The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

  “Now let’s try it again—and this time with courage. Ready? Measure sixteen . . . my shoe size.”

  The rehearsal hour flew by. And every week, the kids got better and better.

  AVERY FISHER HALL

  Judah’s first year with the Morningside Orchestra was the thirty-fifth year since the umbrella organization, the Inter­School Orchestras, was founded. Over the years, many of the young musicians who started with ISO went on to distinguished careers in music, among them the trumpeter with the Canadian Brass, the associate principal cellist at the St. Louis Symphony, the conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, the principal bassoonist at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a timpani player at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  ISO was celebrating the anniversary by holding a gala benefit concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. While ISO parents like me were dazzled that our children were going to have such an opportunity, the significance of playing on the great stage at Avery Fisher, home to the New York Philharmonic, was lost on most of the children. The New York Philharmonic is the orchestra of Leonard Bernstein, Gustav Mahler, Leopold Stokowski, Arturo Toscanini, and Zubin Mehta. All the great cellists I revered played on this stage, including Casals, du Pré, Rostro­povich, and, most of all, Mr. J.

  I was blown away by the thought of the impending concert.

  Like the old joke about Carnegie Hall, there is only one way to get to Avery Fisher and, that is, “practice, practice, practice.” Robert put the children through their musical paces again and again and again. They rehearsed “Overture for Orchestra” by the twentieth-century Czech-American composer Vaclav Nelhybel, a piece called “Engines of Resistance” by the contemporary American composer Larry Clark, and the Finale from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The children played the music to death. Stopped. Started. Got lost. Got found. Laughed. Joked. And played it again.

  More than thirty hours of orchestra practice for what amounted to barely fifteen minutes on the Avery Fisher stage. And that, of course, does not include all the hours and hours of practice that each child prepared on his or her own.

  The night of the concert was a triumph. Judah’s orchestra began with its three musical offerings, and then the more advanced musical groups in the InterSchool Orchestras took over, playing increasingly sophisticated works with greater confidence and musicianship. It was an evening of Stravinsky, Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi, all played by the young musicians of the InterSchool Orchestras. But for me nothing equaled the moment in which the smallest players, Judah among them, came out onto the Avery Fisher stage at the end of the evening to join all the musicians in a chorus of “America the Beautiful.”

  As I watched my son on stage, I thought of another evening almost forty years ago in this same hall. It was 1970 and it wasn’t called Avery Fisher yet—that happened in 1973 after Fisher, an amateur violinist who made his fortune inventing and marketing stereo equipment, donated $10.5 million to refurbish what was then simply called Philharmonic Hall. I was twenty and was seated between my mother and a man she was dating, at a performance of Beethoven’s famous mass called the Missa Solemnis.

  Jack knew a great deal about classical music and during one of our first meetings, he grilled me on my tastes. I told him that I liked “light” classical, such as Mozart, Handel, and Tchaikovsky. I didn’t really know what I was talking about since my exposure to Mozart was Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Handel meant Messiah, and Tchaikovsky meant the 1812 Overture.

  Then I dug myself even deeper by adding, “Tell you the truth, I can’t stand the heavy stuff like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.”

  Jack furrowed his brow and announced, “That’s because you don’t know them.”

  “Judy,” he called to my mom, “I’ve got to educate this boy.”

  The night of the Missa Solemnis concert, Jack bought three tickets. My mother and I went to the Philharmonic together, took our seats, and, as the lights were dimming, Jack slid into the seat next to me.

  The music was indeed “heavy.” Beethoven began this solemn mass—one of several he wrote—in 1819 to honor of one of his patrons, the Archduke Rudolf who was being installed as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. The story goes that Beethoven was so obsessed with this symphony that he missed the deadline to perform the work at the installation. Instead, the Missa Solemnis was first performed in 1824 in St. Petersburg. It is a grand and ambitious work that makes great demands on its soloists, chorus, orchestra—and audience. This is about as heavy as it gets, and, yet, I felt myself drawn into its spectacle and majesty. My eyes scanned the stage and I took in the violinists, the flutists, the French horn players, and the percussionists with their cymbals, timpani, and drums. But I kept coming back to the cellists and their beautiful instruments. I could isolate the sound—the deep, dark, and rich timbres of the cello—and thought it the most wondrous on the stage. If any instrument spoke to me, this was it.

