Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

When he was eleven, his mother took him by train to Barcelona to enroll him in the municipal music school. His parents visited him regularly and one memorable time, when Pablo was thirteen, they stopped at an old music shop near the harbor and browsed through the sheet music. “Suddenly,” Casals wrote, “I came upon a sheaf of pages, crumbled and discolored with age. They were the unaccompanied suites by Johann Sebastian Bach — for cello only!”

The Bach suites were a little-known collection considered to be musical exercises for students and seen as unfit to play in public. But not for Casals. For the rest of his life, Casals devoted himself to these Bach suites and, through his public performances and recordings, eventually assured them the same stature as Bach’s famous work for piano, The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1904, Casals was invited to play for President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, and he was invited back in 1961 to play for President John F. Kennedy.

Casals was known also as a conductor and as early as 1919, he organized an orchestra in Barcelona, but with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he left Spain. He was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government, and, after its defeat by the forces loyal to Francisco Franco, Casals vowed not to return to Spain until democracy was restored. He lived out the rest of his life in exile, first in France and later in Puerto Rico, the birthplace of his mother. He died there in 1973 at the age of ninety-six. Several years later, after the end of the Franco regime, Casals was honored by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos. His remains were reinterred in his native Catalonia.

I was inspired by stories of the great cellists of the past and I began to consume their biographies and listen to their music. Vivaldi, Franciscello, Boccherini, and Casals were only the beginning. I explored the lives of Jacqueline du Pré, the gifted cellist struck down at the height of her career by multiple sclerosis; the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose Soviet citizenship was revoked in the 1970s because of his campaign for human rights; and Vedran Smailovic, who became known as “the cellist of Sarajevo” for playing his cello in the center of the city as the Bosnian War raged around him. And there was no escaping the music and life story of the versatile Yo-Yo Ma.

Study the greats and you can become great, Mr. J said.

But the more I followed his advice and explored these great cellists, the more I was curious about Mr. J himself. As I approached sixty, I believed he still had many lessons to teach me. And, judging by how often I heard his voice, so did he.

THE CELLO, WHICH GREW in status and thrived as an instrument in the twentieth century, seemed to be in danger of losing its resonance in the twenty-first. Or so I feared. In an era in which computers, laptops, and smartphones rule, an instrument like the cello is the ultimate throwback. It has no wires and it has no memory. It is just a lot of wood and four strings made of metal and catgut and a bow made of wood and horsehair. In the right hands, though, it has a rich, sad, and soulful sound like nothing else in God’s creation. In his book Cello Story, the cellist Dimitry Markevitch writes that the cello “allow[s] one to express the most profound feelings, to convey emotions that stir the soul, and yet to give a sensation of total peace.”

I wanted to play like that.

And to do so I had to come up with a strategy. This wasn’t going to happen without a lifestyle change. After I joined LSO, I resolved to spend all my free time practicing. That meant ignoring my neighbor András. It also meant no more going to the gym or walking in the park. “I don’t care if I get fat,” I told myself, “I must learn how to play.” People tell me that I give a slim appearance — when I have my clothes on. But when I am home alone and stepping out of the shower, I can see the effects of the years of sitting at a typewriter and then a computer keyboard. I have little muscle tone on my upper body and my center of gravity has shifted to my stomach.

But I had to rethink my priorities. At this stage in my life, I realized that building my musical brain was more important than building my pecs or flattening my abs. The time I would spend at the gym, I decided, I would spend instead with the cello.

The second step was even more radical. I have eclectic tastes in music and have a collection on my iPod that ranges from folk to rock to jazz to classical to what has become known as “world music.” The sounds include Latin, African, Caribbean, Egyptian, French, Israeli, and Hasidic music. Sometimes I just put my iPod on shuffle and am surprised by what comes up: Dylan, Edith Piaf, 10,000 Maniacs, Yo-Yo Ma, Joan Baez, Shlomo Carlebach, Dave Brubeck, Vivaldi, Alison Krauss, even an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Puccini’s Tosca. But if I wanted to be a cellist, I reasoned, I had to focus on cello music. I went out and bought all the Casals, Rostropovich, du Pré, and Ma I could find. Then I erased everything else. I highlighted so much of my beloved music and pressed “delete,” “delete,” “delete” again and again. It was downright painful. But I had a purpose. I dedicated myself to listening to the great cellists in a new way, trying to understand what it was about their playing that set them apart and made them great. I wanted to train my ear to know greatness. I wanted to absorb whatever lessons they had to offer.

My third step was to devote my Sunday afternoons to LSO. There is only so much time you can spend in your teacher’s music studio or in your living room practicing scales. Even Mr. J, who upheld the discipline of regular practice as the highest value, knew it had its limitations. Music is not a solitary pursuit. You need melody — and you need harmony. And, ultimately, you need an audience.

Finding LSO had been a stroke of good luck. New York is not the kind of town that has too many orchestras for a perpetual novice. It is a city of perfectionists, at least when it comes to music. New York is where the greats come to play — the most accomplished orchestras, the most talented soloists play here — and, if they rate, the press heralds their “New York debut.” It is not a place for mediocrity. To be sure, there are a few community orchestras, but they tend to be for the elite amateurs who may have dropped out of conservatory to go to medical school or work on Wall Street. Such places would have no interest in the likes of me.

But LSO did. The Late Starters Orchestra is a spinoff of a movement that started in Europe in the 1980s with the East London Late Starters and continued with the movement’s bastard child, the Really Terrible Orchestra of Edinburgh, two organizations committed to the notion that everyone should have a place to make music.

Listening to cello music, playing with LSO once a week, studying with Noah, and rehearsing by myself each night was a good start, but it still did not suffice. As my birthday approached, I decided to spend one week at an adult music camp in Maine, near the Canadian border, and another week at a summer music retreat in the north of England run by our sister orchestra, the East London Late Starters.

I did not change overnight, of course. I learned that there are no overnight sensations, especially when you are my age. But I noticed one important thing as my birthday approached: I was getting better, not by leaps and bounds, but by small, almost imperceptible steps. No one else noticed, it seemed; not my wife, not my older children, not András, but I could see the difference. I had greater command of the bow, I was hitting the right notes on the fingerboard, my timing improved, my vibrato resonated. I was now something more than just musical. I was becoming a musician.