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Page Modified: February 13, 2008

 

 

Blair Tindall

Mozart in the Jungle

In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Gelsey Kirkland's Dancing on my Grave comes an insider’s look into the secret world of classical musicians.

From her debut recital at Carnegie Hall to the Broadway pits of Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, Blair Tindall has played with some of the biggest names in classical music for twenty-five years. Now in Mozart in the Jungle, Tindall exposes the scandalous rock and roll lifestyles of the musicians, conductors, and administrators who inhabit the insular world of classical music.

· Review Quotes/Appeal Factors:

Galleys have just been sent to reviewers.

· What is it about this book that would appeal to a reader?

Mozart in the Jungle opens the mysterious lives of classical musicians to any reader, regardless of familiarity with the arts. In plain English, Tindall, who writes about classical music for the New York Times, explains how the arts are funded and produced, and how performers find work and earn their livelihoods, and what it’s like to be selling eighteenth century culture in a new millennium filled with edgy electronic art forms.

Tindall's Jungle travels around the globe, from performances in Vienna's Staatsoper, Rio's Teatro Colon and a remote Brazilian rainforest, then on to New York City, where she and her musician colleagues live in the squalor of a decrepit west side tenement. A metaphor for the classical music business, the building has fallen from glory, its elaborate stone carving chipped, windows patched with cardboard, and its elegant décor plastered over by a greedy landlord and her predatory handyman. Outsiders have never looked farther than the ornate facade…until now.

Inside, music transforms a schoolteacher into a beautiful diva, and sustains a renowned pianist who endures two heart transplants to perform with the stars who pay him a pittance. An American goddess of the arts struggles to fulfill a dream, her ominous future mirrored by an older musician whose fantasies drain away in her lonely apartment upstairs. A stunning cellist becomes an AIDS-infected crack addict and prostitute; a Metropolitan Opera violinist is jailed for selling cocaine; and an African-American virtuoso becomes so lost inside the elitist white arts world that he smashes his $185,000 eighteenth-century French violin into splinters.

The drama of Mozart in the Jungle opens during America's Cold War-era optimism, and follows four musicians as their world dissolves into a culture of entitlement for a new generation of classical musicians, who are deaf to changing American tastes and demand. By weaving memoir with investigative arts journalism, Tindall shatters rhetoric about the arts in the United States -- in an real-life tale from a musician whose career paralleled America’s late twentieth-century culture boom. As Mozart in the Jungle races to its dramatic conclusion, Tindall reveals music as a simple, spiritual gift accessible to all.

· What other books are like it?

Sex and the City

Valley of the Dolls

The Devil Wears Prada

Kitchen Confidential

Dancing on My Grave

· What does this work have in common with other works in the same genre?

The story is a compelling tale that humanizes a hidden world, filled with drama, suspense, and betrayal – with the intricacies of classical music presented in an understandable style.

· How is this work different from other works in the same genre?

Mozart in the Jungle includes several journalistic chapters which follow the timeline of public arts policy and attitudes toward culture at each point during the memoir’s history. Since my life and musical career paralleled the “culture boom” in America (both started around 1960), the hybrid structure illustrates the evolution of the arts in this country.

· What would you like readers to know about you/your work?

I write about classical music for the New York Times and have performed, toured and recorded with the New York Philharmonic and many other musical groups. I'm also a regular contributor to Sierra magazine and have taught journalism at Stanford University and oboe at the University of California-Berkeley.

Mozart in the Jungle was completed during a two-month residency in 2004 at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. I hold two performance degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and a journalism MA from Stanford University, but still play oboe in the New York City Ballet and in the Broadway production of Wicked.

· What’s next, what can readers look forward to in the future?

I am working on a biography of a black Civil War hero, once a slave, from South Carolina, who delivered a Confederate ship into the arms of the Union army, went on to become a congressman, bought his former master’s mansion in Beaufort, SC, and took in the former master’s destitute widow.

·Suggested reading (viewing, listening) - what have you liked, disliked recently?

I loved Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, Barry Lopez's Field Notes, Lisa Carey’s Love in the Asylum, and Mona Simpson’s Off Keck Road.

· Links – author or publisher website, etc

www.mozartinthejungle.com

www.blairtindall.com

· Please include email address so readers may contact you directly.

mozartjungle@earthlink.net

 

Mozart in the Jungle

· Author: Blair Tindall

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

· Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

· Publication Date: July 2005

· ISBN: 0-87113-890-5

· $24.00 · # pages: 320· Genre: Memoir

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