  But even more powerful that night was the drama unfolding around me. I had not met many of my mother’s suitors in the years since her divorce and this night’s circumstance was most unusual. After the concert, Jack took my mother’s hand and said, “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Goldman.” He then turned and was off. My mother and I went home alone.

  A short time later, Jack married my mother. They were married for twenty-five years until my mother’s death from cancer in 1995. Over the years, Jack, a physicist and successful corporate executive, was very good to me. He supported me financially (through grad school and until I landed my first job) and he encouraged me in my career as a reporter. He would sometimes proudly show to his friends an article I wrote and call me not his “stepson” but his “son.” And, as he had done with “heavy” classical music, Jack enriched my intellectual and social skills in ways that helped me in my personal and professional lives.

  As I watched Judah on the stage in 2007, I wished my mother could have seen this: her grandson playing cello at Avery Fisher Hall. For now, I focused on the music. As I had done so long ago in this hall, I took in all the wonders of the orchestra—the violins, the woodwinds, the percussion section—until I came again to the cellos. And there, among the players, was Judah, playing the music that spoke to me on this night in a whole new way.

  THE OLDEST KID IN THE ORCHESTRA

  After his Avery Fisher debut, Judah signed up with the youth orchestra for another season and then I hatched a plot. Simply put, I was jealous. I, too, wanted to play in an orchestra. I had had a few experiences with amateur orchestras in my twenties but I found that the conductors had little patience with rookies. To make matters worse, I had hardly touched a cello in years, unless you count a few failed efforts to jump-start my cello playing. Most of my contact with the cello was carrying and unpacking Judah’s instrument. I went to our storage closet, fished out my old cello, and gave it the once over. It was Bill, the beat-up student cello that Mr. J sold to me for five hundred dollars in 1976. Now, with the passage of time, it looked even worse. It suffered from the years of neglect and the vagaries of New York apartment living where heat seemed to be coming out of the old radiators in all four seasons. The cello’s bridge, the fine wood structure that held up the strings, had collapsed. There were hairline cracks in the wood and some of the joints—the places where two pieces of wood came together—had separated. Like many aging beauties, my cello was in need of reconstructive surgery. Mr J used to talk about his cello repairman as his “luthier,” from the French word luth or lute. A luthier makes and repairs string instruments like violins, cellos, and guitars. This was certainly a job for a luthier, and I sought out my very own at a violin repair shop near Lincoln Center. The proprietor took one look at my ailing instrument and dismissed it out of hand.

  “It would cost you more to fix that than you paid for it,” he told me without even asking me how much I paid for it. And then, turning up his nose, he added: “I don’t fix student cellos.”

  “How much,” I asked him, reasoning that even luthiers must have their price. “Fif
teen hundred,” he told me.

  Sparsamkeit erhalt das haus, I heard Mr. J say. Frugality keeps the house. Move on. You can get a new one for less.

  But it connects me to you, I heard myself responding. I need to keep trying to get the sound out of it that you did.

  Mr. J did not argue.

  “Fifteen hundred it is,” I said. The luthier, fearing I would never come back, made me pay up front.

  MR. J’S OLD CELLO restored, I needed a teacher. Judah was doing so well with Laura that I asked her if she would be willing to spend an extra hour at our apartment on Sunday mornings teaching me.

  “How tough do you want me to be on you?” Laura asked at our first lesson. Although it was obvious, I told her that my goals for myself and my goals for Judah were quite different. “I think he can be great. As for me, I just want to make music.”

  I had no illusions about what I could do on the cello. I remember once joking with Mr. J that I was going to quit journalism and spend full time on my instrument. Apparently that was not something to joke about. “That’s not a good idea, Ari,” he said sternly. “Being a musician is a very hard life. Besides, you have a profession. Let us just play for the love of it.”

