The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

  The LSO members arrived one by one on the promenade and were stricken. “How are we going to compete with that?” we wondered out loud. “Why did they put us here, next to a carnival?”

  Our conductor, Magda, was undaunted. She said that we would just have to outplay the honky-tonk. And we did. We played louder and with more confidence than we do at our rented space or at our usual “open rehearsal” concert space at Ramath Orah. Magda had prepared us for outdoor playing. She had warned there would be many distractions and told us that we were to ignore them all. “There are no subtleties out here,” she said. “The aim is to play louder than all the distractions. And, remember: never stop playing.”

  Though we had only about twenty minutes of material in our repertoire, the event organizers had booked us for an hour-long performance. While I was initially worried about boring the curious folk who had begun to assemble, our limited playlist was not a liability since our audience was a peripatetic one. Ambling past were families on their way to the amusement park below us, softball players in their team jerseys on their way to a game, couples strolling hand in hand, dog walkers with their designer pooches, Frisbee throwers, ice cream lickers, and tourists galore. Some passersby stopped to listen for a minute or two. Others took seats on the nearby park benches or found a place on the grass. Shira, in for the long haul, spread out a blanket, opened a bottle of wine, and was soon joined by our friends Scott and Ellen, who came to hear me play (and keep her company).

  When our twenty-minute program was through, we simply started all over again, as if our audience had totally changed, which, to a large extent, it had. We played some of the most popular music in the classical repertoire, like Pachelbel’s canon, which has a famously monotonous cello part. The cellos repeat a simple series of whole notes ad nauseum. It is a song in which the violins do all the hard work of playing the melody and the harmony in increasing complexity. The cellos just keep the beat.

  I felt sorry for our earliest audience because our first run-through of the Pachelbel was a disaster. Even we cellists, who didn’t have too much to mess up, messed up. Still we got it right the second time around and were downright brilliant on the third try. We also played another popular classic, Bach’s “Badiniere,” a brief and lively dance tune that takes its name from the French badiner, to jest. It was a light and sweet musical dessert.

  Soon after we began the “Badiniere,” a police helicopter arrived overhead and hovered there for the rest of the hour. While the police might have been searching for an escaped convict or a missing person, I imagined that they had stopped to hear us play. The helicopter drew a lot of attention, and made a considerable amount of noise, but we followed Magda’s admonition—“Never stop playing”—and kept going. When we were done, one of the violinists, a man named Lawrence, quipped that we played something never before attempted: “Bach’s Badinere for Strings and Helicopter.”

  We played what could at best be described as “incidental music.” Our audience was made up of folks with a lot of other options and distractions on a beautiful summer’s day. My first outdoor performance reminded me of an experiment that the Washington Post did in 2007 with the violinist Joshua Bell. The Post conspired with Bell to play in an indoor arcade outside the Washington Metro during the morning rush hour just to see what the reaction would be. With his good looks and abundant talent, Bell is one of the rock stars of the classical music world, commanding the attention of audiences in music halls around the world. But during that January morning rush hour in Washington, more than a thousand people passed by and gave him little notice. They also gave him little money—just over thirty-two dollars, thrown into his open violin case. All this while he played some of the most difficult and most beautiful music ever written on a Stradivarius valued at $3.5 million.

  Like the members of LSO, Bell acknowledged being nervous as he took his place outside the subway that morning. “It wasn’t exactly stage fright,” he told Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post writer, “but there were butterflies. I was stressing a little.” The strangest part, he recalled afterward, was that when he finished, there was no applause. He usually brings down the house. The Post experiment was, of course, an effort to show that people don’t appreciate what is around them while others may well pay too much for high culture (a ticket to a Joshua Bell concert can easily command a hundred dollars a seat). Weingarten’s article, “Pearls before Breakfast,” opened an international discussion about our relationship to public art and music. The story won the Post a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

  I can safely say that our ragged band of LSO amateurs received a good deal of respect, encouragement, and attention during our Central Park gig—and a lot more applause than Joshua Bell did.

