I knew Blair slightly; she sometimes played in the
major NY chamber orchestra I ran in the 1980s-90s.
I knew better many of the people she wrote about in
her book (including those she hid behind pseudonyms),
but I was utterly unaware at the time of many of
the events and circumstances she described (being
either naive or clueless).

On 4/20/2023 1:00 PM, Dave P. wrote:
> Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63
> By Neil Genzlinger, April 19, 2023, NY Times
> Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for
> publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine
> view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s
> visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own
> sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at
> the North Carolina School of the Arts.
>
> “I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.
>
> The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.
>
> “Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that
> I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,”
> Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t
> encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of
> this deviant art.”
>
> But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.
>
> “The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an
> autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the
> classical music world.”
>
> In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.
>
> “I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,”
> she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is
> very incestuous.”
>
> Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.
>
> “People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come
> from?”
>
> The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the
> book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star
> conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built
> up false hopes among students.
>
> “If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,”
> she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”
>
> And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’
> roll.
>
> “Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more
> of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”
>
> She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she
> wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out
> cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.
>
> “Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.
>
> Yet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television
> shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran
> for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York
> orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for
> best television series, comedy or musical.
>
> Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was
> a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity)
> Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.
>
> Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the
> instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her
> elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.
>
> “By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she
> wrote. She chose the oboe.
>
> As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.
>
> “Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got
> excused from class for band competitions and tours.
>
> After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s
> degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les
> Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and
> various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied
> debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.
>
> In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study
> journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and
> worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.
>
> In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks
> later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.
>
> Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.
>
> Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most
> often about music.
>
> When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of
> musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times
> about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.
>
> “This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take
> over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and
> the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.
>
> “We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.”
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/television/blair-tindall-dead.html