  I wanted to be sure that Laura understood that, too. I knew that she was an exacting teacher. I saw the way she worked with Judah. I told her that she did not have to correct my every missed note and wrong bow direction. “Go easy on me.”

  Laura and I went over the basics of holding the instrument and doing the C scale. She was pleased I knew as much as I did. “You had a good teacher,” she said admiringly. After some more preliminaries, Laura and I settled on a piece that I could comfortably play, Minuet no. 3 by Bach, the last song in the first Suzuki book.

  Judah took my first lesson with Laura as an opportunity to turn the tables on me. I had sat in on his lessons for so long, now he sat in on mine. “I think you should start with ‘Twinkle,’ ” he said, referring to the first song in the first Suzuki book. “No shortcuts!” He was just drawing on his own experience with Laura. She would not let him go on to the next piece in the Suzuki book until he mastered the one he was working on.

  I was caught, but came up with something of a re­joinder.

  “I’m learning it the Hebrew way,” I told him with a weak smile. “We start at the end of the book.” Satisfied, Judah lost interest and went off to his room.

  Laura and I got off to a good start, but progress was slow. I was trying to get back my game and take it a step further. As I began to play again, I remembered all over again how the art of making music involved so many moving parts: the cello, the bow, the fingers, the hands, the strings, the bridge, the pegs, not to mention the other elements Mr. J emphasized: the body, the voice, and the mind. I found that I could get some of them right, but not all of them right at the same time.

  With a few weeks of lessons under my belt, I felt confident enough to approach Judah’s conductor, Robert, and asked if I could play with the Morningside Orchestra. Much to my surprise, he was receptive to the idea. “You’ll be the oldest kid here,” he told me with a smile. All my fears about not being good enough faded away. Here, at last, was a conductor who liked rookies. Best of all, Robert didn’t even make me audition. I asked and was instantly admitted.

  Even now, all these years later, I marvel at how easy it was. After all, if this had been Little League or the school play or the science fair, I’m sure I would have been shown the door. How absurd for an adult to join any of those activities—and how potentially suspicious. But here I was given complete trust. I was supremely grateful. Robert could have told me to find an adult orchestra, to play with people my own age. But this was even better. What better place to restart my unfulfilled cello ambitions than in a youth orchestra?

  And so, in my late fifties, I became the oldest member of Morningside, the youngest music group of the InterSchool Orchestras. Judah, who was then twelve, was cool with my joining. A year later that might not have been the case, but the sullenness of adolescence had not yet kicked in with my youngest son. I was not (yet) the embarrassment I was destined to become.

  What’s more, Judah even let me sit next to him in the cello section! Still, while Judah was happy to have me nearby, the conductor did not think that was a good idea. “A large part of being in an orchestra is socialization,” Robert explained after I spent a couple of sessions sitting next to Judah. “So we are going to mix things up,” he said. However, I suspect there were other factors at play. After all, Robert didn’t need a six-foot-tall adult sitting in the front row, blocking out all the little kids. Obediently, I took a seat in the back, sharing a stand with a confident fifth grader named Francesca who, when I got lost in the score, was kind enough to point out the place where I should be.

  One of the first lessons about being in an orchestra with children was this: I needed more practice than they did. Orchestral playing came a lot easier to Judah than it did to me. In truth, he never practiced the orchestra music during the week—he was working instead on the solo pieces that he was learning with Laura—but I desperately needed to practice. In fact, Laura and I spent most of our lessons preparing for the Morningside Orchestra rehearsals.

  Among the pieces the orchestra was preparing that season were selections from Holst’s The Planets and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden. I was having an especially hard time with the sixteenth notes in The Planets. They were itty-bitty sounds that suddenly came bursting out of all the instruments around me. I heard them, I could even sing them, but my bow and fingers just wouldn’t move fast enough to play them.

