Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

“Oh,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind but tomorrow I am going to share a stand with my friend.”

Had I been alone, I might have been depressed by the rejection. I was not at the top of my game. Even Linda could see that. But Shira was there to cheer me on. When I found her, she tried to assure me that Linda’s motives were more social than musical.

While I seemed to be alienating people, Shira was drawing a loyal fan base. It wasn’t only the gypsy musicians who wanted her. At the very first session of her dance class, she suggested some choreography and then taught it to everyone while the dance teacher looked on. She quickly took an active role in the fine arts class even though she’s never painted in her life. If she wasn’t exactly a witch, I figured, she was certainly bewitching.

That night at the bar, as Colin played his lonely solos and others caught up on the day’s activities, I introduced Shira to my new friend Aaron, the one who plays cello backward. Aaron expressed surprise when I made the introduction. “Your wife!” he said. I was waiting for him to say, “That is your wife? I thought it was your daughter.” I get that a lot. But Aaron was surprised for another reason. “My wife wouldn’t come along with me!” To which I responded with a wry smile: “My wife wouldn’t let me come without her.”

There was, however, a music camp experience that Shira was ready to forgo. That was my next stop on the summer music circuit. After coming back from ELLSO, I decided to sign up for a program in Maine called SummerKeys. I had heard about SummerKeys from my LSO friends one afternoon at the Chinese restaurant after rehearsal. Several people were comparing camps that they had attended. A cellist named Patty said that SummerKeys was the one for serious players who had a specific musical goal in mind. No dorms or bars or communal meals there. “SummerKeys is like a musical monastery,” Patty said. “It’s in this remote part of Maine where there are absolutely no distractions. There is just one reason to go to SummerKeys: music.”

“Will you come?” I asked Shira. Even for my adventurous wife, this was too much. Or too little.

“You go,” she said. “I’m staying home.”

SummerKeys is in the little fishing village of Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States, right at the border with Canada. One of the chief attractions is West Quoddy Gifts, which dubs itself the “Easternmost Gift Shop in the U.S.” It’s so close to Canada, in fact, that you can walk over the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Bridge and have dinner in New Brunswick. Which is a good thing since there aren’t any restaurants in Lubec. Or at least none worth mentioning. The local population — and local economy — have been on a downslide for decades. The canneries and smokehouses that once gave life to the harbor area are all shuttered now, the victims of changing tastes, overfishing, and business that has moved abroad.

SummerKeys was founded by a man named Bruce Potterton, a New York City piano teacher, who bought a house in Lubec in 1991 for what he recalled was “the price of a used car.” A year later he opened a summer music retreat with three pianos and fifty students. Since then, he’s expanded the range of instruments to include violin, cello, mandolin, guitar, and woodwinds. The original three pianos have grown to thirteen and they are housed in churches and homes around Lubec, including two in a garage that has been dubbed “Car-negie Hall.” Most participants come for a week, although some for two or three. The program draws about 250 students over the eleven-week season.

Students stay at local bed-and-breakfasts and take meals on their own. Adding to the isolation, many cell-phone networks do not reach Lubec (mine didn’t) and there is no Wi-Fi outside of the Lubec Memorial Library, which was open only four hours a day, four days a week when I was there.

Lubec is a good ten-hour drive from Manhattan and three hours from the biggest nearby city, Bangor. I’m not a big fan of long-distance driving so I booked myself a New York-to-Bangor flight and looked into a bus service for the last stretch into Lubec. My decision to fly solved one problem (that long solo drive) but created another — getting my cello to Lubec.

When I told the registrar at SummerKeys of my travel issues, she said she’d be on the lookout for a cello that I could rent while there. She came through a few days later with the perfect solution. “There’s a cellist from the Bangor Symphony who is coming to Lubec and she’s got an extra cello she’s willing to rent,” the registrar said. “And not only that, but she’s driving from Bangor and will pick you up from the airport.”

The cellist’s name was Ruth and she was just as she described herself to me in an e-mail: “Fifty-three, tall, thin, long hair and sharp nose.” And a big, warm smile. She was waiting for me at the gate in Bangor and we made our way to her car, a 1996 Subaru hatchback with two cellos inside. Ruth explained that I’d be renting the cello she’d been playing since she was twelve. It was an old, slightly beaten-up Italian model with a rich sound. “I used it for my audition to the Bangor Symphony,” she said. After joining, though, she bought herself a new cello, a pristine, handcrafted one from China.

As we drove, Ruth, an engineer by training, told me that she spent her career as an officer in the air force, mostly serving in bases out west. She moved to Maine in her retirement to be near her elderly parents. “I thought I’d be spending my retirement making and selling crafts and jewelry,” she told me, “but then I saw this small ad in the newspaper from the Bangor Symphony. They were looking for a cellist!”

Ruth was an unlikely candidate. Her life in the air force meant a lot of moves to different places — California, Colorado, Arizona. She always took her cello with her. She played when she could find the time but had not had formal lessons since she was twenty. After seeing the ad for the Bangor Symphony opportunity, she practiced like crazy for the audition. She was admitted as a “sub,” which meant that she was technically an extra cellist but in reality played almost every concert.

Even as a sub on the orchestra roster, Ruth was suddenly in demand. After all, she could now say that she was a cellist with the Bangor Symphony. She has been called on to perform at weddings, at retirement homes, and in library concerts. She also picked up a number of young students.

“You’re a professional,” I observed. “Why are you going to SummerKeys?”

“There’s an opening for a regular chair in the Bangor Symphony,” Ruth explained. “And I want it.”

Ruth felt that she had gone as far as she could working alone. She wanted a coach to help her prepare her audition piece, the Saint-Saëns cello concerto. I was only a little embarrassed when I told her what I was working on: a Bach minuet from the third Suzuki book, a piece my son Judah had perfected when he was ten. So here we were: Ruth a professional and me a late starter on our way to the same summer music camp. Any program that could teach both of us, I figured, had to be pretty versatile. I wondered if Ruth and I would, in fact, be studying with the same teacher. As it turned out, we were. The cello contingent for our week at SummerKeys was quite small: there were only five of us. The week we were there, right after the Fourth of July holiday, was a quiet one at SummerKeys. The five cellists, plus six pianists, and eight mandolin players. Not your dream week for chamber music. As it turned out, each group really kept to itself.

The cello teacher was a highly accomplished — and rather excitable — soloist and music educator named Joanne. She often brought her preteen daughter and their little dog to sessions.