  MY CELLO ESCAPADES AFTER my birthday were not only classical. One night Shira and I went to a music club in SoHo to hear a performance by our friend Ricky Orbach, a guitarist and songwriter who had just come out with a CD called New Midlife Crisis. True to its title, Ricky was a husband and father and jeweler who was returning to music after many years away from it. His music drew from several rock ’n’ roll genres. After the gig, we shared a drink with Ricky and I told him about my own musical midlife exploits. “You play the cello?” he asked. “I wrote a song, ‘Shoshana,’ that cries out for a cello. You must play with me.”

  A few weeks later, Ricky sent me a link to a recording of “Shoshana.” It sure was a depressing song, with lyrics like “Shoshana says, ‘My husband’s gone. Yes, the car crash, three injured kids.’ ” Perfect for the cello, I thought.

  The music was challenging. It required a great many position shifts up and down the fingerboard, but this was not an occasion to invoke the spirit of Mr. J. He’d gotten me to my sixtieth. That was enough. I decided to figure out “Shoshana” on my own. And I did.

  I joined Ricky for a four-hour rehearsal at a Lower East Side studio. There was Ricky, two guitarists, and me. At one point, when Ricky’s drummer showed up stoned, I felt like I was in a bad rock documentary (aka a rockumentary). At home, I practiced like crazy and couldn’t wait for our date, my first rock gig, at a club on the Lower East Side called the National Underground. Shira dressed in a short black dress, thigh-high kneesocks and Dr. Martens. I wore my regular professor clothes. She looked like she belonged far more than I did. The gig was called for eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and, as I approached the club, I was excited to see the name of our band listed in white chalk on a board at the entrance.

  I glided past the bouncer by taking a cool stance and pointing to the cello on my back. I went down a flight of stairs and heard the deafening sounds of a punk rock band whose name was on the chalkboard before ours. Aside from the band on stage and the barmaid, the place was pretty much empty. Soon Ricky’s guitarists showed up. (The drummer never did.) Then some of Ricky’s fans. A dozen, in all, including Ricky’s wife and mine. It was a big crowd compared to what the band before us drew.

  We rocked. I ended up playing “Shoshana” and one other of Ricky’s songs, called “Completion,” which also called for a cello. Then I took my seat in the audience, ordered a drink, and celebrated my first rock ’n’ roll gig.

  GRAND FINALE

  Judah’s musical journey has also taken some unexpected turns since my sixtieth birthday. Soon after his bar mitzvah, Judah became obsessed with rock music, especially the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My initial reaction was to remind him of all the cool rock bands that used cellos. I tried to introduce him to the music of Apocalyptica, Rasputina, Murder by Death, Cello Fury, and Aaron Minsky, also known as Von Cello. Judah was unimpressed and, frankly, so was I. “Okay. I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s get an electric pickup so we can amplify your cello. That way you can play rock cello.”

  Judah and I headed to a store in Lower Manhattan called David Gage String Instruments, a showroom and workshop where cellos and double basses were scattered across two stories of an old industrial loft. We entered
the workshop area, where we saw dozens of instruments in various stages of disrepair laid out on workbenches. Luthiers walked from table to table like so many emergency room doctors. The only difference was that they were wearing worn leather smocks instead of white coats.

  In addition to sales and repairs, David Gage String Instruments makes, sells, and installs a product called “The Realist,” an electronic pickup device that amplifies string instruments. “That’s the ticket,” I said, and off Judah’s cello went to the workshop to get amped. It took only minutes and then we began to shop for an amplifier to plug in the new equipment.

  William, our salesman, showed us some expensive professional amps, selling for a thousand dollars and more. I told Judah that this was way beyond what we could afford. “Then why did we get the pickup?” he asked quite reasonably.

  William saw my distress, looked around to be sure no one heard him, and said, “What you need is a bass guitar amp. That will work fine with your cello. We don’t sell those here, but you can get one for pretty cheap at Guitar Center on Fourteenth Street.”

