Filed: 27/07/2005)

Rupert Christiansen listens to an analysis from someone who is actually making the noise

Blair Tindall’s autobiography, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music, created quite a stir when it was published in America last month. I ordered a copy, in guilty expectation of a muck-raking page-turner as compellingly nasty as Gelsey Kirkland’s expose of the business of ballet, Dancing on my Grave.

Alas, Tindall doesn’t live up to her titillating title. There’s very little about Mozart in these pages, even less about the jungle. The sex is desultory, the drugs are Class C. But what makes the book well worth reading is its intelligent analysis of the state of classical music, emanating from someone on the floor, actually making the noise, rather than a pundit or academic.

Tindall was a professional, freelance oboist – clearly a very good one, but not a front-ranking soloist. She characterises herself as a product of the post-war boom in high culture, and specifically of the expansion and fetishising of symphony orchestras (a theme explored in Joseph Horowitz’s magnificent study, Understanding Toscanini).

It’s hard now to imagine the status and glamour attached to the career of a classical instrumentalist in that reconstructive era, but Tindall notes the significant statistics and phenomena – between 1940 and 1960, for instance, the sale of musical instruments in the US quintupled. Van Cliburn was greeted with a ticker-tape parade after winning the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, and conductor Leonard Bernstein became one of the 1960s’ superstars. Classical music was prime-time and, even if it couldn’t be profitable, it was seen as fundamental to civic and national self-respect.

But a generation reared on Elvis, the Beatles and the space race, impelled to modernise and liberate itself, gradually lost its deference to the music of the old order, with its attendant class associations. Only the lifejacket of subsidy – whether European state funding or American private philanthropy – could keep it afloat, and when that deflated, the classical music industry finally had to accept itself as an over-valued commodity.

The system didn’t adjust quickly enough to this social change, with the result that a glut of young musicians were groomed to enter a profession that was both puffed up and weighed down with its own status and restrictive practices. By the turn of the millennium, Tindall estimates, the imbalance between supply and demand meant that more than 5,000 music graduates were pursuing 250 orchestral vacancies.

The remainder of these instrumentalists earn their living in the freelance market, of which Tindall paints a graphic picture. In the 1980s, anyone established on the circuit could find plenty of work. The record companies were still busy, fired by the arrival of the CD format. Advertisers needed accompaniments for jingles, films had original orchestral scores. Broadway shows used large pit bands, and almost all orchestras allowed “subbing” (known as “depping” in Britain), whereby an instrumentalist could pass his chair at a rehearsal or concert to a substitute and take a vacation or a better-paid gig.

Twenty years on, the scene has changed dramatically. Classical recording has shrunk to vanishing point in the US. Classically focused radio stations have dumbed down or sold out. Many smaller civic orchestras have closed or merged, and even the most prestigious ones have battened down the hatches after weathering untenable deficits. Movies increasingly use rock soundtracks, and on Broadway the unions have capitulated to the synthesizers and a reduction in the size of bands. An extraordinary amount of orchestral music can now be effectively simulated by digital means.

In sum, classical music’s great wave of self-confidence has subsided, and despite a flurry of clever marketing strategies, it is doubtful that it will ever win back its former eminence in the cultural hierarchy, or the attendances of the 1950s and 1960s.

I’m not convinced this is altogether a bad thing. The stable was dirty and stuffy: it needed cleaning out. Perhaps, Tindall wisely concludes, “classical music could learn from the diamond companies, which have transformed a relatively common mineral into something precious by limiting its abundance in the marketplace”.

Too much of the recent debate about classical music has focused on the decline in the quantity of performance or the size of audience, compared with the levels achieved in that brief post-war boom. Yet the quality of music-making should also be considered, and surely nobody who heard the Royal Opera’s Die Walküre or John Eliot Gardiner’s Nelson Mass at the Proms last week could come away worrying about a decline in standards.

We may have less classical music communicated to fewer people than we did 30 years ago, but how much does that matter if the quality of performance and the enthusiasm of audiences remain undimmed?