Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

“No, she stopped playing years ago, but I came back to it. . That is what retirement is for.”

Aaron plays in an amateur orchestra in Dorset that he described as a “rehearsal orchestra.”

“All we do is rehearse,” he explained. “We never play in public, never have concerts. No performances. We just play for the pleasure of it.”

We took our meals at ELLSO at the college cafeteria and then ate, family style, at long tables. I work at a university and I know how bad college food can be, but this food set new records for inedibility. (Eventually we had to take a cab to town, find a grocery store, and stock up on provisions of our own.) The compensations for the poor food in the cafeteria were the good conversations at the dining tables. One day over lunch we met Geraldine, who was seventy years old and had a warm smile and a lilting Irish brogue. Like Aaron, Geraldine came to music through her daughter.

Geraldine was one of three double bass players — all of them women — who came to the ELLSO summer program. If I sometimes worry about carrying an instrument that takes up twice my normal footprint, imagine what it must be like to carry a double bass. A standard double bass is six feet tall, weighs forty pounds, and is so difficult to manage it is usually carted about on a single rubber wheel.

With an instrument that size, Geraldine really had no choice but to drive and ferry from Ireland. She took up the double bass six years ago after she retired from her work as a physical therapist in Dublin. “It seemed that all my waking hours were devoted to work and family,” she told me. “I’d finished supporting my children and then my eye settled over on the double bass in one corner gathering dust.” It had been decades since her daughter had played.

Geraldine found herself a teacher, practiced like a demon, and eventually caught on. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said, “because I had never done music before.” The double bass is big, but she didn’t find it intimidating.

“Hey, kids can do this,” she said. “It’s not rocket science. I knew I could learn.” Before long, she found a spot as a double bassist in the Greystones Orchestra, an amateur group in Dublin. “Was it hard to get in?” I asked.

“There was only one double bass player at the time,” she said drolly. “They were delighted to have me.”

I thought about all the lugging around she had to do and wondered if it kept her in shape.

“Put it this way,” she said. “I have to keep fit in order to play the double bass.”

Towing it around is such a big part of Geraldine’s life these days that she even bought a car to accommodate it. “Last time I shopped for a new car, I brought the double bass along to the showroom to be sure it would fit,” she said. Not simply in the trunk, of course. Her car is a hatchback and that is where the bass enters the car. She pushes it clear across the rear seats at an angle and it extends to the front passenger seat, which is folded down.

The trip from Ireland — in her spacious Renault Leguna Hatch — took seven hours: three hours on a ferry from Holyhead in Wales and then four hours across Britain to Doncaster. During orchestra rehearsal most of Geraldine was all but hidden behind her double bass in the back of the room, but I could make out her face. And she was always smiling.

After a long day of playing at ELLSO, many of the musicians would retire to the bar that was set up in the far corner of the campus dining room where we gathered for meals. During the day there was very little time to socialize. Participants went from session to practice room to session to practice room. Most of the daytime conversation was about a piece of music or an instrument that needed some quick repair. But in the evening, people drank, relaxed, and caught up on each other’s lives. Their instruments were never far away and no one ever locked them up at ELLSO; they were strewn about the halls and along the dining room walls. Sometimes, a spontaneous jam session would break out at the bar. A musician would whip out a fiddle, another a double bass, and someone else would sit down at the piano. A woman would get up and start dancing in place and then another and yet another would join her. Soon people would be doing reels and jigs as more and more dancers and musicians joined the fray.

It was at the bar one night that I met Colin, Ed, and Chris.

Colin was old, Ed was young, and Chris somewhere in between. One night, Colin, dressed in a frayed tweed jacket and tie, stood in a corner of the room and played his violin diligently as everyone around him chatted. Tall and thin, with a music stand in front of him, Colin played the basic repertoire of a young Suzuki musician: easy classical pieces in first position. It was an odd scene since there were practice rooms open on the campus from seven in the morning to midnight. “Why here?” I asked him. “Why play in a crowded bar when you can have your very own private room?”

“Just about everybody here is better than me,” Colin explained between songs. “I have to get over the fear of playing in front of people. And this helps.” Colin played his songs over and over again above the din of the bar. When he was finished he packed up his violin and folded his stand. With that, the bar patrons erupted in applause. Colin took a shy bow.

Ed and I shared a beer at the bar. Ed was thirty-three, unmarried, and worked for a human rights organization in London and Geneva. He took up the violin just six months before coming to summer school and had no idea what he was in for. Like everyone else who participated, Ed was asked to fill out forms in advance about his level of musical abilities so the organizers could place him in the appropriate musical classes. Ed boldly inflated both his musical knowledge and ability. “I figured that by the time the summer came along I would know what I was doing,” he said. “But to tell you the truth before I came here I never played a flat.”

Ed was placed in the top orchestra group and matched for chamber music with the most proficient chamber players, but once his lack of experience and know-how were noted, he was downgraded. “Was that embarrassing?” I asked.

“No,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone here is very forgiving.”

A woman named Chris overheard our conversation and told how she, too, had underestimated how hard it would be to learn an instrument.

When she grew up in England in the 1960s, Chris recalled, a child had to make a choice between athletics and music. “If you were good at sports, you didn’t get an instrument,” she said. And she excelled in sports. She played hockey and football, joined the track team, skated, and danced. She was happy with her choices but carried a memory from her high school graduation. One of her classmates played an old English folk song, “The English Country Garden,” on her treble recorder. “It sounded so beautiful,” Chris recalled as if graduation had been held earlier that day. “I wondered: why wasn’t I given a chance to learn an instrument?”

She continued to play sports and be physically active through a career in the British Army until a back injury sidelined her. “I was really depressed for a year and then I remembered the girl playing ‘The English Country Garden.’ ”

In her mind, the treble recorder was too complicated. She thought the violin would be easier. “It was only four strings so I figured: how hard could it be?” In the thirteen years since she picked up the violin, she’s found out. But she’s never looked back. Like me, she first played with a youth ensemble and then graduated to an amateur orchestra. Her musical group has one of the best names I’ve ever heard. It’s called the Cobweb Orchestra because so many of its musicians have retrieved their instruments from attics and dusted them off for the first time in years.