  From the moment William uttered those words—“Guitar Center on Fourteenth Street”—our lives were not to be the same. When we entered the shop for the first time, I might as well have smashed Judah’s cello over the threshold. We bought the bass amp that day and Judah hooked it up to his cello that night, but rock cello never caught on in our house. Guitar Center did. The store became Judah’s Xanadu. He was then nearing fifteen and just beginning to make his way around the city on his own. Every free afternoon, every early night off from school, Judah headed down to Fourteenth Street, ogling the electric bases and guitars like older teen boys ogle girls. Within the next twelve months, he not only acquired a bass amp, but an electric bass guitar, two six-string electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, strings, picks, guitars stands, and a portable amp.

  Before my eyes, Judah was morphing from a classical cellist into a rock musician.

  To the strains of Fiddler on the Roof, I hear Tevye pleading with his youngest daughter Chava not to marry Fyedka, the handsome young non-Jewish Russian. “Never talk about this again,” he exclaims at the mere suggestion of their union.

  Like Tevye, I thought I could stem the tide.

  I wasn’t about to let him stop cello. He could play guitar if he wanted to, I said, but cello was his first instrument. His cello teacher would continue to come each week. And, let me make one thing perfectly clear, young man: no guitar lessons.

  Then one day Judah asked if I would come into his room. He had long before put away the toys that he so loved in his youth: Pajama Sam, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! Most recently, Judah went through a Nipponophile phase, in part fueled by the Japanese comic called Manga that he devoured. He had taken to labeling with Japanese trans­lation stickers everything in his room and in the house, from his bed (shou) to the toaster in the kitchen (tosuta) to the dogs that ran amuck in the house (inu).

  But, now, on this night, there was little evidence of his old obsessions. Instead there were four guitars suspended from hooks above his bed. Wires and amps and distortion pedals crisscrossed the floor. His cello had recently been relegated to the living room, on an instrument stand near mine.

  “Dad,” he announced, “I want to stop cello lessons.”

  Even though the evidence for this declaration was everywhere, I was disbelieving. “Judah, you’ve been playing cello since you were six. You love the cello. You are great at it. You can’t.”

  “I’m not going to stop playing, Dad. I just want to stop lessons. I’m too busy with school and my friends and my music.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting desperate. “I’ll make a deal with you. You continue taking cello lessons and I’ll get you a guitar teacher, too. That way you’ll be good at both.”

  “I don’t need a guitar teacher. I can learn on my own. And I don’t need a cello teacher either. I’m finished with lessons.”

  My mind went back to when Judah was a little boy and we took the subway together to Suzuki class with his very first cello teacher, Sujin, the one who put dinosaur stickers on his music workbook when he mastered a piece. If, when we set off for a lesson, Judah complained that he was tired or “not in the mood,” we’d just stop at the Baskin-Robbins on the corner and order an ice cream. Within minutes, his worries would be forgotten and he’d happily go off for his lesson with Sujin. Now, there was no ice-cream cone in the world big enough to change his mind.

  And there was no stopping his musical hunger. After all, Tevye can’t stop Chava. She marries Fyedka anyway.

  Judah taught himself to play electric bass and guitar. And he did it by using the medium I most feared: the Internet. Fuck new media, indeed! To learn to play his favorite songs, he downloads “tabs,” a form of musical notation that indicates fingering rather than musical pitches. It seems like cheating to me but it works. He plays the bass parts of songs together with his favorite bands’ YouTube videos. He sounds like he’s part of the band, which is just what he aims for.

  Judah saves his birthday and holiday money for his Guitar Center excursions and to buy hard-to-find rock songbooks at vintage shops around New York City. He jams before going to school (with, at my insistence, the amp off) and when he comes home (with the amp at full blast). And we triumphed over our downstairs neighbor András. Fed up with us, he moved. In his place, we got a neighbor who doesn’t seem to mind the music.

  Judah jams in the music room at school during classroom breaks. He plays in several bands, all of them configurations of various musical friends. One of his bands, Blue Velvet, took third place in a local battle of the bands.

