The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

  Aside from factual errors—I did not say it on the first day of class and I don’t use words like gadgetry—I did say “Fuck new media,” and there was no living it down. The Web is an echo chamber and my comment was picked up by magazines, newspaper websites, and dozens of blogs. There were over seventy comments alone on the New York Magazine website, most of them condemning me and asking how Columbia University could continue to employ such an irrelevant professor. I was called a “dinosaur,” a Luddite, and worse. The embrace of the digital future was so complete that anyone who treasured the past was the enemy.

  There was only one thing for me to do: I turned off my computer, went home, and played my cello.

  BAR MITZVAH

  There are many elements that go into a bar mitzvah, the coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys as they turn thirteen. There are the essentials, like synagogue and food, and there are the singular themes that reflect the interests of the bar mitzvah boy. We knew Judah would play cello at his bar mitzvah; it is just a big part of who he is.

  The challenge was how best to find a time for Judah to play. Judah was going to have his bar mitzvah on a weekend in June at our synagogue, an Orthodox shul in Manhattan. The bad news was that the Orthodox do not allow instruments to be played on the Sabbath. The good news was that since it was the summer, the Sabbath does not arrive until late in the evening. We asked our guests to arrive for a six-thirty cello recital followed by candle lighting to usher in the Sabbath at eight. Judah prepared five classical works for the occasion, among them short pieces by Beethoven, Lully, and Dvořák. When the guests arrived, Judah took the stage and played with confidence and a sense of ownership. For four of the pieces he was accompanied on keyboard by our friend Jay, a mathematician and Wall Street analyst, who is a musician at heart. Judah’s fifth piece, a solo, was an excerpt from one of Bach’s famous cello suites. He felt at home with the music, the shul, and his family.

  We thought it would be nice to round out Judah’s concert with some additional cello playing. Judah’s teacher Laura was a fine performer but she had moved to New Haven to complete her master’s in music at Yale. Mr. J was sadly gone. I decided instead to invite a cellist named Noah who I had heard at another West Side synagogue, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, where instruments are played on the Sabbath. I asked Noah if he could think of something appropriate to play for a bar mitzvah. I wasn’t sure there was anything appropriate; the most famous Jewish piece for cello is Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre,” based on the somber atonement themes of Yom Kippur, hardly a bar mitzvah–friendly piece. Noah assured me that there was a lot of Jewish music for the cello. In fact, many composers used the cello to express Jewish themes because they were often trying to replicate the voice of the cantor. Among the possibilities he mentioned were two pieces by Ernest Bloch—“Schelomo” and “From Jewish Life.”

  Noah came up with something even better. He composed a special “Musical Tribute to Judah” that included melodies from the Torah and Haftorah readings as well as songs from the Sabbath liturgy. Noah’s playing was inspired and helped transition our party from a concert to the Sabbath. Noah would soon help me with my own playing, too.

  As the Sabbath arrived, we locked Judah’s cello and Jay’s keyboard in the synagogue office and returned to the Orthodox way of keeping the holy day. We prayed that night and the next morning and Judah was called to the Torah to read and officially become a Jewish man. There was a lot of singing and chanting but there were no instruments. The synagogue was packed to overflowing with the shul regulars plus our friends and relatives. Someone on the street asked me if it was a special Jewish holiday. “For my family, it is,” I responded.

  JUDAH’S BAR MITZVAH CAME forty-six years after mine. Mine was marked not by the cello but by my voice. The theme of my bar mitzvah was not Bach or Mozart but the Jewish singer and songwriter Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Even as a boy I was deeply moved by the music of Carlebach, a German refugee who revolutionized Jewish music in the decades after the Holocaust. Shlomo, as I knew him, emigrated from Berlin as a teenager with his parents on the eve of the Second World War. While the understandable reaction to the Nazi horrors was mourning and sadness, Shlomo picked up a guitar and gave American Jews songs of hope, joy, and redemption. He produced some wonderful early LPs, which I listened to again and again in my youth. There were songs like “Od Yishama” (“May It Be Heard”), which became a standard at Jewish weddings, and “Am Yisrael Chai,” (“The People of Israel Live”), which was sung at rallies in support of Soviet Jewry and the young State of Israel. These were catchy anthem-like songs that were easy to learn. But Shlomo also wrote several intricate and majestic cantorial pieces. And I sang one of them, “Mimkomcha,” at my bar mitzvah. Soon after my bar mitzvah, which was held in Queens, my mother, my brothers, and I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was there that I finally got to meet my idol, whose father, Naftali Carlebach, was the rabbi of a synagogue just a few blocks from our apartment.

