The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

  Right then and there, at Chef Yu on Eighth Avenue, I came up with a plan. My sixtieth birthday was approaching and I decided to see if I could live up to Mr. J’s faith in me—and in the Chinese waiter’s appraisal of me. I was a late starter, not once but twice. And so I decided: I would stage an elaborate birthday party to celebrate my sixtieth, and there, in front of friends and family, I would play cello in public and prove to myself—and to all of them—that I was a musician.

  THE FIDDLER

  If there is a character in Jewish folklore that I most relate to in my middle years, it is Tevye the Milkman from the famous story by the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. Tevye is a well-meaning and lovable character who bumbles through life trying to make everyone happy—his wife, his children, his neighbors, his rabbis, his God, and even his milk cow. Tevye has certain truths he lives by—above all tradition—but he finds these truths challenged at every turn. He hears voices, imagines music, and invokes those long dead, calling on them in his sleep. His children are dragging him ever reluctantly into the future and he steps gingerly forward, his eye on the fiddler perched impossibly on his roof.

  For Tevye, the fiddler represents the beauty and demands of the past, as well as the precariousness of the present. As he says in the stage version of this tale: “You might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.”

  While Tevye is rooted in the late nineteenth century, I am rooted in the twentieth. I was born smack in the middle—in September 1949—and I am a product of the twentieth century’s work ethic, its optimism and its values. Long before Ronald Reagan was president and long before I was an adult, I watched Reagan on television as a pitchman for General Electric intoning, “Progress is our most important product.” I was brought up to believe that hard work would yield success and a better world.

  But yet, like Tevye, I have a connection to the old world that I hold on to for dear life. Family is precious to me, as is prayer, study, and the Sabbath day. For me, too, the fiddler represents the beauty of the past. But I didn’t just want to listen to the fiddler. As I grew older, I wanted to climb up on the roof and play violin-cello duets with him. And if you think the fiddler on the roof is imperiled, imagine the cellist. His instrument is bigger and his balance even more precarious; unlike the fiddler, he needs a seat.

  How does one reconcile the old and the new? Why this human desire to hold on to our roots, our foundations, even as the world all around changes rapidly? Part of us wants to preserve and protect what came before, but another, equally compelling part wants to take chances and innovate even in the face of possible failure.

  For Tevye, the quest was to be “a rich man,” as the song from the musical adaptation goes. But by Tevye’s yardstick, we are all rich men. Cossacks are not at our door, and, despite our recent economic downturns, most of us have a “fine tin roof” over our heads and “real wooden floors below.”

  Baby boomers like myself sing a different tune. My song is, “If I Were a Cellist.” I grew up hardly even knowing about the cello but fell in love with its sound as a young adult. It wasn’t until I was twenty-six years old that I actually held one in my hands and, thanks to the wisdom and patience of Mr. J, began to play. Since then it has been an on-again, off-again romance.

  Now, I wanted to give the cello another chance in my life. Others of my generation long to reclaim their own dreams, be they on the basketball court or tennis court or on the back of a horse. There are those my age who want to learn to cook or garden or run a marathon or get on stage and act or climb aboard a motorcycle and race. For some the quest may be to build wooden scale model airplanes, for others to fly a plane, and for still others to paint landscapes.

  With age, learning anything new is hard; learning a classical string instrument like the cello or violin is close to impossible. What’s more, all learning needs a supportive environment. As I took up the cello once again, I found that the people in my life were skeptical.

  I HAVE THE GOOD fortune of knowing the writer Elie Wiesel and he and I get together every so often to chat. I went to see him shortly after I started to play with LSO and my new quest was very much on my mind. His eyes lit up when I mentioned the cello. “I love the cello,” he said. “I love the sadness of it; the richness of it.”

  Wiesel told me that as a boy in Hungary before the Second World War music was a central part of his life. He rhapsodized about the sounds of his youth: the Hebrew melodies of his father’s synagogue, the Yiddish folk songs of his mother’s kitchen, the klezmer music of a local wedding band and his own violin.

  “You played the violin?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yes. One of my father’s friends was teaching me to play.” Wiesel had spoken before about the songs of his youth—he was even known to sing in public from time to time—but the violin? What happened to the violin?

  “Juliek,” he said. “After Juliek I couldn’t play again.”

  It had been years since I read Wiesel’s first book, Night, a heart-wrenching account of his time desperately trying to stay alive as a teenage boy trapped in a series of Nazi death camps. He writes of getting to know Juliek, a young Jew from Warsaw who was afforded special privileges in the camps because he played the violin. Macabre as it sounds, musicians such as Juliek were needed to play the marches that kept the prisoners, like Wiesel and his father, in line. Many marched to their deaths to the sounds of the band at Auschwitz.

