Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

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 lauded. 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.”

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.”

It wasn’t until after college that she picked up the violin. Elena waxed eloquent when I asked her about her choice. “There was always a part of me that loved the way it sounded, the way it could evoke emotions,” she said, adding: “I was curious about what it must be like to be the one creating the happiness. . or the sorrow or the anger” that the violin expressed.

“I also thought somehow that if I could just make that music, I would never be sad, or rather, I would be, but if I had the power of making the music myself, all I would have to do is pick up my violin and in a few minutes, create joy. Of course I didn’t know that it would be years and years of lessons before I would be able to come close to that.”

Elena found a teacher, and, after just a couple of years of playing, she was scouring the Internet for a musical community at her level. She came across a summer program run by a British organization called the East London Late Starters Orchestra. She sent them an e-mail. “It was the best ‘send’ button I ever hit,” she told me. The group, known by its letters, ELLSO, was started in the early 1980s by a group of parents who brought their kids to music lessons week after week and realized that the kids were having all the fun. They wanted some of that, too. The parents decided to organize a musical experience for themselves under the ELLSO banner. Almost thirty years later, many of those children no longer play, but ELLSO members still meet with their violins and cellos weekly in London during the academic year. In the summers, they host a musical retreat program in the north of England. Elena signed up.