Эд Макбейн - Love, Dad

“What it was, if you were a student there, you were supposed to be serious about music, so it was music, music, music all day long every day of the week. Either lessons, or else practicing, or else performing with this or that school orchestra or, you know, a friend might be giving a little recital, and he’d ask you to play with him, or you’d get together with some other musicians and just play things you loved, you know, like, oh, God, you know, the Mozart flute concertos or, God, there was a girl there, she was just a lovely harpist, do you know Mozart’s Concerto in C Major for Flute and Harp? God, I used to love playing that with her, we’d spend hours on that, I absolutely adored it.

“But you see, I loved all of it. I mean, even the dumb exercises. All of it. Taffanel and Gaubert, or the Andersen exercises, or the Marcel Moyse stuff, all the exercises I use now when I’m warming up before a performance, but which then , meant a lot to me, when I was developing technique. I’d go to the hearing room, the school had this room with record players and earphones, it still has one at Lincoln Center, with the same person behind the desk, and I’d listen to, oh, God, I don’t know, tons of stuff — do you know the fourth movement of the Brahms four symphony? There’s some beautiful flute stuff in it. Or Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony? The third movement? There’s some very hard stuff there for two flutes, I mean, it’s hard for me even now , but then it was impossible. Or, you know, the flute solo in Daphnis and Chloé, or Strauss, well, Strauss, yes, everything in Till Eulenspiegel. And there’s L’aprèsmidi, I’m sure you know that one, the flute solo at the beginning, Debussy? No? You don’t know Debussy? Oh, well.

“I don’t want you to get the impression that all I did was play music all the time, or think about it all the time. I was twenty-two when I got out of Juilliard, and by then, well, you know, I’d, uh, picked up a little experience along the way with this or that man, I’ll tell you about that sometime, but not right now. The thing was trying to get a job when I got out. You see, if you’re a fiddler, I mean a good fiddler, you’ve got a shot at something like thirty, thirty-five chairs in the orchestra — sure, there are what? eighteen fiddles in the first section, another fifteen in the second? That’s thirty-three, am I right? Thirty-three chances for a job in any given orchestra. In New York, we haven’t got that many orchestras, you know. Cultural center of the world, sure, thank you, Mayor Lindsay, but all we’ve got is the Philharmonic and the American Symphony, which is only so-so, and the National Symphony, which doesn’t really count because that’s semi-pro, and then the Met and the City Opera, and that’s about it.

“Well, wait, you’ve got your ballet orchestras, but those are mostly pick-up jobs, the Joffrey, you know, and the Harkness, and the New York City Ballet company. There’s nothing that says you can’t leave New York and get a job with the Chicago Symphony, which, by the way, is the best orchestra in America, or the Cleveland, or wherever, but if you live here then you want to stay here and work here, even if it means subbing in a Broadway musical when a musician gets sick. My point is, there are only three flutes in an orchestra. Count ’em. Three. So, if you’ve got four or five true orchestras here in New York, that’s fifteen jobs. And you’re not going to get one of those jobs unless a flutist dies or moves to London.

“So there I am in 1966 with my B.M. from Juilliard, and all I want to do is perform, and there’s not a job anywhere on the horizon. Julie suggested that I call Arthur Aaron, he was contractor for the American Symphony, and Dino Proto who contracts for the State Theater, and he was nice enough to prepare the way for me so that when I called and told them I was a flutist looking for a job they didn’t just say, ‘Oh, really, how nice, what a surprise!’ I auditioned for both of them, and they were very complimentary, but they really didn’t have anything at all, and they told me to get back to them in six months or so. Well, Dino said that. Arthur Aaron didn’t have anything, and he wasn’t expecting anything, either. You have to understand that when a musician lands a chair in an orchestra, he stays with it. He doesn’t go job hopping, the way you do in advertising or publishing. Jobs are hard to get. So I called Dino back in six months — this was now getting to be 1967 — I didn’t call him Dino in those days, it was still Mr. Proto. His name is Secondo, anyway, his first name, but everybody who knows him calls him Dino — and he still didn’t have anything for me.

“I was a trained musician, out of Juilliard since June of 1966, and it was now the spring of 1967, the Beatles had just come out with ‘Strawberry Fields,’ I remember, and I thought they’d written that one line just for me, do you know the line I mean? The one about how hard it was getting to be someone? That one. There were a lot of musicals running that year on Broadway, but I couldn’t get a job with any of them. I mean, really a lot. My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! and South Pacific and Dolly and Sound of Music, I mean it, the list just went on and on, How to Succeed, Fiddler, Kiss Me Kate, Pajama Game, some really terrific stuff, when you think of it, Damn Yankees, Guys and Dolls, wow! But I could not get a job.

“So I found a couple of students who thought they might like to play flute, I charged them ten dollars an hour, but they didn’t really love the flute, and you’ve either got to love it or forget it. And then I began working at a drugstore near Carnegie Hall, the proximity had nothing to do with it, I mean I wasn’t hoping to get discovered or anything, it was just a job. Then I sold music for a while, at Schirmer’s on Forty-ninth, and then a friend of mine, a girl with the Radio City orchestra, she’d gone to Juilliard with me and had landed a job in the second fiddle section, called to say they needed a sub there for a week or so, the third flute was out sick, so I played that for a while. And I did two nights in King and I, there’s a lot of nice flute stuff in it, but that was just dumb luck, I just stumbled into that one.

“And then I got a call from a friend — you make a lot of friends who are in the music business, you know, music becomes your life, can you understand that? — anyway, this friend called, he was a percussionist, and he’d been auditioning for something, I forget what now, and he’d run into a bassoonist who said he’d heard the first chair in the City Opera Orchestra — this is flute, did I say flute? the first chair in th e flute section — was desperately ill, he was dying of cancer or something, and they were going to be auditioning flutists all the next week!

“Bang! Like a shot I called Dino, hello, Mr. Proto, do you remember me, this is Joanna Berkowitz, I’m the flutist, I auditioned for you a while back, when I got out of Juilliard, I was recommended by Julie Baker, he suggested that I call you, do you remember me? Not only did he remember me, thank God, but he confirmed the rumor that they’d be hearing flutists at open auditions all the next week, and he set up an audition for me on the following Wednesday at ten A.M. Okay. I get there. This is the State Theater at Lincoln Center. It’s been built by then, this is 1967, August of 1967. They’ve already begun rehearsing the season, in fact, and here’s this flutist who’s about to drop dead on them.