  To me, Judah’s transformation was sudden and dramatic. One day my youngest son was a sweet-faced, sincere boy with round checks and curly hair; the next he had slimmed down, perfected a sullen appearance, wore his hair spiky, acquired a black wardrobe, and was borrowing my electric shaver. Most unfairly of all, he started playing music with Shira, who until this point had left his musical education up to me. How was this possible? After all, it was me who sat through a decade’s worth of Suzuki lessons with him. It was me who picked him up from school early every Tuesday afternoon so he could get to the Morningside Orchestra. It was me who took him to Suzuki camp in New England for five summers running.

  Now instead of cello duets in my living room, I was coming home to find Judah, a guitar strapped to his chest, playing music with his mother. Shira was at the piano banging out “Stadium Arcadium” or “Heaven” or “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” or another song I couldn’t stand. They went over riffs and worked out harmonies endlessly. And even when they weren’t at their instruments, like when we were all in the car, they sang their favorite songs, often arguing over lyrics. Back home they’d consult lyrics.com. Then they’d download the ringtone. (My favorite ringtone is “ringggg-ringggg.” Who needs anything more?)

  This was a betrayal of mind-boggling proportions. How did this happen? She really is a witch, I thought.

  I grieved over the loss of the compliant cello prodigy I had been cultivating. Maybe it was just as well that the spirit of Mr. J had left me. This would have been too painful to witness. But then, again, Mr. J, like Johnny Cash, had said that all music was from God. Maybe rock, too.

  I had to admit that bringing a guitar to high school was far cooler than schlepping a cello. And I did see that the cellist in my son was not lost. Clearly, Judah took everything that he learned on the cello—melody, rhythm, intonation, pitch, and performance—and applied it to his new musical interests. And he hasn’t abandoned the cello. When performing at school, he will move with fluidity from guitar to cello to bass and back again. He tells me that he plans to play cello in the orchestra when he goes to college. Recently he has been teaching himself the piano and mandolin and has begun to arrange, compose, and record music. He will often lay down voice, guitar, piano, bass, and cello tracks and mix them all on GarageBand to create original music that he posts and shares on the Internet. He even has his own YouTube channel.


  While I have struggled for decades to master one instrument, the cello, Judah does not see the lines between instruments that I do. He is musically fearless. He plays songs—and writes songs—that express his happiness, his sadness, and everything in between. While I set aside time for practice, he just plays. While I keep a diary, he keeps logs of his songs. They reveal as much about him as words say about me. Music is his ultimate form of expression. It connects him with the musicians he admires. It connects him with friends. It connects him with Shira.

  And it still connects him with me.

  JUDAH AND I KEEP our cellos on special upright instrument stands in our living room, one cello at each end of the big black leather couch. The cellos stand there within easy reach, poised for the moment when musical inspiration strikes.

  One day I carefully take Judah’s cello from its stand and bring it over to a chair. I position myself opposite Bill, thinking that perhaps I have the power to conjure up the spirit of Mr. J one more time and entice him to play with me. I’ve heard him come through Bill before.

  I plant my feet squarely on the floor, place the cello between my legs, take the bow in my right hand, and gently glide it over the strings.

  I play my open strings, running the bow between the bridge and the fingerboard, careful to find the sweet spot where the sound resonates most vibrantly. I look at Bill but I do not hear a note. I do not hear a word. No one else is home. And no one else is playing. This is just me.

  My playing fills the house. The sound fills the air. It is rich, full, and luxuriant. Every note is perfect. Time slows, and slows, and slows, until it stops. I lift my left hand to the strings and find third position. Without effort or intention, I am playing Rabbi Carlebach’s “Mimkomcha.” I feel time actually unfurling, slowly moving back, and back, and back, until I am at a place where I was before the cello, before fatherhood, before marriage, before adulthood. Suddenly, I am no longer a sixty-something-year-old man in my apartment in New York, but I am a boy singing in the synagogue, reaching for the high notes.