  In Night, Wiesel recounts that toward the end of the war, in a last desperate attempt to stay alive, he flees, taking refuge in a shed with other prisoners, some alive and some already dead. Exhausted from running all day and his foot inflamed with a painful infection, he falls off to sleep only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the tuneful sound of a violin. “The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living,” Wiesel writes with astonishment. “What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?”

  When Wiesel wakes the next morning he spots the violinist Juliek, slumped over, dead. “Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.”

  In Night, the smashed violin represents the death of hope. Although Wiesel survived the war and was able to rebuild his life, he told me that he could not go back to the violin. “I never played again,” he said.

  Wiesel and I spoke for an hour, about family, about writing, about domestic politics, about Israel, about the state of the world. In some ways, our conversation reminded me of a ritual that Mr. J and I had before our weekly lessons where we would share a cup of tea and catch up on each other’s lives and on the consequential events of our time.

  Afterward, Wiesel walked me to the closet of his office and took out my coat. He held it for me. I began to slip into my coat and then realized what was happening. Wiesel, a distinguished man in his eighties, was holding my coat for me. It was such a kind and courtly gesture, one that reminded me of Mr. J.

  Here is your coat, Ari, Mr. J said after our lesson. When I resisted, he would keep holding it until I relented. When I come to your house, you can do this for me. Now you are my guest.

  There was no sense in arguing with Mr. J, but Elie Wiesel? “What are you doing?” I said. “I should be holding your coat!” In some ways, I was addressing both of these great men in my life.

  I tried to wrest the coat from his hands but he was insistent.

  Wiesel helped me with my coat.

  “Thank you,” I said, and then added, “I once had a cello teacher who did the same for me every week after our lesson. He was Berlin-born and half Jewish, a wonderful man and a great cellist. You remind me of him.”

  “I take that as a high compliment,” Wiesel said with a smile. “Now, good luck with your music. But remember, Ari, you may play the cello, but you are a writer.”

  ANOTHER MAN MIGHT HAVE been flattered. Here was a Nobel Prize laureate and icon of his
generation telling me that I was a writer. But I wasn’t flattered; I was insulted. I didn’t say it, but I thought it: Why do you assume that I am only a writer? Maybe I’m also a musician. How do you know I’m not a cellist? Did you ever hear me play?

  “I’ve heard you play,” my wife, Shira, told me that night when I repeated what Wiesel had said. “And, sweetheart, you are not a musician.”

  Shira is a most supportive wife. But she also won’t allow me to wallow in my illusions. I was studying with Mr. J when Shira and I first started dating in 1983. She saw my love for the instrument—and the man. But she had also watched my cello obsession wax and wane over the decades of our marriage. I clearly hadn’t convinced her that my latest infatuation with LSO was any different from earlier attempts to master the instrument.

  After Mr. J died, I tried out other teachers but none of them had the faith in me that he did.

  After I committed to performing at my birthday party, I turned to a teacher named Noah Hoffeld, a versatile young cellist whose repertoire ranged well beyond the classical. Noah was more likely to play in rock clubs, churches, and synagogues than concert halls. He was laid-back and easy­going. His music studio was like a Zen retreat center with busts of the Buddha and burning candles and incense. But he could also dish out some tough love.

  “Ari, you’ve plateaued,” Noah told me after working with me on and off for almost a year. He spoke about other adult students he had who never missed a day of practice and who kept improving. “I can’t continue to teach you unless you try harder, much harder.” I was shocked at his strident tone. After all, I was paying him handsomely—and he was going to drop me? I assured him that I was practicing, although practicing is one of those things you can never seem to do enough of.

  “Ari, I expect more,” he said sternly.

  I started playing every night. Some nights it was just fifteen or twenty minutes and some nights longer but not much longer, except on the weekends, when I had more time and could play during the day. My commitment was to at least hold the cello every night. You can’t even begin to call yourself a musician unless you play every day, Mr. J said.

  With practice, my cello playing improved but not my relationship with our neighbors. We live in a sturdy one-hundred-year-old apartment building on a busy avenue in New York City just a block from Columbia University, where I teach. The apartment has thick walls and high ceilings, but a cello can sound rather loud especially late at night when the traffic on the street slows down. Our neighbor András complained. I didn’t know much about András. I knew he was from Hungary and that he and his wife had two small children (we saw them in the elevator). We knew he ran marathons (we saw him dashing through the park) but that was about it. They were extremely quiet people. We never heard a peep out of them—no music, no singing, no raised voices—and it seemed that they expected the same from us.

