Mozart in the Jungle, the new Amazon series starring Gael García Bernal and Malcolm McDowell, focuses on the highs and lows of classical musicians trying to make it in New York, but they may not be practicing what they preach. A recent article in the New York Times reveals the show is outsourcing the music used in the program.
The Amazon series is based upon oboist Blair Tindall’s 2005 memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which focuses on her time as a classical musician in New York. While the show details how classical musicians struggle, the musicians in the show may be in the same boat.
As technology changes and overseas orchestras provide cheaper competition, soundtrack recording work for American musicians has grown scarcer. According the New York Times, some scenes that were filmed for the series show real orchestra musicians — those who were hired to play members of the fictionalized New York Symphony mimed playing their instruments. Instead of their own playing, pieces of Mahler and Berlioz were recorded for the show in Bratislava, Slovakia. Even an orchestra arrangement of the popular indie song “Lisztomania” by Phoenix was recorded in Los Angeles, separately.
During the time when Tindall was performing in the 1980s, recorded scores were a profitable way for classical musicians to make money.
"The money was so good several members of the New York Philharmonic quit their contracted positions to play only recording gigs,” she wrote.
But those kinds of jobs became scarcer now that music can be made cheaper. New York and Los Angeles have seen a number of recording studios close, with session wages for studio musicians in L.A. falling to $15.5 million in 2013 from a high of nearly $50 million in 1998.
When is comes to Mozart in the Jungle, the music comes from a bunch of different places. In addition to studio musicians based in L.A. and members of the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, some have been recorded by series composer Roger Neill in his studio and some were previously recorded and licensed for the show.
