[Dixielandjazz] The Music Business?

[Steve barbone]

Here is another take on the pitfalls of the music business. About
"Classical" but then, music is music.

Perhaps too many schools are graduating excellent musicians, but not
educating them on the business side.

Or are most musicians, jazz or otherwise, just too damned naive?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Sleazy tales from the classical pit
"Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music" is a troubling report
by a freelance oboist turned journalist

By Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer

A young musician, quickly rising to fame in the late '70s, seemed to have it
all. She was beautiful. She was an extraordinary player. She was muse to at
least one great composer. She was highly ambitious. Some significant music
exists because of her. But in the early '80s, she suddenly vanished from the
scene.

Several years later at a concert in New York, I ran into a friend who had
known her. Normally unflappable, he looked shaken. He had just stumbled over
her. Literally. She was on the street in the Bowery, homeless. She told him
her story.

She had fallen on a slippery floor and broken her wrist. The fracture was
complex, and when it healed she had lost a bit of mobility. She had also
lost her edge on the competition and simply given up. She looked terrible
but refused help.

My reaction to this tragedy was that music and musicians had let her down.
Couldn't someone along the way have helped her realize her worth, shown her
that there is more to life than a self-centered soloist's career?

The music business, however, is a sea full of sharks. In a well-publicized
new memoir, "Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music," Blair
Tindall uses a more earthy metaphor. Reading her exposé will definitely not
increase your respect for the classical music establishment and how it
treats many of its underlings. This is a troubling report from the front
lines by a freelance oboist turned journalist.

Yet "Mozart in the Jungle" ended up making me sympathize less, not more,
with victimized musicians. It's far too easy to blame the music business for
all that is wrong with classical musicians. Such censure is very old news.

Bach grumbled about his bosses, be they prelate or prince. Mozart parodied
his patrons. Beethoven felt downright oppressed by publishers, concert
promoters and the fickle public. Mahler tore his hair out over such things.
Schoenberg was treated badly. Leonard Bernstein played the game better than
others but was angst-ridden all the same. John Cage kept his sense of humor
but still had plenty to complain about and advocated anarchy.

Tindall's is a tawdry tale. But what is scandalous in it may not be what she
intends. I know the sharks' motives, and I don't expect them to be on the
side of music. But I do expect musicians to be on the side of music. One of
the best things about music is that its most devoted practitioners have,
throughout history, found ways to keep their art alive and thriving whatever
the obstacles. Indeed, it's the fate of those like the homeless musician in
the Bowery who help us appreciate the success of the winners.

A veteran freelance musician in New York, Tindall tells of a rat race. She
lived in the Allendale, a cockroach-infested building on the Upper West Side
favored by musicians. She went from gig to gig to gig. She substituted in
the New York Philharmonic, played in opera and ballet pit bands, in various
chamber orchestras. The pay for such gigs is not good, but a really busy
freelancer can make $1,000 a day by playing, say, a morning orchestra
rehearsal in Brooklyn, a Broadway matinee, a late-afternoon session for a
jingle recording and an evening concert with the Hudson Valley Symphony in
Poughkeepsie.

The problem is that there are few really busy freelancers and that a
schedule like that will kill the spark of almost any musician. So Tindall
describes a life of desperation. She slept with first-chair oboists who
would then hire her for the second chair. She, of course, would lose the
chair when the affair ended.

Like a lot of her colleagues, she went to performances drunk or stoned.
Playing for such Broadway shows as "Les Misérables" proved so mindlessly
repetitive that she read books and magazines not only during her rests but
even while performing. Musical revelations were few and far between. The
norm was a round of lecherous teachers and conductors, petty treatment from
colleagues and general sleaze.

This was hardly the life Tindall imagined when she started on a career in
music. And she believes she was duped by the system. Classical music doesn't
mean much to the average American's life, and she condemns the major
orchestras, opera companies and performing arts centers for acting as if it
does. They can't sustain their high budgets, and they get by, in part, by
taking advantage of the little guy, the musician. She should have been
warned. She should have been trained by her exclusive, high-tuition
conservatory to know something of the world, not just of the oboe.

"Music," she learned the hard way, "had not become the glamorous and elite
profession of Cold War fantasy but an overpopulated, stagnant and low-paying
business." Conductors make 10 times, 20 times what musicians in the
orchestra make. Nonprofit arts administrators get paid huge salaries. For
what?

It was enough to drive Tindall to the brink of suicide, although a hunk she
met on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas managed to lift her depression for
a while, showing her a glimpse of a world outside music.

Tindall admits that she never really had the fire for a career. She had
found she was good at playing the oboe and liked the attention it brought,
and she just kind of went along with the flow. In her book, she demonstrates
little knowledge of, or even interest in, music.

The most worldly of her circle of desperate drudges was the late pianist
Samuel Sanders, best known as violinist Itzhak Perlman's accompanist. She
admired Sanders for his intellectual sophistication. But her touchingly
sympathetic portrait hardly touches on intellectual sophistication. Instead,
she tells us that "Prizzi's Honor" was one of his favorite movies, that he
collected toy soldiers, that he and Perlman exchanged baseball scores and
made merciless fun of each other's infirmities (Perlman crippled by polio,
Sanders with a bad heart).

At the end of the book, Tindall does offer a ray of hope for the corrupt
world of classical music by mentioning Michael Tilson Thomas' championing of
new music with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen's bringing
musical relevance to Walt Disney Concert Hall. But she seems to miss the
point. They and most of the conductors and performers who matter today do so
because they are deeply engaged with art, music and the issues of their
times.

It was not out of character for conductor Simon Rattle to once take a year's
sabbatical to study literature. It is no coincidence that a refined
classicist such as the pianist Alfred Brendel is a quirky surrealist poet or
that the versatile Russian violinist Gidon Kremer has written several books.
Has anyone noticed that a new, powerful urgency in Daniel Barenboim's
conducting coincided with his political activism?

Perhaps for a hard-working, underpaid freelancer, taking a year off to read
English literature at Oxford or Cambridge, having the time to write a book
about music or finding six weeks to spend coaching young Arab and Israeli
musicians, in an effort to promote peace in the Middle East, is as much an
unobtainable luxury as living in the Dakota, the New York building favored
by such musicians as Bernstein and John Lennon.

Then again, maybe it isn't. Tindall, using savings from playing on Broadway,
attended journalism school at Stanford and has written a book. She claims
that journalism gives her a satisfaction she did not get from her career as
a freelance musician, and she now sees herself as a kind of savior, spilling
the beans about classical corruption.

The beans are worth spilling. There are serious inequities in the system and
a lot of jerks who manipulate musicians and the public for their own profit.
But there are musicians who engage in the world in a meaningful way — and
not just the Rattles, Tilson Thomases and Salonens — who get out and make
music that matters, who change lives.

That level of engagement, though, seems never even to have been an option
for Tindall, whose focus was on her career. Now, no longer a victim, she's
found her own way to exploit the system. "Mozart in the Jungle" is part of
the problem, not a solution.