Mozart in the Jungle TV show

Friends who are connected to the classical music world kept telling me to watch Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon Prime. So I did…

The show is interesting because the actors are portraying highly technical activities, e.g., conducting a symphony orchestra or playing a violin. They have to do this in time to actual music and the result is remarkably convincing.

The show starts when the president of the “New York Symphony”, played by Bernadette Peters (70!), brings in a young Mexican conductor modeled after Gustavo Dudamel. (We later get the backstory on the character played by Peters: she is a billionaire who made her fortune by marrying and divorcing four different men, not an entirely realistic outcome based on current New York family law, especially given New York’s vague cap on child support profits in the single-digit $millions.)

The highlights of the show include cameo appearances by real-world classical music stars, such as Joshua Bell, Emanuel Ax, and Lang Lang. If you’re a fan of Broadway-for-4-year-olds, you’ll also enjoy seeing Melody Yang.

One interesting aspect of the show is that its production straddles the point at which female victimhood began to dominate American public discourse.

• Early seasons: Old man conducts and is replaced by young man. Attractive female cellist has sex with old male conductor. There is no discussion of the gender ID of any composer, but all pieces played are by male composers (including a modern commission).
• Final shows, aired 4.5 months after Hollywood producer shower habits made the New York Times: Young woman conducts. Attractive female cellist has sex with other women. All pieces played are by female composers (and works by male composers are specifically excluded from a new orchestra’s mission). Characters speak statistics to each other regarding the percentage of conductors who are female.

I’m wondering if this could be used as an example of men becoming “woke”. The producers of the show are all described on Wikipedia with male pronouns. They could easily have picked a young female Latin American conductor to start off the show (e.g., modeled after Alondra de la Parra). There was no need for them to portray young female orchestra members as seeking to have sex with old male conductors. The show thus gratuitously reinforced gender stereotypes in classical music. No lesbian relationships were depicted, thus reinforcing heteronormative stereotypes for women.

By the last season, however, they were devoting about 30 percent of the dialog to decrying the lack of social justice for women conductors, women composers, etc. That shows an “unwoke” to “woke” transition?

Readers: If you’ve seen this show, what did you think?