Mozart in the Jungle Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music

by Tindall, Blair

• ISBN13: 9780871138903
• ISBN10: 0871138905
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-07
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic Inc

Summary

From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to performing with the orchestras of "Les Miserables and "Miss Saigon, oboist Blair Tindall has been playin g 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 delves into her own life and the lives of the musicians and conductors show inhabit the insular world of classical music. After having an affair with her forty-three-year-old teacher at the age of sixteen, Tindall graduates from the North Carolina School of the Arts to the back-biting New York classical music scene, a world where classical musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in musicals and orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, 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. "Mozari in the Jungle offers a stark contrast between the rarefied experiences of overpaid classical musician superstars and those of the working-class musicians who schelp across the city from low-paying gig to low-paying gig, without health-care benefits or retirement plans. 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.

Table of Contents

Prelude	1	(6)
First Movement: Appassionata Sonata
The Magic Flute	7	(12)
Cunning Little Vixen	19	(21)
The Prodigy	40	(7)
New World Symphony	47	(11)
Apollo's Flophouse	58	(9)
Elixir of Love	67	(12)
The Rite of Spring	79	(13)
A Midsummer Night's Dream	92	(14)
The Damnation of Faust	106	(13)
Second Movement: Rhapsody in Blue
West Side Story	119	(20)
Mozart in the Jungle	139	(11)
Twilight of the Gods	150	(9)
Danse Macabre	159	(11)
Unfinished Symphony	170	(21)
The Pits	191	(14)
Beggar's Opera	205	(16)
The Age of Anxiety	221	(16)
Third Movement: Symphonic Metamorphoses
Airlift from Saigon	237	(11)
Smoke and Mirrors	248	(7)
Les Miserables	255	(11)
The Medieval Baebe	266	(11)
Music of the Heart	277	(14)
Encore: The Lark Ascending	291	(18)
Acknowledgments	309	(2)
Notes	311	(6)
Bibliography	317