  We, however, are a volatile bunch, a lot like Tevye’s clan in Anatevka. Music, singing, and raised voices are just the beginning. Arguing, fighting, and debating—all good-natured, of course—are common in our house. We have no milk cow, but we do have two Pomeranians, Alfie and Nala, who can get pretty yappy at times. András had at times complained about our upright piano, which our son Adam played with abandon in his youth, but he seemed especially sensitive to my cello playing. András would often call the house to ask us to keep it down. He got so annoying that we stopped answering the phone. Then he took to climbing the flight of stairs between us and knocked on our door. “Can you keep it down? Do you know what time it is?” András was standing there in his pajamas. I often wondered if András would complain if I was any good at the cello. After all, it wasn’t that late. Maybe it wasn’t the hour but the music?

  My children were far more tolerant of my cello playing, but I had a feeling that they were not fully convinced of my abilities. I told them I needed their forbearance just a little while longer. “Let me get to my sixtieth birthday. If I can’t play by then, I’ll give it up.”

  Adam, who moved to Germany after college to start a writing career, asked Shira during one of their marathon Skype conversations, “Is Dad really going to subject every­body to his cello playing at his birthday party?” Adam wasn’t a roll-your-eyes-at-Dad teen. He was twenty-five and making a living as a freelance music writer and opera critic in Berlin. He knew good music . . . and bad.

  My daughter, Emma, took a gentler approach. “Dad, you have such a nice voice. Why don’t you sing some folk songs at your party?” Emma was twenty-one and a college junior who had just given up as a voice major and turned to philosophy. She had to stop singing because she developed polyps on her vocal cords. But she loved music more than ever.

  The only one who believed in me was my fourteen-year-old son Judah, himself a cellist. “It’s really not hard, Dad. You can do it.” Of course, it was easy for Judah. He’d been playing cello since he was six years old and was damn good at it. When I thought about it, the whole thing didn’t make much sense. Judah had been playing for eight years and I’d been playing—off and on—for thirty-five. So why was he so good and I wasn’t?

  JUDAH HAS THE MOST important advantage for any musician—youth. It’s not just that learning is easier and the fingers move quicker, it’s the brain. As the neurologist and psychiatrist Oliver Sacks explains in his book Musicophilia, people who learn music at a young age actually grow a set of brain neurons that we late starters simply don’t have and will never have. Modern brain-imaging studies have enabled scientists to visualize the brains of musicians and to compare them with those of non­musicians. “The corpus callosum, the great commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain,” Sacks writes, “is enlarged in professional musicians.” Were the musicians just born with these bigger musical brains or were they developed over time? Sacks wonders. He cites studies that conclude “beyond dispute” that the brain of a person given intensive musical training at a young age develops differently from that of someone without musical training. “The effects of such training,” Sacks concludes, “are very great.” The anatomical changes, he adds, quoting the results of one popular study, “were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal.”

  Norman Doidge in his outstanding study The Brain That Changes Itself is even more pointed. Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, writes: “Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.”

  In short: the earlier you start and the more intensive practice you have under your belt, the bigger your “musical brain.”

  The ancient Jewish sources that I studied as a youngster corroborate Sack’s scientific findings. What you learn as a child sticks with you, says the Talmud, the library of Jewish lore and law. I guess I remember that one because I learned it as a kid.

  The odds were stacked against me. I was in my late fifties, my musical brain was puny, and many of the people around me thought I was crazy. “Don’t you have better things to do?” a few of them asked. I had a wife and three children, one in college, one in middle school, and one living abroad on his own. I also had a bad back—a ruptured disk on the third vertebra to be exact—and it went out every so often, making tying my shoes, let alone toting and playing a large instrument, a challenge. And I was a professor of journalism, with an ever-renewing cohort of students and a growing number of former students, many of whom were panicked about their jobs or prospects for employment in the increasingly unstable field of journalism.

  My profession was undergoing the greatest upheaval since Gutenberg invented movable type almost six hundred years earlier. The Internet had changed everything, from how news is gathered to how it is consumed. The authoritative names in news like the Washington Post and CBS were being replaced by Yahoo and Google and th
e Huffington Post and other outlets that didn’t even exist a few years earlier. The New York Times, where I worked for twenty years before coming to teach at Columbia, was laying off reporters and editors. Newspapers around the country were cutting back their operations or simply folding.

  The newspaper business that I grew up with was becoming the news business. In my youth if you didn’t read the newspapers, you tuned into the evening news. But almost no one was watching them anymore, either. I remember gathering around the television after dinner to watch Walter Cronkite assure us that “that’s the way it is.” Instead, television viewers had migrated to the opinion-laden and endless talk shows of Fox and MSNBC. Instead of “that’s the way it is,” we were hearing “that’s the way we want it to be.” Young people were getting their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. Books were rapidly being replaced by handheld electronic devices called Kindle and Nook. The growth of e-books was so steady that many predicted that old-fashioned paper books would soon disappear.

  On top of all that, the economy was tanking in the year I was turning sixty. The venerable investment house of Lehman Brothers had declared bankruptcy the year before and the government was faced with the decision of either letting other businesses, especially the auto industry, go under or trying to shore them up with government bailouts.