  The older Rabbi Carlebach looked and acted like a proper European Torah scholar. He had a formal, distinguished manner about him and a wispy white beard that seemed to hang around his face like a cloud. By comparison, Shlomo was a rebel. He was warm and physical with all those he met. He favored vests over his white shirt but rarely wore a jacket. In California’s Bay Area he established The House of Love and Prayer, something of a hippie shul. He once quipped, “If I called it Temple Israel, no one would come.”

  I met Shlomo on his frequent trips to New York and, as a teenager, I became his part-time “roadie,” accompanying him to concerts, carrying his guitar, and trying to keep him moving toward the stage when he’d stop to hug and greet fans. For me as a teenager in the 1960s, Shlomo gave me a chance to grow my hair long and rebel without ever leaving the bosom of my traditional community. I was singing protest songs but they were from the liturgy of the synagogue and I was marching for causes like Soviet Jewry and Zionism that were part of my legacy.

  I lost touch with Shlomo for many years, but his music and his spirit of Jewish activism deeply influenced me. Toward the end of his life, I had an opportunity to travel to Morocco with him and a group of American doctors who had arranged a tour “in the footsteps” of Judaism’s most famous doctor of the Middle Ages: Maimonides. The doctors engaged Shlomo to travel with us as a teacher and singer.

  A master storyteller, Shlomo performed for the small Jewish communities of Fez and Casablanca as well as for our Muslim hosts. He was also featured at a banquet organized by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture. There he sang Hebrew songs with a twelve-piece Arab string and percussion band. It was a remarkable and hopeful moment.

  I sat with him on the flight back from Casablanca to New York. He was exhausted and weak from the journey. In a moment of candor, he told me that he was not afraid of death. “When I die, I will go to heaven and there I will meet many wonderful people. I will meet my mother and my father. And I will meet Johann Sebastian Bach.”

  “And what will you say to Bach?” I asked.

  “Well, first I will finally find out if we are related. Bach and Carlebach. How could we not be?

  “Then, I will tell him, ‘Mr. Bach, you wrote many wonderful symphonies and concertos, but I, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, wrote something great, too. I wrote “Mimkomcha.” ’ ”

  “Mimkomcha” starts very low, down by the cello’s low C string, but then it settles for a sweet and soft lyrical section in the comfortable middle range of the male voice. The song suddenly becomes strident as the prayer gets louder and louder and asks of God: “When, oh when, will you rule again over Zion?” And then it climbs inexorably higher as it demands: “May our eyes see your kingdom, as is said in the songs of your splendor, written by David your righteous anointed one: ‘The Lord shall reign forever.’ ”

  The last notes are confrontational yet so hopeful. The prayer holds God to a standard and yet embodies a faith that God will deliver his people. By using the full range of the human voice, Shlomo is expressing a vas
t range of human emotion. For me, the song was never just about Zion. It was about making demands of life, of fighting for what we need, even when it seems beyond our reach.

  I told Shlomo that, given the musical range and intensity of “Mimkomcha,” it was the perfect song for the cello. “Yes, the cello,” he said with a smile. “It was a favorite instrument of Bach—and of Carlebach, too! How I love the cello. It must be the instrument that they play in heaven.”

