Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

“I will never forget the day my daughter Kate came home with a cello,” Chris told me when we met in England. “She was seven years old, she was so pleased. What was wonderful was that she hadn’t been singled out; the whole class had been given the chance to take home either a violin or a cello. They’d had a couple of musicians come in and play these instruments, then they said, ‘Who wants one?’ Everyone put up their hands, and they were each given one to take home.”

It was all part of an experimental musical enrichment program in the East London public schools. Soon Chris and other parents were spending their Saturday mornings watching their children make music. “Three or four of us looked at each other and said, ‘We could do this!’ ” On behalf of the group, Chris, who was then working for the City of London, approached the school and asked if there were any instruments left over. The school not only gave the parents instruments but arranged for lessons. The classes, however, were offered on a weekday afternoon, and Chris, being a city employee with a flexible job, was the only one able to attend.

“I went and then taught what I learned to the others,” he said. He held his sessions on Saturday mornings while the children played nearby. But ELLSO, as the group came to be known, grew in unexpected ways. A turning point came in 1998 when the Sunday magazine of the Times of London published an article. It was written by Rose Shepherd, who chanced upon an ELLSO concert at “Hawksmoor Church off the Highway at Wapping, East London,” and declared that “it wasn’t half bad.” But what happened to her next, Shepherd wrote, was nothing short of remarkable. “After the proper concert anyone from the audience could choose an instrument — violin, viola, cello — and have a bash. Then the whole ensemble launched into the waltz, and the new recruits were free to string along.” Shepherd was swept up in the moment. “I plied the bow, I sawed about on open strings. . and heard something almost tuneful in my left ear. I was reluctant, at first, to get involved. I’m cloth-eared, if not actually tone-deaf (a far more rare condition I am assured, than most of us imagine), and was appalled by the idea of making a public spectacle of myself. But the people were so persuasive, so supportive, and it had been so long since anyone proposed making beautiful music: in the end, I just couldn’t say no.”

Shepherd was hooked. “I hadn’t ‘played’ an instrument since, at age five, I banged out ‘Oranges and Lemons’ on the triangle with my school percussion band, on stage at the Civic Hall, Croydon. To have the chance, even to hold a violin was. . well what everybody says: a revelation.”

She ended her article this way: “You know, you really ought to try it.”

They did. “At the first meeting of ELLSO after the article appeared, there was a line of people around the block carrying instruments and waiting to get in,” said Carol Godsmark, who remembers the scene vividly because she was one of those people. She is now the executive director of the East London group. But back then she was just another aspiring late starter who brought her violin, which she hadn’t played since she was a youngster in Czechoslovakia. “Some of those people got up at five in the morning and drove 150 miles to get to London on time.”

Today, some two hundred people participate in the East London group on a weekly basis. “There’s a very strong amateur tradition in this country,” Chris explained. “It grows out of the role of music in the nineteenth century workers’ movement. There were certain composers associated with it. These composers wrote music not for the rich but for the working folk.” Add to that a mandatory retirement age in England of sixty-five and you’ve got a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands who want to turn their attention to music. Many, of course, find more solitary pursuits, such as gardening, painting, quilting, and even playing the piano, but England is a nation of joiners.

America, on the other hand, is a nation of rugged individualists. In most American professions, there is no official retirement age and, in this economy, even those who can retire often postpone it. And all of this accounts for big differences between amateur music in the United States and England. If, for example, you Google “Making Music U.K.,” you will learn that there are 2,850 voluntary and amateur music groups throughout the British Isles, including choirs, orchestras, samba bands, jazz groups, festivals, handbell ringers, barbershop choruses, brass bands, folk groups, and many others. Making Music is a nonprofit organization that represents and supports these groups.

Then try Googling “Making Music U.S.” and you’ll find a for-profit organization that books professional musicians for “anything and everything,” from a soprano or harpist for “your wedding ceremony” to a brass quintet for a corporate event.

Of course there are many amateur orchestras in the United States. But my point is that the first thing that the music seeker finds in the United States is professional musicians; in the United Kingdom, you find the amateur musicians themselves. It’s the difference between doing it yourself and ordering in. When it comes to music at least, we Americans are better at ordering in than playing ourselves.

Before I wax too poetic about community orchestras, I should point out that there is a downside to them, a caution best expressed by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who said, “Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.” Shaw was probably referring to the bad fiddlers and fife players of his day who subjected everyone at the pub to their latest jig and reel. But there’s a lot of bad amateur music today, too, as one can see in everything from auditions for American Idol to the incessant postings of Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel covers on YouTube.

Some amateur groups simply give music a bad name; in fact, one even has it in its name. It is the RTO, the Really Terrible Orchestra. The RTO, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and made up of middle-aged musicians and late starters, is actually proud of its terribleness. It grew out of the same soil as the East London Late Starters but took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

One of the RTO’s founders and champions is Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the immensely popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. As McCall Smith, a rookie bassoonist, tells it, he was among a group of adult players who were “unable to infiltrate” amateur orchestras in Edinburgh. “We shall start our own orchestra!” McCall Smith declared. “It won’t be a very good orchestra, in fact it will be a really terrible one.”

And so the name was born. The RTO began with ten players and has grown to sixty-five. Like with the LSO, the RTO has no audition requirement. But unlike the LSO, the RTO takes pride in its limitations. After all, we may call ourselves late, but they call themselves terrible.

The RTO found not only players but an audience. It stages an annual concert in Edinburgh, although these are usually associated with that city’s experimental theater event known as the Fringe Festival. After several successful years there, the RTO began a “world tour,” which meant a one-night stand on April Fools’ Day in New York’s Town Hall.

At one LSO rehearsal, Elena, our cofounder and unofficial social director, suggested a group outing to the concert. It sounded kind of campy so I picked up tickets for Shira and Judah. I thought Shira would enjoy meeting some of the LSO members that I had been telling her about. As for Judah, I thought it would show him a lighter, looser, and fun side of classical music that Suzuki didn’t often showcase.