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I just finished Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall. This book is part memoir, part indictment of the classical music industry. Tindall, an oboist who grew up in North Carolina and moved to Manhattan after graduating from the North Carolina School of the Arts' high school program, played a lot of oboe between the ages of 15 and 40, and by her own admission played very, very few jobs that she didn't obtain by sleeping with someone. By all accounts she is a good oboist, though I was amused by her constant harping on her inability to produce good reeds. I also wondered how she managed to learn anything about the oboe as her primary teacher for almost her entire life was, according to her description, useless at best. (Except for the fact that he could recommend her to play as a sub in the NY Philharmonic.)
Although I don't disagree with much of what she writes about the state of the discipline, she seems oblivious to the fact that the same circumstances apply in many fields. (If she thinks classical musicians enjoyed an artifically created boom in the 1960s and 70s, and that music schools turn out far more graduates than there will ever be jobs for, she should consider the career opportunites her own father, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, faced in the 1960s compared with those of a 30-something humanities PhD today.)
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