Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall

Author:Blair Tindall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-01T08:00:00+00:00

Arts funding kept pace with spending growth during the phenomenal economy of the mid-1980s. Over twenty-five thousand leveraged mergers had driven the stock market to spectacular heights. The net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans tripled, and the new multimillionaires sought both tax exemptions with cultural donations and the instant elitism that comes with arts patronage. However, the age of excess came to an end one Monday afternoon, just two months after the Philharmonic returned from its 1987 tour. On October 19, the Dow fell 508 points, nearly 23 percent, marking the largest one-day drop on the New York Stock Exchange.

Fortunes shrank overnight. The country was already weakened by a 1982 recession and by the dual crises of farm debt and savings-and-loan deregulation—which cost thousands of Americans their life savings as well as $166 billion in government bailouts. Additional public resources were limited, since taxes, which had been cut by Ronald Reagan in 1981, brought in no additional revenue.11

Backstage, a small number of the busiest musicians with money to invest rued individual losses, yet few saw how Black Monday would affect the performing arts world as a whole. Foundations had given 14 percent of their grant money to the arts through the mid-1980s, but now began turning their attention toward poverty and other social issues. By 1990, only the Getty Trust, the Pew Trust, and the Wallace Readers’ Digest Fund still significantly supported the arts.12 Federal arts spending had decreased 24 percent between 1980 and 1988, while states slashed appropriations for their arts councils. In the private arena, the 1986 Tax Reform Act had decreased philanthropic incentives by lowering the maximum tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.13

Ten to 12 percent of all corporate gifts in the mid-1980s had gone to cultural causes, but the flood of corporate mergers reduced the number of actual donors. Companies that had once sponsored the arts (in order to soften a harsh corporate profile) wanted, after a decade of excess, to support universally acceptable causes like health and education.14 Oil companies that had cashed in during the 1970s had less to spend after petroleum prices plummeted in 1986. In 1987, Exxon withdrew its $1.5 million sponsorship of the New York Philharmonic’s weekly radio broadcasts, which had been on the air since 1922 with only an eight-year break. In 1989, Exxon also ended its thirteen-year sponsorship of the television series Live from Lincoln Center and stopped funding the orchestra’s free summer parks concerts.

Corporate America was downsizing, but arts organizations, isolated from the financial reality of earned income, stuck to their growth model. Only a month before Black Monday, Donal Henahan described the malaise in a New York Times story:

The irony is that arts administrators, orchestra trustees, critics and others in influential positions have worked hard for generations to help bring about the current state of doubt and confusion. Driven by economic winds and, in some cases, fearsome ambition, they have sold the American public on the need for quantity in music rather than

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