The Many Writings of

Somewhere in my ramblings I know that I mentioned in passing that I was, for several years, a member of an orchestra. I remember glibly saying that those years helped propel me into my life as a singer. Here's why.

When Billy Brown called me and asked if I'd be interested in a full-time position in the New Jersey Symphony's horn section, I stuttered a few times and said yes. The orchestra was trying to recover from a long and bitter strike that had pitted the musicians against management and each other. Little personal feuds had built into acrid vendettas, and it took me some time to figure out who hated whom and why. The one thing that the members of the ensemble had in common was a universal and towering dislike for their conductor.

It isn't uncommon for an orchestra to detest its leader. There have been few conductors in the relatively short history of the position who were beloved of their players. The man who invented the position, Jean Baptiste Lully, would tyrannically pound out the rhythm of his Renaissance ballet music with a very heavy staff, until one day he smashed his gouty foot with it, causing gangrene, which led to his demise. That should have been the end of it right there, but the job didn't die with him. There is an apocryphal tale of a Mexican orchestra whose conductor was so hated that, when the principal oboist stood at a rehearsal, pulled out a pistol and shot the man dead at point blank range, there was not a single witness to the event. All claimed that they had been too busy looking at their music, and that may well have been the case. In another instance, this one at the Metropolitan Opera, there flailed a conductor so fraudulent that the orchestra could sabotage any performance he led simply by following him. Bad conductors are not ever to be watched or followed lest the music deconstruct itself, and most conductors unfortunately seem to be far more interested in the power of the job rather than the musical responsibility of the post. Our maestro was assuredly one of those.

Henri was having a terrible year. Every time he picked up a baton he was excoriated. His Met performances were panned in the most acerbic terms. His marriage to a famous opera singer was on the rocks. Some of the principal players in the orchestra had an unresolved and very personal ongoing spat with him that made a bad situation miserable. I would have felt sorry for the man had he not regularly butchered even the most common pieces of the repertoire. He would manifest his emotional disorientation by spookily erratic behavior on the podium. One memorable evening he spiraled into madness when he looked over at the bassoon section and observed that a player who had been absent for several of the previous week's rehearsals was sitting in the section. He flew into a throbbing-vein-in-the-forehead rage and took his anger out on poor old Mendelssohn, who didn't deserve it. He sabotaged the first movement of the symphony by setting a tempo so ridiculously fast that the offending bassoonist would flub his solo, which he did. Of course everyone else did, too. The piece flew by in record time, totally devoid of musical content. After the intermission, during which – we joked – Henri took his Thorazine, the remainder of the evening's program became a lugubrious march into agonizing boredom. It was bad enough that the piece before us was an obscure English tone poem by one of the most inane English romantics. It seemed as though the baton had put on thirty pounds during the intermission and we were back to Lully angrily pounding his cudgel on the floor as the piece droned on. Then, in a horrifying instant, Henri forgot where he was. At a general fermata in the vapid musical oleo, he froze, his arms lifted over his head. His eyes glazed and then snapped into a mask of confusion and panic. The orchestra went silent, all eyes on the wretched soul on the podium frozen in a rictus of fear. For what seemed like an eternity, the silence, broken by nervously shuffling feet and the tuberculars who attend every symphony concert, hung like a thin pall of noxious smoke over the entire hall. In a heroic act of desperation, a lone bassoonist- not the one Henri had declared persona non grata – broke the ironbound code of orchestral demeanor and started in playing the next section of the work. The orchestra rallied around him and finished the piece as Henri milled the air in desperation, lost and ignored by the ensemble as we struggled to conclude the program in spite of him.

There is a hoary old joke among musicians concerning conductors; What's the difference between a bull and an orchestra? Well, the bull has the horns in front and the asshole at the back. This tired old piece of threadbare wit proved itself over and over again in the next few seasons, as management paraded a series of martinets, crybabies and prigs in front of the orchestra. I think we reached some sort of nadir when, during a concert in Atlantic City, we were under the baton of a maestro who lacked even the basic skill to get the ensemble to begin playing.

