Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

William saw my distress, looked around to be sure no one heard him, and said, “What you need is a bass guitar amp. That will work fine with your cello. We don’t sell those here, but you can get one for pretty cheap at Guitar Center on Fourteenth Street.”

From the moment William uttered those words—“Guitar Center on Fourteenth Street”—our lives were not to be the same. When we entered the shop for the first time, I might as well have smashed Judah’s cello over the threshold. We bought the bass amp that day and Judah hooked it up to his cello that night, but rock cello never caught on in our house. Guitar Center did. The store became Judah’s Xanadu. He was then nearing fifteen and just beginning to make his way around the city on his own. Every free afternoon, every early night off from school, Judah headed down to Fourteenth Street, ogling the electric bases and guitars like older teen boys ogle girls. Within the next twelve months, he not only acquired a bass amp, but an electric bass guitar, two six-string electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, strings, picks, guitars stands, and a portable amp.

Before my eyes, Judah was morphing from a classical cellist into a rock musician.

To the strains of Fiddler on the Roof, I hear Tevye pleading with his youngest daughter Chava not to marry Fyedka, the handsome young non-Jewish Russian. “Never talk about this again,” he exclaims at the mere suggestion of their union.

Like Tevye, I thought I could stem the tide.

I wasn’t about to let him stop cello. He could play guitar if he wanted to, I said, but cello was his first instrument. His cello teacher would continue to come each week. And, let me make one thing perfectly clear, young man: no guitar lessons.

Then one day Judah asked if I would come into his room. He had long before put away the toys that he so loved in his youth: Pajama Sam, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! Most recently, Judah went through a Nipponophile phase, in part fueled by the Japanese comic called Manga that he devoured. He had taken to labeling with Japanese translation stickers everything in his room and in the house, from his bed ( shou ) to the toaster in the kitchen ( tosuta ) to the dogs that ran amuck in the house ( inu ).

But, now, on this night, there was little evidence of his old obsessions. Instead there were four guitars suspended from hooks above his bed. Wires and amps and distortion pedals crisscrossed the floor. His cello had recently been relegated to the living room, on an instrument stand near mine.

“Dad,” he announced, “I want to stop cello lessons.”

Even though the evidence for this declaration was everywhere, I was disbelieving. “Judah, you’ve been playing cello since you were six. You love the cello. You are great at it. You can’t.”

“I’m not going to stop playing, Dad. I just want to stop lessons. I’m too busy with school and my friends and my music.”

“Okay,” I said, getting desperate. “I’ll make a deal with you. You continue taking cello lessons and I’ll get you a guitar teacher, too. That way you’ll be good at both.”

“I don’t need a guitar teacher. I can learn on my own. And I don’t need a cello teacher either. I’m finished with lessons.”

My mind went back to when Judah was a little boy and we took the subway together to Suzuki class with his very first cello teacher, Sujin, the one who put dinosaur stickers on his music workbook when he mastered a piece. If, when we set off for a lesson, Judah complained that he was tired or “not in the mood,” we’d just stop at the Baskin-Robbins on the corner and order an ice cream. Within minutes, his worries would be forgotten and he’d happily go off for his lesson with Sujin. Now, there was no ice-cream cone in the world big enough to change his mind.

And there was no stopping his musical hunger. After all, Tevye can’t stop Chava. She marries Fyedka anyway.

Judah taught himself to play electric bass and guitar. And he did it by using the medium I most feared: the Internet. Fuck new media, indeed! To learn to play his favorite songs, he downloads “tabs,” a form of musical notation that indicates fingering rather than musical pitches. It seems like cheating to me but it works. He plays the bass parts of songs together with his favorite bands’ YouTube videos. He sounds like he’s part of the band, which is just what he aims for.

Judah saves his birthday and holiday money for his Guitar Center excursions and to buy hard-to-find rock songbooks at vintage shops around New York City. He jams before going to school (with, at my insistence, the amp off) and when he comes home (with the amp at full blast). And we triumphed over our downstairs neighbor András. Fed up with us, he moved. In his place, we got a neighbor who doesn’t seem to mind the music.

Judah jams in the music room at school during classroom breaks. He plays in several bands, all of them configurations of various musical friends. One of his bands, Blue Velvet, took third place in a local battle of the bands.

To me, Judah’s transformation was sudden and dramatic. One day my youngest son was a sweet-faced, sincere boy with round checks and curly hair; the next he had slimmed down, perfected a sullen appearance, wore his hair spiky, acquired a black wardrobe, and was borrowing my electric shaver. Most unfairly of all, he started playing music with Shira, who until this point had left his musical education up to me. How was this possible? After all, it was me who sat through a decade’s worth of Suzuki lessons with him. It was me who picked him up from school early every Tuesday afternoon so he could get to the Morningside Orchestra. It was me who took him to Suzuki camp in New England for five summers running.

Now instead of cello duets in my living room, I was coming home to find Judah, a guitar strapped to his chest, playing music with his mother. Shira was at the piano banging out “Stadium Arcadium” or “Heaven” or “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” or another song I couldn’t stand. They went over riffs and worked out harmonies endlessly. And even when they weren’t at their instruments, like when we were all in the car, they sang their favorite songs, often arguing over lyrics. Back home they’d consult lyrics.com. Then they’d download the ringtone. (My favorite ringtone is “ringggg-ringggg.” Who needs anything more?)

This was a betrayal of mind-boggling proportions. How did this happen? She really is a witch, I thought.

I grieved over the loss of the compliant cello prodigy I had been cultivating. Maybe it was just as well that the spirit of Mr. J had left me. This would have been too painful to witness. But then, again, Mr. J, like Johnny Cash, had said that all music was from God. Maybe rock, too.

I had to admit that bringing a guitar to high school was far cooler than schlepping a cello. And I did see that the cellist in my son was not lost. Clearly, Judah took everything that he learned on the cello — melody, rhythm, intonation, pitch, and performance — and applied it to his new musical interests. And he hasn’t abandoned the cello. When performing at school, he will move with fluidity from guitar to cello to bass and back again. He tells me that he plans to play cello in the orchestra when he goes to college. Recently he has been teaching himself the piano and mandolin and has begun to arrange, compose, and record music. He will often lay down voice, guitar, piano, bass, and cello tracks and mix them all on GarageBand to create original music that he posts and shares on the Internet. He even has his own YouTube channel.

While I have struggled for decades to master one instrument, the cello, Judah does not see the lines between instruments that I do. He is musically fearless. He plays songs — and writes songs — that express his happiness, his sadness, and everything in between. While I set aside time for practice, he just plays. While I keep a diary, he keeps logs of his songs. They reveal as much about him as words say about me. Music is his ultimate form of expression. It connects him with the musicians he admires. It connects him with friends. It connects him with Shira.