  PRACTICING

  After Judah’s bar mitzvah, I asked Noah to help prepare me for my birthday concert. We met sporadically at his studio on the West Side. After a year of lessons, I thought I was making progress, but Noah wasn’t convinced. That’s when he said that I had to practice harder and more often. Or he’d drop me. It was so out of character. I was shocked. Noah—tall and thin with his dark wavy hair pushed back high on his forehead—was a gentle soul. He had scented candles and pictures of yogis in his music studio. He made you take off your shoes before entering. It was like a shrine. Didn’t I already demonstrate my commitment by coming for lessons every week?

  I promised him that I wouldn’t come back for the next lesson unless I practiced every day.

  Practicing music is a strange art. You just don’t pick up your instrument and play a song. You have to begin by playing scales, like the most basic C scale.

  When he was ninety-one, Casals was approached by a student who asked, “Maestro, why do you continue to practice?” Casals replied, “Because I am making progress.”

  In my own way, I, too, am making progress. But it’s still strange. Casals’s daily routine would be the equivalent of Stephen King or John Grisham or Toni Morrison beginning each day by writing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMO NOPQRSTUVWXYZ.

  But that’s not all. Then the great writer would have to type: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” that old typewriter formula that tests every letter of the alphabet. That’s roughly what musicians play after they run through the scales. They do exercises just to make sure every note is clear. Then, and only then, do they take on an actual piece of music. And they play it again and again and again. After Casals played the C scale, I am told, he played Bach’s cello suites. Every day. It would be like Philip Roth rereading Hamlet. Each day.

  Somehow reading builds on itself so that what you did yesterday is still retained. When it comes to music, though, it is almost as if we are learning and relearning our art daily.

  Of course, we carry our earlier lessons with us, but we bring them back each day and build on them, step by tiny step. And the longer we are away from it, even a day or two, the harder it is to recapture. Imagine being away for twenty-five years. That is why I was frustrating myself and my teachers. I needed to keep a steady momentum going to be sure I retained what I could and kept advancing.

  Luckily, I had a geographical advantage. I enjoy the great luxury of working one block from my Manhattan apartment. If I had a free hour during the day, I went home and played cello. I no longer swam or jogged. I made music instead. Consistent practice—of scales, of technique, and of music—was good for my instrument, but not good for the waistline. I gained twenty pounds. I went from a thirty-five-inch waist to a thirty-eight. I had never been so heavy. I didn’t like what I was turning into but I reasoned that the trade-off was worthwhile. I could always lose the weight, but this felt like my last best shot at becoming proficient in making the music that I loved the most.

  THE VIEW FROM THE AUDIENCE

  In addition to my regular teaching responsibilities, I occasionally do educational consulting for colleges and universities to help them develop new programs. I had been in touch for several years with Hadassah Academic College in Israel, a vocational college in Jerusalem that was interested in starting a journalism program. While most universities in the region cater to either Palestinian Arabs or Israeli Jews, Hadassah has managed to attract both. It takes advantage of its location right on the border between East and West Jerusalem and has classes for everyone from ultra-Orthodox women in wigs called sheitels to Arab women in head coverings called hijabs.

  A few months before my birthday, I was granted a Fulbright scholarship to spend a month in Israel helping Hadassah. Shira and the kids were fully supportive, but I worried about my cello. Practicing was especially crucial and I did not want to fall behind. Taking my own cello was not practical; professional cellists will actually buy a seat for their instrument, but Hadassah was not about to pay for that. Storing a cello in baggage hold is a risky proposition. I’ve heard horror stories of splintered wood, collapsed bridges, and busted strings.

  Through a musician friend in Israel, I managed to find an instrument rental business in Jerusalem and reserved a cello for the month. Before I had a chance to pick it up, I took a day trip to the city of Petra, in the south of Jordan, to see this ancient city, truly one of the wonders of the world. Petra was cut out of the desert rock more than two thousand years ago by a people known as the Nabataeans. It has been remarkably preserved and was not even known to the Western world until its discovery in 1812, although it gained real fame in 1989 when it was the setting for the adventure movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade starring Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.

