics of the North Carolina School of the Arts were becoming more vocal as the school approached its fortieth anniversary in 2005 with only a $17.5 million endowment. Nearly half the government-supported institution’s students came from
outside North Carolina, and few of its artsy alumni earned enough income to donate to the school. “If they could show me what the benefit is to the state and the average person, I might have a different attitude,” said state representative Cary Allred in 2003, declaring the school’s existence unjustified.

  As NCSA chancellor Wade Hobgood explained in a newspaper interview, “There’s that automatic assumption that we have strange things happening here.” He was right. In 2004, North Carolina auditors determined that a school administrator had diverted nearly $1 million in foundation money for country club memberships, a Cadillac Escalade, and a down payment on a million-dollar condominium. The scandal was compared to Enron and predicted to represent just the tip of the iceberg.

  The two male dance teachers whom my 1970s classmates had dubbed Crotch and Groin had been forced to resign in 1995, after a former student sued the school, alleging the pair had seduced him. My high school lover, the flute instructor twenty-seven years my senior, had retired. He married one of his three daughters’ former childhood playmates and sired another child at age seventy. There were sad stories about NCSA’s star students. Patrick Bissell had become a star with American Ballet Theater and then died of a drug overdose in 1987. José, my violin-smashing first boyfriend, was struggling in Kansas City to complete his first bachelor’s degree at age fifty-two. He was majoring in math.

  I started writing about classical music for The New York Times, first with an op-ed piece during the Broadway strike. The essay was well received. Before long I spoke to a Times editor and gave him a list of story ideas. He chose an article about the exorbitant salaries of “nonprofit” orchestra executives and conductors that ran as the cover story of the Arts & Leisure section.

  Some of the pay packages are huge, many of them at orchestras that have run deficits for years. At the New York Philharmonic, conductor Lorin Maazel earned $2.3 million for fourteen weeks of work. Execuive director Zarin Mehta got a $600,000 salary plus $150,000 in benefits, despite overseeing the orchestra during a year that included a botched move from Lincoln Center to Carnegie Hall and three canceled tours. Soloists also command huge salaries, with Itzhak Perlman said to charge $65,000 per night and Yo-Yo Ma, $80,000. The large sums not only challenge the budgets of these so-called charitable organizations but also destroy morale within the ranks of musicians who earn a fraction of their bosses’ pay.

  Communicating with the orchestras sometimes proves difficult. As organizations granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service, orchestras are obliged to release the salaries of their highest-paid employees and contractors. Almost without exception, they refuse to provide financial information any more recent than the year-old tax documents available online. This was particularly frustrating in the case of the Boston Symphony, which had just hired Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine as its conductor. Levine’s salary had not yet showed up on Boston Symphony forms. At his other job, the Metropolitan Opera, the salary was concealed in tax documents that listed two independent contractors—whose payments totaled $2.2 million—”Phramus” and “Dry Fly,” one or both of whom could have been Levine.

  A disturbing picture emerges. Conductors and executives are regarded as a class of workers whose superior skills entitle them to demand astronomical salaries from nonprofit organizations that are already in debt. As the oxymoronic concept of such classical music “stars” grows, the musicians themselves begin to appear peripheral to the organizations, or even the music interpretation. One midwestern conductor I spoke to said that board members don’t respect the musicians because they are willing to work for such meager wages and benefits. (The conductor himself earned a salary exceeding $130,000 for his season of under twenty weeks.)

  Sadly, many arts organizations like orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and performing arts centers are failing to fulfill their missions because they are not functioning as charities providing a public service. The people most likely to benefit from these “nonprofit” groups are a handful of star performers and administrators, as well as wealthy donors who receive a tax deduction for their financial contributions to organizations that, themselves, pay no taxes. Many lower- and middle-class citizens interested in attending cannot afford ticket prices, which have risen sharply in an attempt to cover escalating costs.

  I discovered huge salary discrepancies among orchestras of similar budget size. In presenting five weekends of concerts, Connecticut’s Stamford Symphony spent a total of $847,000 on expenses ranging from musician salaries, advertising, and fund-raising, yet paid executive director Barbara Soroca $105,000, a salary that was 12 percent of the orchestra’s total expenses. A few miles away, the Greenwich Symphony also put on a similar season of five weekends of concerts but spent only $465,000. Its president, Mary Radcliffe, took no compensation at all.