  Just play the first note of each bar, Mr. J whispered in my ear. The important thing is to keep up a steady rhythm. Stopping is not an option.

  Robert spent a good deal of time on dynamics, especially when it came to the Holst piece. Dynamics is your volume control button, Mr. J reminded me. You can turn it up or you can turn it down. In a piece of music, dynamics are indicated by markings centered on two terms, piano and forte, indicated in the music by p and f. But there are more subtle variations like mezzopiano (mp), which is moderately soft, and mezzoforte (mf), moderately loud. But why deal in moderation when you can deal in extremes, like music noted ppp (as soft as possible) and fff (as loud as possible). The Planets by Holst, asks for even more, ffff, which I guess means even louder than possible. What a great piece to play with a bunch of kids. We got as noisy as we could without ever losing the music.

  Louder! Louder! Mr. J was now shouting in my ear. To get louder, check your ninety-degree angle. It’s not about pressing hard. It’s about the ninety degrees. The bow must be at a ninety-degree angle to the string. He stood in front of me. I saw his familiar face and his strong hands, but his body had become a full-length mirror. Look in the mirror! Is your bow at a ninety-degree angle to the strings? Looks like fifty to me. Okay. Now, sixty, seventy, eighty. You’ve got it! Ninety degrees. And your sound! Forte-fortissimo!

  THERE WAS NO BIG Lincoln Center gala planned the year I joined ISO as there had been for the thirty-fifth anniversary. Instead we played at a smaller and funkier venue called Symphony Space, a performing arts center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. To me, though, the venue hardly made a difference. I was about to experience playing cello with an orchestra before an audience in a proper concert hall.

  There was great anticipation and excitement on the night of the concert even though we had the most forgiving of audiences: parents, siblings, and friends. Shira was there in her dual roles. While many of the orchestra members had mothers in the crowd, I was the only one with a wife sitting there.

  We boys wore black pants, white shirts, and ties and the girls wore knee-length dark skirts and white blouses. Though I did my best to blend in, I felt that I stood out like Mr. Johnson’s lethargic Thanksgiving monster. Still, I played, surrounded by beautiful, if not perfectly executed, music. Of course, we made some mistakes but you wouldn’t have known it from the audience’s reaction. We were praised, cheered, applauded, and laude
d. I loved the warm embrace of the crowd, but perhaps the greatest compliment came when Judah and I were packing up our cellos backstage after the concert. “Nice going, Dad. I knew you could do it.”

  PART FOUR

  The New York Late-Starters String Orchestra

  Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  After my season with the kids at the Morningside Orchestra, I wrote a feature article for my old newspaper about playing music with Judah called BIG CELLO, LITTLE CELLO. Underneath the title ran this momentous line: “For months, he watched his young son play. Then he took a seat beside him.” With that, the invitations started to pour in. I heard from numerous orchestras in New York—and around the country—inviting me to join.

  This is the moment you’ve been waiting for, Mr. J exhorted. Seize it!

  I remembered that after his retreat from the limelight, Mr. J conducted community orchestras, one at the Music Conservatory of Westchester and the other at the Armonk Village School of Music. The musical world is much bigger than the philharmonics. Seize it!

  Most of the orchestras that got in touch with me after the article appeared seemed out of my reach, some because of geography and others because of the skill level required, but one, the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra, seemed plausible. “I think you’ll fit in here,” read the note from one of the cofounders, Elena Rahona. I would come to know her as a bright, blue-eyed, bubbly, and athletic AIDS researcher in her early thirties.

  Elena is your classic late starter. She was born in Boston, the daughter of a sales and marketing manager for an international hotel chain, and, as she put it, grew up “up and down the East Coast”—from Massachusetts to New York to Florida to Vermont to Washington, D.C.—as her father’s work shifted locales. The thread through her childhood was sports, which helped her cope with each move the family made. “I knew that wherever I was, I could join a team. I was good. Someone would have me.” Elena played competitive soccer for nearly twenty-five years. “And when I wasn’t at practice I would be running or lifting weights or doing drills in my backyard.”