Everyone is familiar with the cartoon representation of the conductor, imposing and distinguished in his tailcoat and flowing silver mane, mounting the podium, rapping his baton smartly against his podium, and with a sweeping motion initiating the glorious swell of massed instruments. This clown, who shall remain mercifully nameless, could not coax the orchestra into sound. The piece, as hackneyed and overplayed as any in the standard repertoire, was Tchaikovsky's Overture 1812, a piece that even a half-assed, half dead orchestra could play in its sleep. It begins with 'cello soli, but Bozo's beat was so amorphous and puzzling that, when he began his bizarre gesticulations, not a soul could decipher them. The 'cello section sat, silent and mystified. Bozo stopped waving and glared at the 'celli when it became obvious that his efforts were eliciting no response. Clearing his throat, he began another strange, swooping motion with his arms, resembling a crane in its mating ritual more than a conductor, and once again the low strings sat, bows poised, waiting for some recognizable indication of tactus. Then, as a sort of karmic comment on the proceedings, a drunken woman in the front row of the audience threw up, loudly and copiously, on the floor in front of her and the unfortunates in the seats to either side of her, setting off a small stampede for the exits. In this effluvium of puke, panic, and dilettantism, the principal cellist looked back at his section, shrugged, and dug in. That initial 'cello intro, ragged as it was, was drowned out by the sound of running feet, slamming doors, and patrons gagging in sympathy. Bozo, now looking more grateful and afraid than reproachful, dutifully followed the orchestra through the rest of the piece.

To be fair (although I believe that 'fair' is only a concept with which we try to soften and rationalize reality, as if there is some sort of moral imperative governing its more horrific, random elements) there were a few, by which I mean perhaps three, concerts in the several seasons of my tenure, that rose above the incompetence and apathy of the ensemble and its various directors. Most of the time, however, it was business as usual. When I was an aspiring student, my goal was to find a position in an orchestra and live happily ever after. I idealized my musical heroes, and imagined orchestral musicians as a group to be a liberal, accepting, open-minded, high-thinking cadre of artistes. Try to imagine my surprise at finding myself in the midst of a bunch of angry, demoralized, conservative, vengeful, petty narcissists, some of whom could barely play their instruments but were spared the ax because it would have been more trouble to try to fire them than to let them sit and bumble through their parts. Whatever joy these people might have at one time felt about music and music making had evaporated into bitterness and resentment at having reached a musical dead end. Many of them seemed to get their kicks by making life tough for someone else. Whether it was the trumpeter who occasionally sat behind me and blasted his nasty, tinny high notes directly at my head (until the day I snapped and threatened him with lasting damage should he do it again) or the personnel manager, a geek in a mullet and a bad suit who delighted in the psychological torture of his personnel, the gestalt of the band was one of simmering hatred and hostility.

Then there was the bus. Not the big bus that picked up all the NYC-based players on concert days up at 96th and Broadway – I'll get to that-, but the VW microbus that hauled seven of us back and forth to rehearsals, sometimes twice a day, through the Lincoln tunnel. My patron, Billy, the principal hornist, owned and usually drove the van. It was a crowded, chummy vehicle at first, people and instruments jammed in together. We had every section of the orchestra represented, and there was a pleasant balance of men and women. We discovered after several months that amongst the seven of us there were two bipolar schizophrenics who occasionally went off their meds. They were both violinists, of course. All those high freq's, I think. Jerry was obviously batty. We were just getting comfortable with that when Natalie stopped taking her lithium. We didn't even know she was taking it until she stopped, and that's when the fun really started.

One schizo is weird but manageable. Two is another beast entirely. Two is a system, an army, a tidal wave of jagged thoughts and indecipherable nonsense. Two is fission, each fuelling and goading the other. Two is a journey through the dark side of the human psyche. Jerry had been a child prodigy, the kind that blazes briefly and then burns out. I don't think that, from his first breath, Jerry had ever been tethered to this earth. He was a superb player, which is why his aberrant behavior was usually tolerated. He liked to stand on his chair during concerts, sometimes in an alarming state of dishabille, and conduct with his bow. He also made a lot of noise when he played. I don't mean squirming in his chair or shuffling his feet. He would get emotionally caught up in the music and start to moan, long, low moans that grew in intensity, pitch and length, and would continue until one of his section mates had had enough and jabbed him in the ribs with their bow.

My first experience with Jerry's moaning scared the hell out of me. Being on the end of the horn section nearest the second violins, I was usually pretty close to Jerry. During a concert I started to hear a strange, mournful sound, a sort of hoarse, strangled unpitched low wail, coming from somewhere nearby. It could have been human, but the context made it appalling. I looked around, trying to locate the source of the eerie noise. It died away suddenly, and then surged again, louder. The crazy thought passed through my mind that somewhere in the convoluted catacombs under the Newark Mosque, some poor bastard was being tortured. As the piece we were performing slowly built in emotional intensity, so did the awful moaning. At last Jerry, in a fit of musical rapture, opened his mouth and really let it rip, sounding like a cross between Keith Jarret in ecstasy and a death wail in a meat packing plant. His stand partner, an unusually patient and tolerant Russian émigré, stopped playing long enough to gouge Jerry under his uplifted bow arm. The moaning stopped, and every player on that side of the orchestra shuffled his feet as a thank you to the Russian, who was himself having a pretty lousy evening. He had arrived at the concert only to discover that his young son had switched his full sized violin with the ¼ size instrument of a beginner, and the poor man had no choice but to play the entire concert on the tiny instrument or have his pay docked for a missed performance.