  The New York Philharmonic was particularly elusive. Its public relations director did not return my calls for two weeks. He spent our two brief phone conversations discussing “the media” instead of providing information that might have tempered an unflattering portrait of the orchestra and its administration.

  The salary story piece ran in The New York Times on July 4, 2004. The responses I received were almost all positive, although many were transparent; musicians who hadn’t acknowledged me for years now wanted me to help them with their own publicity. Could I place an article about their chamber group in The New York Times? Did I have friends who could write up their summer festivals? Their voices were filled with desperation.

  I received two negative messages. The first came from a prominent musician whose salary of over $350,000 was revealed in the story. He complained that I’d let “the world” know he was underpaid, because he suspected one of his competitors earned slightly more. The second message came from a symphony representative who said I’d miscalculated the percentage increase of their president’s raise. As it turned out, the executive had calculated the percentage equation backward, basing it on the salary amount that included the raise instead of the pre-raise salary. That phone call ended quickly.

  As I continued learning about nonprofit organizations, I began to see a pattern. Major health research centers, museums, performing arts groups, and university endowments pay disproportionate executive compensation compared to other types of public organizations. In many cases the nonprofit structure has become a new scheme for members of the middle class to earn big money by declaring unique knowledge of arts or other specific fields, claims that much of the public is too intimidated to question or challenge.

  The musicians, however, were relieved to have the information out in the open after my Times article appeared. Through a delegate to the ICSOM convention, I heard that my story opened up the topic of conductors’ and administrators’ salaries for the first time in contract talks. I felt I had at last done something constructive for classical music. The uproar over the story subsided over the next month, and I began working on a second Times article about drugs used for stage fright, with several more ideas in the works.

  There are positive signs in the orchestral business. Some organizations are either shifting their priorities or downsizing. The two major West Coast orchestras, for example, are leading something of a revolution. Under the artistic direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony has been drawing record audiences with its intelligent contemporary music programs. The futuristic Disney Hall in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry, has become an icon of that city’s cultural renaissance. At its center is the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which under the guidance of managing director Deborah Borda and music director Esa-Pekka Salonen has achieved both financial stability and musical relevance, with accessible concert formats at both Disney Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

  A trend has also emerged for larger orchestras to experiment with hiring several regular conductors instead of relying on a single absentee music director. The New York Philharmonic will play not only under its music director Lorin Maazel, but also with David Roberts
on, Alan Gilbert, and Ricardo Muti. The Atlanta Symphony employs two conductors, Robert Spano and Donald Runnicles, and the Pittsburgh Symphony added a trio of conductors who will trade off concerts. This experiment may provide a more consistent musical identity for the orchestras or it may become a colossal expense, as not one but three music directors demand enormous salaries.

  It will take years for orchestras to reconcile the needs of musicians with those of their listeners. One major orchestra’s executive said that his job revolved around finding ways to meet the musicians’ full-time employment demands rather than serving the audience. Another asked plaintively why the musicians were so belligerent during contract negotiations. Although the top ten orchestras are not likely to shorten their seasons, smaller orchestras are already cutting both season length and orchestra size. In doing so, they put the needs of their communities first.

  Symphonies that have gone bankrupt and reorganized with smaller expectations and shorter seasons include those in Oakland, California; Denver and Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Birmingham, Alabama, and they are thriving as part-time orchestras with schedules in proportion to their region’s population. Those sticking with the old full-time model are unlikely to succeed. Yet for some musicians, an orchestra is an all-or-nothing proposition, a local expense that their adopted communities are required to bankroll whether they like it or not. “We’re not going to be the poster child for making per-service orchestras out of full-time bands,” said one unemployed woodwind player in the former Savannah Symphony, which went out of business in 2003 under a crushing debt.

  Musicians are finally beginning to understand that the way they have done business is no longer working. When four of the “big five” orchestras came up for contract negotiation simultaneously in the fall of 2004, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cleveland were rumored to be considering strikes. At first, musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra would not budge on issues like eliminating the thirteenth viola chair, complaining that such an action would compromise their artistic integrity. However, as contracts expired and talks continued for weeks, all three orchestras finally settled. This time, musicians agreed to reducing orchestra size (and the collective cost of full-time benefits) through attrition, higher health-care premiums, and more flexible scheduling that will allow performances to break free of formal concert formats.