By DCist contributor Orrin Konheim
Amazon’s hit series Mozart in the Jungle explores the cutthroat and risqué world of the modern day orchestra. The outlandish happenings on the show left us wondering: is this really what goes on behind the scenes of the venerated National Symphony Orchestra, a D.C. fixture since 1931?
Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries) plays the eccentric Latin American conductor Rodrigo de Souza (loosely based on LA Philharmonic composer Gustavo Dudamel) against Lola Kirke (Gone Girl) as Hailey Rutledge, an up-and-coming oboist who catches Rodrigo’s eye. The series is populated by a plethora of colorful background characters including a Machiavellian principal oboist (Debra Monk), a sexually adventurous cellist (Saffron Burrows), a prescription drug dealing timpani player (John Miller), and a flautist hell-bent on using his union-mandated powers to ensure a bathroom break during rehearsal (Mark Blum). Amazon renewed the show for a third season shortly after it won the Golden Globe for best comedy and Bernal picked up the statue for best actor in a TV series.
While the web series might appear outlandish, it is actually based on oboist Blair Tindall’s salacious tell-all memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music, which chronicles her life spent as a freelance musician and substitute for the New York Philharmonic during the 1980s and 1990s.
To learn what’s fact and fiction, we enlisted the expertise of National Symphony Orchestra musicians Jamie Roberts and Jennifer Mondie. Roberts is the orchestra’s assistant principal oboe (more commonly known as second chair) and is in her fifth year in the orchestra. Mondie has played viola in the orchestra since 1995. Both are conservatory-trained and come from the Chicago area. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
DCist So what do you guys make of Mozart in the Jungle?:
Jennifer Mondie: It’s really good. It’s interesting to see our art form showcased like that.
Jamie Roberts: It’s really great to see us as a viable member of the community. My neighbors know what an oboist is now. I have noticed that the airport, they don’t question me, but they just let me go.
DCist: Wait, what usually happens?
JR: I’d have to show them the instrument and explain.
DCist: Have you seen a similar response to the show from your colleagues in the classical music community?
JR: A lot of musicians turn it off after the first episode. I try to tell them to keep it on because it gets so much better after the first episode.
DCist: The show is pretty sensational, but it is based on Blair Tindall’s memoir. How true to life is it?
JM: If you take it as a condensation of the way our life really is, it’s a pretty good condensation. All the personnel and management, for instance, is encapsulated into Gloria. It’s just too complicated to get all those stories straight.
JR: In the show we are MP3s, but in reality we are more like vinyl records. A lot of texture and dimension are left out of the show.
JM: That’s a great comparison. It’s a condensed version of our experiences. Our situation is richer and more interesting, I think, but given 22 minutes per episode, you’d need too many characters and too much explanation to give a fuller sense. The show is a decent approximation.
DCist: One thing that the show seems to imply is that it’s very difficult for audiences to tell whether the orchestra is having a good or bad day. At one point Rodrigo, the conductor, is fake conducting because he can’t hear properly!
JM: Well that’s true, it is hard, but I think audiences can tell the difference. Essentially, you have these amazing experiences and when they translate on stage, the audience feels it.
DCist: Yes, I’ve been to the orchestra and I feel it, but I was just saying that if you pranked me and substituted the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra…would I be able to tell the difference?
JR: We should send you there as an experiment and see if you would
DCist: Well, since I’ve just outed myself as a reporter who can’t tell the difference between two symphony orchestras, I don’t think I’d get any other classical music assignments. There are some other pretty wacky-seeming things on this show that we were wondering about. Early on, for example, Rodrigo belatedly hears Hailey auditioning and immediately demands to rearrange the season’s concert schedule to put her in as a fourth oboe. What are the chances of that happening?
JR: Zero, but it works as a storyline.
DCist: Would the fourth oboe even make that much of a difference?
JM: As a non-oboist, I figure I have better perspective on that question. We all absolutely would. The scene where Hailey blows her part in the Mahler? We would all hear that. They wouldn’t change the repertoire because of it, though; that would be ridiculous.
DCist: The principal oboist, who is half mentor, half enemy to Hailey, charges her $400 a hour for a lesson. That seems really high.
JM: $250 is the max, though I’ve heard of famous people charging a lot.
JR: It’s not very common and they usually charge that much because they want to be left alone.
DCist: In one dramatic scene, the soloist walks out in the middle of playing and violinist Warren Boyd (Joel Bernstein) plays her part without prior rehearsal. And in another, Rodrigo spontaneously has the orchestra play Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” in an abandoned lot. Could you actually do that on a moment’s notice?
JR: Just to play the 1812 Orchestra without rehearsing? Not a problem.
JM: Except they didn’t have sheet music. It would be unrealistic to expect that people would have a piece like that memorized at a moment’s notice. With sheet music, though, yes. We have to play with very few rehearsals all the time.
DCist: One of the characters, drolly known as Union Bob, is constantly reminding the conductor about mandated bathroom and other breaks. Does the head of your union have the power to hold your conductor in check like that?