Natalie bloomed in the spring. She claimed that her lithium was giving her the shakes, which made it difficult for her to play. Actually it was going off the stuff that gave her the shakes. It also gave her paranoid delusions. At first we thought she was simply in a bad mood. Then the phone calls started. The first one came at about three a.m.

"Uh, hullo?"

"Barry, this is Natalie."

"Oh".

"Barry, never ever forget, ever."

"Huh?"

"Don't ever forget, never never ever."

"Forget what, Natalie?"

"Barry, I'M YOUR ESKIMO MOTHER!!!"

Click.

Something was obviously very wrong. Over the next couple weeks the calls became more and more fantastic and hysterically pitched, and always between three and five in the morning, when I was sound asleep and she was at her weirdest. The night before we checked her in to Bellevue, she had called me with a long and confusing account of her apartment being broken into and her being raped by seven cops.

Jerry and Natalie were a team now. They sat together in the back seat of the little bus, feeding off each other's lunacy. After an hour in the confines of the microbus, I wasn't at all sure that I wasn't as crazy as they were. Just being around such a geometrical expansion of craziness was unbalancing. I think that two profoundly crazy people are ten times crazier than just one, and they are a lightning rod for the smaller crazies we all harbor. Even if I wasn't crazy, after an hour with the two of them I felt unhinged. When Natalie took her sabbatical at Bellevue, Jerry quieted down some. He went back to muttering, moaning, and conducting, but at least he kept his clothes on.

Now for the big bus; your basic Grayhound-style tour bus, minus the amenities. All of us players who lived in Manhattan would pile into the bus in the early evening of a concert night, wearing our tailcoats, carrying our instruments and bags of takeout Chinese. We traveled the length and breadth of the Garden State in that bus, but no matter what burg we rolled into, I always had the dismal sensation that we hadn't gone anywhere because everywhere we went looked the same. I discovered lots of obscure towns in Jersey, places that, when you got there, there was no there there. And each and every one of those little settlements had a school auditorium or gymnasium in which we would find ourselves, arrayed in our most formal attire, hacking through the classics for audiences dressed predominantly in sweats and team jerseys. My friend the Lady was loving it.

The big bus was our home away from home. It was a lot like being on tour, except that I got to sleep at home. After every concert we would drag ourselves back onto the big bus, break out the booze and the backgammon and try to forget the musical mayhem we had so recently perpetrated. By the time the big bus arrived back at the drop zone, empties would roll and clank and clatter every time the bus moved.

The big bus played a pivotal role in my transformation from orchestral nonentity to ascending vocalist. It was on the big bus that, one night after a particularly ghastly concert in which we managed to disembowel several of my favorite composers, I emitted The Scream. It was my Munch moment (the painter, not the jaw movement), and it illuminated my path, reshaping and redefining my future. I didn't know it was going to happen until the moment sound began to emanate from my lips. It began as a thin little quiver of sound, a yip of discomfort, a soblet of frustration. Before I could bottle it up, it rose to a full fortissimo howl that shook the windows of the big bus. Then an amazing thing happened. All of my uptight, quietly miserable colleagues started to Scream with me, turning my lone eldritch cry into a primal Wagnerian chorus. In the quiet that followed, there were first stunned looks and nervous giggles, and then everyone on the big bus broke into wild applause and roaring laughter. The Scream then became the first order of bus business after every show, before the sauce and board games. Of course the players who lived in Jersey felt envious and left out. They wanted to scream, too.

The Scream was my eviction notice. I knew from the sound of my own voice that I couldn't abide this genteel sort of cultural torture anymore. Music was too precious a thing for me to see it so badly mauled so regularly. I was, as my brother Mikey used to say, paying rent with my soul. To be sure, it had been a better job than playing eight shows a week in a Broadway pit band, which I regarded as a form of musical suttee. But it wasn't the musical apotheosis I had envisioned for myself. It wasn't even close. The Scream helped me deal with the bitter disappointment of having achieved a life goal only to find that it wasn't at all what I had imagined. It was a sort of metaphysical slap across the face with a dead fish.

It wasn't long after this stunning realization that I quit playing entirely. When queried about my past, some find it odd that I no longer play or even own a horn. I suppose it's indicative of my cuspy nature (zero degrees on the Aries –Taurus cusp), which is an unsavory amalgam of the baby and the bull, that when I'm done with something, I really am done with it. When I quit playing I sold all my instruments, tons of sheet music, even my music stand. I have no notion of the fates of my former comrades, other than the one concert per year that the orchestra presents at Carnegie Hall. As far as I know they're still rolling about the hinterlands of New Jersey, giving the state it's occasional and perfunctory culture enema and screaming all the way home.