The truth of making sweet music...sex!

Poststructural Pub
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From the TimesOnLine today

June 18, 2005

The truth of making sweet music
By James Bone
Oboest bares her soul - and more - to expose musical casting couches

A PROFESSIONAL oboist has lifted the curtain on sex, drugs and nepotism in the world of classical music.

Blair Tindall, who played with the New York Philharmonic, offers an unseemly tour behind the scenes in a book entitled Mozart in the Jungle.

Tindall claims that sex played a decisive role in her musical career. She says she was simultaneously involved with three leading New York oboists — two married — who gave her work in their orchestras. One had a maxim: “The section that lays together plays together.”

She describes leaping naked into a hotel pool with a leading member of a touring Andrew Lloyd Webber production who subsequently made love to her in his hotel suite as “exuberantly” as he performed music. He then lit a postcoital cigarette and offered her a job on Lloyd Webber’s new Aspects of Love in New York. “Why, I thought, did I bother with an answering machine?” Tindall writes. “Between XXX and my former oboist boyfriends, I got hired for most of my gigs in bed.”

Although Tindall’s 25-year music career included such highlights as working with Leonard Bernstein, she also had to make money recording Karaoke music, and got so bored on Broadway that she would read magazines on her music stand while playing in the orchestra pit.

Now in her mid-forties, she says she dated “almost every classical musician around my age” — as well as some who were not, including two of her high-school music teachers.

“Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument,” she writes. “Neurotic violinists, anonymous in their orchestra section, came fast. Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists’ sensitive fingers worked magic. French horn players, their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely get it up, but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything.”

One man not granted anonymity in the book is the Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart. Tindall claims that she had sex with him and that he invited her to Salt Lake City, where he was music director of the Utah Symphony. “The night before my departure he called to cancel because his wife was suddenly visiting him to get pregnant,” she says.

Mr Lockhart has issued a statement insisting that the relationship was “at no time anything more than friendship”.

Disenchanted with the classical music world, Tindall went to Stanford University to study journalism and has written for The New York Times.

MarkB

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“Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument… but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything.”


hmmmmmm - maybe we all should stop with the bodhran jokes??? :smiley:

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That sounds quite amazing. I wonder if it’s all true.

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Well, except that brodhran players don’t qualify as “instrument” players… :smiley:

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This lady obviously got bored rather easily.

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That’s unfair. I’d be bored, too, if I had to play Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. :stuck_out_tongue:

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MAN THE BARRICADES!

Slan,
D. :astonished:

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Webber didn’t write Les Miserables. :smiley:

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No, that was Boublil, that French guy, and the other French guy, who got their start on “La Revolution Francaise,” to which I’ve been singing all the lyrics since I bought the album, in Lyon, at age 16.
It is a handy skill, to annoy your children by singing, in French, about the assassination of Marat.

And really Dub, do you think I’m that volatile?

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Well there hugo then..I never said he did :wink:

Slan,
D.

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You’re a woman aren’t you? :laughing:

Slan,
D. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes, but the same missions can be accomplished without raised voices where I come from. One must hone one’s alpha-female trait.

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Well now…I just knew that you were an Angel sent down from on high to break the hearts of we mere mortals…


Slan,
D. :slight_smile:

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Oh, you think that’s a good thing, eh? Imagine the position of the two males in our household–both annoying, but neither domineering–forced to live in the estrogen-heavy domain of 4 women, who, relative to the guys, tend to think in tandem and exert some heavy force of will. And I may not be loud, but that doesn’t apply to all the girls here.

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That would be a Heavenly lifestyle to someone like me…six sisters and a very dominant Mother was no picnic for poor little me ye know…not one of the sisterhood likes anything I ever listened to,watched on T.V.books I read and any attempt to bring a girl home was enough to send them into a feeding frenzy as they bayed for blood..usually mine :sniffle:

Slan,
D. :wink:

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My wife used to be an oboe player. In fact at the time I met her (online) her screen name was Oboe123456. Explains a lot :stuck_out_tongue:

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Didn’t realize that being BORED justified such digusting behavior. You all did READ the article, yes? She’s sleeping around with a good number of men, three at a time at one point (that it mentioned) TWO of the three at the time happend to be MARRIED! Then she goes on saying that she “got hired for most of my gigs in bed”! And this is worthy of room in a NEWPAPER like it’s a good thing??? Then to top it off it not only gets posted here (no wonder this site doesn’t pass through internet filters well anymore) and the whole thread turns into a joke, started by this pathetic excuse for an article? Like sleeping around with that many men and getting hired because you do it is funny?

Guess I shouldn’t be surprised in a world where fewer and fewer people have genuine respect for themselves or each other. Well, I’m genuninely disgusted, so much so that I had to post and say so even if it winds up being majorly irksome to others.

And people wonder why we have so many children doing each other at increasingly younger ages… well, if the adults can’t control themselves and show some decency and respect when it comes to sex then the kids certainly aren’t. This lady and the reaction (or rather, non-reaction) she is getting is just another example of the twisted perversion that has become the accepted norm in our society. Sick, sick, sick!


I feel like throwing up now…


:angry: Sara (Where’s a barfing emoticon when you need it? Maybe it is time for a break…)

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I’m no shrink but I believe that the woman in question would have a very low level of self esteem and some inner drive for affection would be a greater motivation than sex here.She also seems to be a lover of publicity - I mean why else would she go public with such a pathetic tale?.
These sordid little storys pop up every day in some form and other and I honestly believe that the majority of people have become indifferent to them..Foolish shallow people who would do absolutely anything to get their name into the media bore me.
The original post was obviously put up in the spirit of humour and I took it like that though I can fully understand your outrage.

We live in strange times Sunny…it’s very hard to know where we, as a society, will end up.

Slan,
D.

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Actually Sara, I think the whole thing’s silly.
The oboist is, for attention and maybe a book deal, exposing her ridiculous lifestyle to the public—it’s tantamount, really, to posing nude in Penthouse. It may earn her a few bucks, but this is not what most people would want to be known for.
It’s stupid that she slept with married men (if any of this is true,) it’s stupid that they slept with her, and it’s stupid to publicize such indiscretions.

But I see this theme frequently lately. And what’s new is not the affairs–what’s new is the social climate in which one can make promiscuity into a public persona without complete societal disapproval.

OTOH, it’s not a bad thing if people in a position to be exposed have another reason to think twice about questionable behavior–someone even more shameless than yourself may be waiting to cash in on your bad judgment.

Anyway, I understand your rant–I guess that for me, for better or for worse–humor trumps outrage in this case.
(edit–Dub said almost exactly the same thing!)