Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

Rehearsals for the Morningside Orchestra were held every Tuesday at four o’clock, which made sense for children in public and private schools, but not for Judah, whose school day ended at a quarter past four. After pleading for some early release time, I got Judah excused from his last period at school and took it upon myself to pick him up each Tuesday at three thirty.

I had my routine. On Tuesday mornings I’d bring Judah’s cello to work with me and, at the end of the day, drive with it to pick him up at his school. His eyes would light up when I arrived to get him, although I couldn’t be sure if he was excited about playing in the Morningside Orchestra or getting out of school early. Then we’d race downtown in time for him to unpack his cello and be ready for rehearsal.

The Morningside Orchestra was a wonder to behold. Little kids — ranging from seven to thirteen — were arranged in a semicircle facing their conductor, a cheerful, pudgy, and often ebullient man named Robert Johnston. This group of children had all the hallmarks of Upper West Side of Manhattan privilege: braces, pigtails, designer knapsacks, cell phones, school uniforms, and a gaggle of nannies and parents who waited patiently during the rehearsals. Each child held an instrument, often in the half or three-quarter size. There were violins, cellos, flutes, clarinets, and one oboe. The conductor kept them engaged and amused with corny and self-deprecating humor.

“Measure seventy-one,” he’d call out, signaling the point in the score where he wanted the orchestra to begin. “Measure seventy-one! My age!” In fact, Robert was barely forty, but the line always got a laugh.

“You’re sounding lethargic,” he said one night, and then went about defining the word by sticking out his stomach and lolling around the front of the room like a stuffed monster who, he explained, just ate a huge Thanksgiving meal. “Okay,” he’d say when the laughter died down. “Measure 161. I said Measure 161! My IQ.”

One day Robert handed out the score for a new piece of music, a lyrical composition by Carl Strommen called “Irish Song,” and asked the group to sight-read the music as he conducted. The piece was beyond their abilities and the young musicians quickly got lost. Robert stopped. “What’s the most important thing about sight-reading?” he asked, hands on his hips.

The youthful orchestra members called out answers.

“Rhythm?” one little girl asked tentatively.

“No!” he shouted.

“Sound?” another ventured.

“No!”

“Intonation?”

“No!”

“Melody?”

“No! No! No!” he said, pounding his music stand. “The most important thing about sight reading is courage. You have to have courage!

“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.

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.