Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

With Mary’s words still ringing in my ears, Elena, the cofounder of the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra, announced that we had to vacate the actors’ studio — we were late; our time was up — but that she was leading an expedition to the bar at the Chinese restaurant on the corner for drinks. “Join us,” she said to my little group. I had promised my wife I’d be home right after rehearsal, but the chance to continue the conversation was just too enticing. I crammed myself and my cello into the elevator and made my way to Chef Yu on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. It was just after five on a Sunday evening and we were welcomed warmly.

“Put your instruments there,” the hostess said as she pointed to a spot near the restaurant’s massive fish tank, “and take any table you want. The waiter will be right with you.”

“Ah, the musicians,” the waiter said a few minutes later after we unloaded our instruments and took seats around a big round table near the bar. “What can I get for the musicians?”

I’ve had many titles in my life — a father, a son, a husband, a reporter, an author, a professor, even a rabbi (although I am not one) — but this was a new one for me. A musician. I was tickled, even dazzled, by my new identity. But I was quickly beset by doubt. Was I really a musician? Of course I own a cello and have been trying to learn how to play it for decades, but I have never felt I was master over it. I can see you have the soul of a musician, I remember Mr. J telling me when we first met in 1976. You just don’t have the skills yet. We’ll get you there. That was more than three decades ago. Now, approaching sixty, was I there yet?

I ordered a beer and, ignoring the chatter around me, mused about my life.

Over my lifetime I had worked hard to reach my goals. Everything took effort: my writing, my teaching, my friendships, my parenting, my faith, my marriage. What if, I wondered, I applied the same energy, commitment, and hard-work ethic to the cello as I did to everything else? Could I be good? Could I be worthy of the title musician?

I had started cello in my midtwenties under the guidance of a wonderful cellist named Heinrich Joachim, whom I came to call Mr. J. At the time, he was at the end of a long musical career, a career that had its dramatic ups and downs. In his prime, Mr. J, a German refugee, owned the Stradivarius of cellos, a Guarneri, and played as a soloist with major orchestras in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. For a decade, he was a cellist with the New York Philharmonic. By the time I met him, though, he was twice divorced and once widowed and the Guarneri was gone. He was scraping together a modest living by conducting a community orchestra in Westchester County, New York, and teaching adults at the going rate of thirty dollars an hour in his studio or at their homes.

Over the seven years I studied with him, he became a trusted friend and something of a father figure and was a source of valuable advice not just on music but on life. As I picked up the cello again, one of his lessons, taken from Buddhist philosophy, seemed particularly apt: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When I joined LSO, Mr. J was many years dead, but he now returned to my life in full force — and in ways that I couldn’t fully appreciate when he was alive. Whether playing with LSO or practicing in my living room, Mr. J was there. He was the voice in my head and a benevolent specter in my dreams. Sometimes, I thought I could even hear his voice coming through my cello.

Right then and there, at Chef Yu on Eighth Avenue, I came up with a plan. My sixtieth birthday was approaching and I decided to see if I could live up to Mr. J’s faith in me — and in the Chinese waiter’s appraisal of me. I was a late starter, not once but twice. And so I decided: I would stage an elaborate birthday party to celebrate my sixtieth, and there, in front of friends and family, I would play cello in public and prove to myself — and to all of them — that I was a musician.

If there is a character in Jewish folklore that I most relate to in my middle years, it is Tevye the Milkman from the famous story by the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. Tevye is a well-meaning and lovable character who bumbles through life trying to make everyone happy — his wife, his children, his neighbors, his rabbis, his God, and even his milk cow. Tevye has certain truths he lives by — above all tradition — but he finds these truths challenged at every turn. He hears voices, imagines music, and invokes those long dead, calling on them in his sleep. His children are dragging him ever reluctantly into the future and he steps gingerly forward, his eye on the fiddler perched impossibly on his roof.

For Tevye, the fiddler represents the beauty and demands of the past, as well as the precariousness of the present. As he says in the stage version of this tale: “You might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.”

While Tevye is rooted in the late nineteenth century, I am rooted in the twentieth. I was born smack in the middle — in September 1949—and I am a product of the twentieth century’s work ethic, its optimism and its values. Long before Ronald Reagan was president and long before I was an adult, I watched Reagan on television as a pitchman for General Electric intoning, “Progress is our most important product.” I was brought up to believe that hard work would yield success and a better world.

But yet, like Tevye, I have a connection to the old world that I hold on to for dear life. Family is precious to me, as is prayer, study, and the Sabbath day. For me, too, the fiddler represents the beauty of the past. But I didn’t just want to listen to the fiddler. As I grew older, I wanted to climb up on the roof and play violin-cello duets with him. And if you think the fiddler on the roof is imperiled, imagine the cellist. His instrument is bigger and his balance even more precarious; unlike the fiddler, he needs a seat.

How does one reconcile the old and the new? Why this human desire to hold on to our roots, our foundations, even as the world all around changes rapidly? Part of us wants to preserve and protect what came before, but another, equally compelling part wants to take chances and innovate even in the face of possible failure.

For Tevye, the quest was to be “a rich man,” as the song from the musical adaptation goes. But by Tevye’s yardstick, we are all rich men. Cossacks are not at our door, and, despite our recent economic downturns, most of us have a “fine tin roof” over our heads and “real wooden floors below.”

Baby boomers like myself sing a different tune. My song is, “If I Were a Cellist.” I grew up hardly even knowing about the cello but fell in love with its sound as a young adult. It wasn’t until I was twenty-six years old that I actually held one in my hands and, thanks to the wisdom and patience of Mr. J, began to play. Since then it has been an on-again, off-again romance.

Now, I wanted to give the cello another chance in my life. Others of my generation long to reclaim their own dreams, be they on the basketball court or tennis court or on the back of a horse. There are those my age who want to learn to cook or garden or run a marathon or get on stage and act or climb aboard a motorcycle and race. For some the quest may be to build wooden scale model airplanes, for others to fly a plane, and for still others to paint landscapes.

With age, learning anything new is hard; learning a classical string instrument like the cello or violin is close to impossible. What’s more, all learning needs a supportive environment. As I took up the cello once again, I found that the people in my life were skeptical.