JM: Most conductors are pretty respectful of our time, and it’s tiring for them to be up on the podium too, so they also need breaks. In the NSO, if the conductor is either getting really close to the end of the rehearsal or going too long before a break, our personnel manager, who is a member of our professional management and does not play in the orchestra, will hover at the edge of the stage for maybe 30 seconds and then gradually walk closer and closer until the maestro can’t really do anything but stop. It’s very civilized. But it’s different for different symphonies.
DCist: In the second season, Boyd fakes having his violin stolen to collect the insurance money. Would that ever happen?
JR: I really hated that.
JM: People are too attached to their own individual instruments. Besides, if you’re going to buy an instrument and expect it to retain its value, it has to have an established provenance. The black market is an entirely different thing entirely.
DCist: Some viewers found it unrealistic that Hailey would practice five hours a day. According to one blogger: “It’s a physical thing – your embouchure would go to pieces if you did that (and your brain would explode because of the constant pressure).” What would be an accurate number of hours of practice in the day of a professional oboe player?
JM: It’s actually not outside the realm of feasibility. I don’t know what it’s like for woodwinds as much. What would you say?
JR: I would say five hours a day of practice and reed making combined, at least. I would tell that person they just need to use their corners.
DCist: This is actually one of the main takeaways I got from Blair Tindall’s book, that being an oboist doesn’t just involve being a woodwind player but also woodworker of sorts, as you have to make your own reeds. Does that drive a lot of people away from playing the oboe?
JM: Every instrument has the “do you really want to take that way with your life” aspect, Like with the viola, if you say, you could never play the melody for the rest of your life, can you deal with that?
DCist: So what drew you to the viola?
JM: I like to be the glue, I like to be the middle, and no one else in my family played it.
DCist: And what drew you to the oboe?
JR: I don’t know, it just came to me. My hands are big enough for the 4th grade music teacher to give it to me. Also, Peter and the Wolf, that was the first record my parents had that I listened to.
DCist: In the book, Blair describes a hostile world where her advancement was entirely dependent on using her relationships to her gain, and Hailey faces quite a bit of adversity as she tries to fit in with the main orchestra as well.
JM: That happens a lot more with substitutes and giggers, and Blair relied on relationships with people to have more opportunities. When you’re a member of an orchestra, that’s not an issue anymore, but then again, you have people you like to play chamber music or that you’re hanging out with. It doesn’t feel as cutthroat.
DCist: One of the most tragic moments of Tindall’s memoir is that because she had a bad reed on the day she auditioned to be a part of the New York Philharmonic, she lost her once-in-a-lifetime chance to be a permanent member of an orchestra she had spent ten years substituting for. Does the fate of your future often come down to how you perform on a given day?
JR: Yeah, it’s just awful.
JM: Most of us have experienced that moment. It’s just not your day, or something happens like travel plans going awry, and then it’s even more difficult to concentrate. It’s very stressful and challenging to take an audition, and there are no guarantees no matter how prepared you are.
JR: I took 20 auditions before I won this job.
DCist: But once you win a position with an orchestra, are you set for life?
JM: You still have to get tenure, and you still have to maintain your standards.
DCist: Another theme of the book is that as Tindall got deeper into her conservatory education (she attended the North Carolina School for the Arts and Manhattan School of Music), she feared that she didn’t really have a general education curriculum, that she was trained to do nothing but play the oboe and wouldn’t have any backup options if she failed to get into an orchestra.
JR: It takes so long to learn how to master your instrument. If you’re gonna prepare something so specific as the oboe or the viola to this level , you can pretty much do anything. So if you were going to not play the oboe, you would have seven hours to devote a day to something else. I know someone from the world of classical music who decided to quit and open a restaurant, and I think it’s because of that level of dedication he had to learning the instrument that he was successful in his restaurant.
JM: It’s because it is something that we love to do, and that’s why we can tolerate doing it with the risks involved. I also agree with your point about discipline. That’s why I’m going to have my son learn an instrument even though I don’t expect him to become a professional musician.
DCist: One of the more interesting debates I came across in the blogosphere is whether an orchestra player would come across the same music multiple times over their careers. It seems like there’s only a finite amount of composers who have produced a number of works that are the same during their careers.
JM: We get a question similar to that a lot which is “why record anything? Every famous piece has already been recorded” and the answer to that is that every conductor records things differently. Each orchestra brings its own spin and each conductor has his own interpretation on a piece. A Bernstein and a Slatkin interpretation of a Mahler symphony are entirely different things. And there is more symphonic music being written all the time.
DCist: A theme of the TV series is the need to reinvigorate classical music to connect it to young audiences. The book, in contrast, targets the management and funding structures for the orchestras for being behind the times. What do you make of those criticisms?
JM: The “classical music is dying” sentiment has been around for a while now. Blair Tindall’s book is about experiences she had 30 years ago. The truth is that we’ve always wanted to connect to younger people and we are always trying to step up our game.
DCist: I’ve heard the Detroit Symphony is increasing their presence outdoors in different neighborhoods.
JM: We do “NSO in Your Neighborhood.” We canvas the joint and play wherever. Even night clubs where we might fit smaller groups in.
DCist: So, finally, why should people come out and see an orchestral performance?
JR: Where else can you see 100 people working together towards a common artistic goal? It’s amazing to be a part of, and it’s even more amazing to share it with a concert hall full of enthusiasts and have their energy reflected back into our performance. There’s nothing else like it.