  I had my Petra adventure, but I paid for it afterward. The long bus rides to and from Jordan and the arduous walk along the rocky ancient city took a toll on my back. I could hardly move the next morning. I finally rolled out of bed and went crashing to the floor, then made my way on all fours to the bathroom. A friend brought me some pain medication but it provided only temporary relief. A fellow back sufferer in Jerusalem directed me to her osteopath, who manipulated the bones and muscles of my back but that relief, too, was temporary. Not only did I not get to practice cello, I barely got to the college. Most of the trip was spent struggling with my bad back. My biggest fear was flying home. I was not looking forward to sitting in a tiny seat in a cramped airplane for eleven hours. I loaded up on painkillers and boarded the flight. I made it home with the realization that I was going to have to put my cello dreams on hold.

  In New York, my physician sent me to a physiatrist who prescribed a course of physical therapy. I went twice a week and gradually began to feel better. Soon I was able to sit at my desk, but the idea of wrapping my body around a cello seemed still far off. I am sure physical aliments happen to younger players, too, but they are especially threatening to late starters like me. We are more vulnerable to back pain—and every other pain, it seems—and we heal more slowly.

  While this was going on, Elena sent around a note informing us that LSO had lost its performance space. The old coat factory turned actors’ studio booted us out. Elena found a rehearsal space in midtown near Times Square but needed something bigger for the “open rehearsals” that LSO offered four times a year. Big spaces in New York come with big price tags, something that LSO could not afford. I called my synagogue and made a “match.” LSO could play at Ramath Orah on those four Sundays at a nominal fee. To save money for a custodian, I agreed to open and close the building.

  The marriage of the shul and the orchestra was a good one. On more than one occasion the orchestra was tuning up while the afternoon prayer service was getting underway. One Sunday afternoon they were short the full complement of men—ten are needed for prayer in an Orthodox congregation—and the rabbi came down to the social hall to enlist me. “Are there any other Jews here we can recruit?” he asked. Dan, the violinist, seemed pleased to accommodate. He couldn’t recite the Hebrew prayers but was certainly comfortable with the choreography of the synagogue—the getting up and the getting down and the subtle bow that punctuates the Aleynu prayer.

  The next time LSO gathered at the synagogue, Dan even brought his own yarmulke and asked me several times if he was needed for a minyan. His enthusiasm reminded me of what Elena had said about how people who stretch to accommodate music in their lives might keep stretching for other new experiences.

  Because of my back problems I was unable to play at our concert, but I was
eager to participate as part of the audience. There were about thirty players that day and some forty guests in the hall. I took my seat among the guests, glad that I could sit without pain.

  Magda raised her baton and I heard the music, imperfect to be sure, but beautiful nonetheless. But, there, from my new perspective, I noticed something that I did not see when I played with LSO. And that was the look on every musician’s face. The violinists, the violists, the double bassists, the cellists—they all looked happy. They were concentrating on the music, some with furrowed brows and clenched jaw, but there were also small, almost imperceptible grins. And when Magda conducted the final notes, and held her hands up as the last sound softly faded, those grins broke out into huge smiles. Then she swept her hands upward and everyone stood. The audience continued to applaud and the musicians, beaming, seemed almost surprised by the adulation. Each person stood just a little bit taller than when the concert started.

  The joy in making music was palpable. Sitting in the audience made me eager to be back on stage. I longed to wrap my arms around my cello again and resume my cello dreams.

  BACK IN THE SADDLE

  My physical therapist said I was not ready. My wife said I was not ready. Everyone warned me of a relapse. “You’re better off if you wait a few more weeks,” said Toni, the therapist, applying pressure to my lower back as I did modified sit-ups under her supervision. Toni, barely over five feet tall, was standing on a stepping stool to reach my back as I lay on the padded exam table. I struggled to lift off the table as she pushed down on my lower vertebrae. It seemed like she was trying to snap them back into place. “We are just getting your back into shape. Sitting in front of a cello is not going to be good for you right now.”