Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

My children were far more tolerant of my cello playing, but I had a feeling that they were not fully convinced of my abilities. I told them I needed their forbearance just a little while longer. “Let me get to my sixtieth birthday. If I can’t play by then, I’ll give it up.”

Adam, who moved to Germany after college to start a writing career, asked Shira during one of their marathon Skype conversations, “Is Dad really going to subject everybody to his cello playing at his birthday party?” Adam wasn’t a roll-your-eyes-at-Dad teen. He was twenty-five and making a living as a freelance music writer and opera critic in Berlin. He knew good music. . and bad.

My daughter, Emma, took a gentler approach. “Dad, you have such a nice voice. Why don’t you sing some folk songs at your party?” Emma was twenty-one and a college junior who had just given up as a voice major and turned to philosophy. She had to stop singing because she developed polyps on her vocal cords. But she loved music more than ever.

The only one who believed in me was my fourteen-year-old son Judah, himself a cellist. “It’s really not hard, Dad. You can do it.” Of course, it was easy for Judah. He’d been playing cello since he was six years old and was damn good at it. When I thought about it, the whole thing didn’t make much sense. Judah had been playing for eight years and I’d been playing — off and on — for thirty-five. So why was he so good and I wasn’t?

JUDAH HAS THE MOST important advantage for any musician — youth. It’s not just that learning is easier and the fingers move quicker, it’s the brain. As the neurologist and psychiatrist Oliver Sacks explains in his book Musicophilia, people who learn music at a young age actually grow a set of brain neurons that we late starters simply don’t have and will never have. Modern brain-imaging studies have enabled scientists to visualize the brains of musicians and to compare them with those of nonmusicians. “The corpus callosum, the great commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain,” Sacks writes, “is enlarged in professional musicians.” Were the musicians just born with these bigger musical brains or were they developed over time? Sacks wonders. He cites studies that conclude “beyond dispute” that the brain of a person given intensive musical training at a young age develops differently from that of someone without musical training. “The effects of such training,” Sacks concludes, “are very great.” The anatomical changes, he adds, quoting the results of one popular study, “were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal.”

Norman Doidge in his outstanding study The Brain That Changes Itself is even more pointed. Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, writes: “Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains — the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others — that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.”

In short: the earlier you start and the more intensive practice you have under your belt, the bigger your “musical brain.”

The ancient Jewish sources that I studied as a youngster corroborate Sack’s scientific findings. What you learn as a child sticks with you, says the Talmud, the library of Jewish lore and law. I guess I remember that one because I learned it as a kid.

The odds were stacked against me. I was in my late fifties, my musical brain was puny, and many of the people around me thought I was crazy. “Don’t you have better things to do?” a few of them asked. I had a wife and three children, one in college, one in middle school, and one living abroad on his own. I also had a bad back — a ruptured disk on the third vertebra to be exact — and it went out every so often, making tying my shoes, let alone toting and playing a large instrument, a challenge. And I was a professor of journalism, with an ever-renewing cohort of students and a growing number of former students, many of whom were panicked about their jobs or prospects for employment in the increasingly unstable field of journalism.

My profession was undergoing the greatest upheaval since Gutenberg invented movable type almost six hundred years earlier. The Internet had changed everything, from how news is gathered to how it is consumed. The authoritative names in news like the Washington Post and CBS were being replaced by Yahoo and Google and the Huffington Post and other outlets that didn’t even exist a few years earlier. The New York Times, where I worked for twenty years before coming to teach at Columbia, was laying off reporters and editors. Newspapers around the country were cutting back their operations or simply folding.

The newspaper business that I grew up with was becoming the news business. In my youth if you didn’t read the newspapers, you tuned into the evening news. But almost no one was watching them anymore, either. I remember gathering around the television after dinner to watch Walter Cronkite assure us that “that’s the way it is.” Instead, television viewers had migrated to the opinion-laden and endless talk shows of Fox and MSNBC. Instead of “that’s the way it is,” we were hearing “that’s the way we want it to be.” Young people were getting their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. Books were rapidly being replaced by handheld electronic devices called Kindle and Nook. The growth of e-books was so steady that many predicted that old-fashioned paper books would soon disappear.

On top of all that, the economy was tanking in the year I was turning sixty. The venerable investment house of Lehman Brothers had declared bankruptcy the year before and the government was faced with the decision of either letting other businesses, especially the auto industry, go under or trying to shore them up with government bailouts.

There was much to do and so much to say, both in my private life and in my professional life. There were classes to teach, parties and dinners to attend, books to read, movies and museum exhibitions to see, and a rich religious life to explore.

But all I wanted to do was play the cello, formally called the violoncello, an instrument that was beginning to take its modern shape in Gutenberg’s time.

The music that Tevye heard — or thought he heard — came from a fiddle, which is pretty much just another name for the violin. What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle? One Irish folk musician I know put it this way: “A fiddle is a violin with an attitude.” Fiddling refers more to the style of music than the instrument itself. It is used for jigs and reels, while the violin is used for symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. People sit when they listen to a violin; they dance when they hear a fiddle. And just as you can fiddle on a violin, you can fiddle on a cello. Yo-Yo Ma, probably the most famous classical cellist of our time and known for his mastery of the classical music repertoire, has gone the fiddling route more than a few times to record with folk, jazz, and Celtic musicians.

What’s the difference between a violin and a cello? Here, it’s more than simply attitude. The cello is easily three times the size of the violin. Given its bigger body and thicker strings, the cello produces a much lower sound. It is held vertically, between the legs, rather than horizontally under the chin like a violin.

In musical history, the violin came first. It dates back to the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and its sound reflects the fashion of the day. Ideal sound of the early middle ages was high-pitched, whiny, and nasal, not unlike traditional Asian and Indian music. The violin was designed with the female musical voice in mind.