Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

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.

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. “Fifteen 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.