Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

When our twenty-minute program was through, we simply started all over again, as if our audience had totally changed, which, to a large extent, it had. We played some of the most popular music in the classical repertoire, like Pachelbel’s canon, which has a famously monotonous cello part. The cellos repeat a simple series of whole notes ad nauseum. It is a song in which the violins do all the hard work of playing the melody and the harmony in increasing complexity. The cellos just keep the beat.

I felt sorry for our earliest audience because our first run-through of the Pachelbel was a disaster. Even we cellists, who didn’t have too much to mess up, messed up. Still we got it right the second time around and were downright brilliant on the third try. We also played another popular classic, Bach’s “Badiniere,” a brief and lively dance tune that takes its name from the French badiner, to jest. It was a light and sweet musical dessert.

Soon after we began the “Badiniere,” a police helicopter arrived overhead and hovered there for the rest of the hour. While the police might have been searching for an escaped convict or a missing person, I imagined that they had stopped to hear us play. The helicopter drew a lot of attention, and made a considerable amount of noise, but we followed Magda’s admonition—“Never stop playing”—and kept going. When we were done, one of the violinists, a man named Lawrence, quipped that we played something never before attempted: “Bach’s Badinere for Strings and Helicopter.”

We played what could at best be described as “incidental music.” Our audience was made up of folks with a lot of other options and distractions on a beautiful summer’s day. My first outdoor performance reminded me of an experiment that the Washington Post did in 2007 with the violinist Joshua Bell. The Post conspired with Bell to play in an indoor arcade outside the Washington Metro during the morning rush hour just to see what the reaction would be. With his good looks and abundant talent, Bell is one of the rock stars of the classical music world, commanding the attention of audiences in music halls around the world. But during that January morning rush hour in Washington, more than a thousand people passed by and gave him little notice. They also gave him little money — just over thirty-two dollars, thrown into his open violin case. All this while he played some of the most difficult and most beautiful music ever written on a Stradivarius valued at $3.5 million.

Like the members of LSO, Bell acknowledged being nervous as he took his place outside the subway that morning. “It wasn’t exactly stage fright,” he told Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post writer, “but there were butterflies. I was stressing a little.” The strangest part, he recalled afterward, was that when he finished, there was no applause. He usually brings down the house. The Post experiment was, of course, an effort to show that people don’t appreciate what is around them while others may well pay too much for high culture (a ticket to a Joshua Bell concert can easily command a hundred dollars a seat). Weingarten’s article, “Pearls before Breakfast,” opened an international discussion about our relationship to public art and music. The story won the Post a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

I can safely say that our ragged band of LSO amateurs received a good deal of respect, encouragement, and attention during our Central Park gig — and a lot more applause than Joshua Bell did.

MY CELLO ESCAPADES AFTER my birthday were not only classical. One night Shira and I went to a music club in SoHo to hear a performance by our friend Ricky Orbach, a guitarist and songwriter who had just come out with a CD called New Midlife Crisis. True to its title, Ricky was a husband and father and jeweler who was returning to music after many years away from it. His music drew from several rock ’n’ roll genres. After the gig, we shared a drink with Ricky and I told him about my own musical midlife exploits. “You play the cello?” he asked. “I wrote a song, ‘Shoshana,’ that cries out for a cello. You must play with me.”

A few weeks later, Ricky sent me a link to a recording of “Shoshana.” It sure was a depressing song, with lyrics like “Shoshana says, ‘My husband’s gone. Yes, the car crash, three injured kids.’ ” Perfect for the cello, I thought.

The music was challenging. It required a great many position shifts up and down the fingerboard, but this was not an occasion to invoke the spirit of Mr. J. He’d gotten me to my sixtieth. That was enough. I decided to figure out “Shoshana” on my own. And I did.

I joined Ricky for a four-hour rehearsal at a Lower East Side studio. There was Ricky, two guitarists, and me. At one point, when Ricky’s drummer showed up stoned, I felt like I was in a bad rock documentary (aka a rockumentary). At home, I practiced like crazy and couldn’t wait for our date, my first rock gig, at a club on the Lower East Side called the National Underground. Shira dressed in a short black dress, thigh-high kneesocks and Dr. Martens. I wore my regular professor clothes. She looked like she belonged far more than I did. The gig was called for eleven o’clock on a Thursday night and, as I approached the club, I was excited to see the name of our band listed in white chalk on a board at the entrance.

I glided past the bouncer by taking a cool stance and pointing to the cello on my back. I went down a flight of stairs and heard the deafening sounds of a punk rock band whose name was on the chalkboard before ours. Aside from the band on stage and the barmaid, the place was pretty much empty. Soon Ricky’s guitarists showed up. (The drummer never did.) Then some of Ricky’s fans. A dozen, in all, including Ricky’s wife and mine. It was a big crowd compared to what the band before us drew.

We rocked. I ended up playing “Shoshana” and one other of Ricky’s songs, called “Completion,” which also called for a cello. Then I took my seat in the audience, ordered a drink, and celebrated my first rock ’n’ roll gig.

Judah’s musical journey has also taken some unexpected turns since my sixtieth birthday. Soon after his bar mitzvah, Judah became obsessed with rock music, especially the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My initial reaction was to remind him of all the cool rock bands that used cellos. I tried to introduce him to the music of Apocalyptica, Rasputina, Murder by Death, Cello Fury, and Aaron Minsky, also known as Von Cello. Judah was unimpressed and, frankly, so was I. “Okay. I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s get an electric pickup so we can amplify your cello. That way you can play rock cello.”

Judah and I headed to a store in Lower Manhattan called David Gage String Instruments, a showroom and workshop where cellos and double basses were scattered across two stories of an old industrial loft. We entered the workshop area, where we saw dozens of instruments in various stages of disrepair laid out on workbenches. Luthiers walked from table to table like so many emergency room doctors. The only difference was that they were wearing worn leather smocks instead of white coats.

In addition to sales and repairs, David Gage String Instruments makes, sells, and installs a product called “The Realist,” an electronic pickup device that amplifies string instruments. “That’s the ticket,” I said, and off Judah’s cello went to the workshop to get amped. It took only minutes and then we began to shop for an amplifier to plug in the new equipment.

William, our salesman, showed us some expensive professional amps, selling for a thousand dollars and more. I told Judah that this was way beyond what we could afford. “Then why did we get the pickup?” he asked quite reasonably.