Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

Contents

PART ONE: TUNING UP

The Fiddler

The Cello

PART TWO: OVERTURES

The Next Chapter

Origins

Love and Marriage

PART THREE: FATHERS AND SONS AND ORCHESTRAS

Downtown Symphony

Milt

Suzuki

Music Moms and Dads

The InterSchool Orchestras of New York

Avery Fisher Hall

The Oldest Kid in the Orchestra

PART FOUR: THE NEW YORK LATE-STARTERS STRING ORCHESTRA

Conducting

Nishanti

Dan

Joe

LSO and Suzuki

The East London Late Starters Orchestra

The Really Terrible Orchestra

Shira

PART FIVE: OLD AND NEW

Bar Mitzvah

Practicing

The View from the Audience

Back in the Saddle

Music Camp British Style

Aaron

Geraldine

Ed, Colin, and Chris

The Maestros and Me

Music Camp American Style

PART SIX: THE BEAUTY OF AN OPEN STRING

Happy Birthday

Finale

Grand Finale

Acknowledgments

Standing in a crowded elevator in midtown Manhattan with a cello strapped to your back is no way to win a popularity contest. For one thing, you are taking up nearly twice your normal footprint; for another, you can barely make a move without sideswiping someone. But there I was jostling people with my cello in the elevator of a Manhattan loft building on my way to my very first rehearsal with the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra.

In truth, the cello on my back was the least of my worries. I was en route to what I feared would be a mortifying encounter. My orchestra experience was limited to playing in a middle-school ensemble with my son plus a handful of sessions with adult amateurs where I often felt lost and overwhelmed. Humiliation was assured. I was destined to play out of tune, out of time, out of rhythm — crimes akin to having your cell phone go off in a crowded theater. Why was I even going? I was silently praying that the elevator would get stuck on its slow climb to the thirteenth floor.

The elevator eventually belched me out into a narrow hallway that led to a small actors’ studio where members of the orchestra were unpacking their instruments. The room was strewn with props from a show, including hats, shoes, and an old bed frame with exposed springs. There was a maze of pipes overhead and wire mesh — reinforced windows that were nailed shut. This old loft, which once housed a ladies coat factory, was surely on its way to becoming something else — luxury condominiums or maybe a swanky gym — but for this brief moment it was rehearsal space for the Late Starters Orchestra.

I had been advised to arrive ten minutes early because the Late Starters Orchestra was paying for the studio by the hour. And it wasn’t about to start late. Casting a brief glance around, it became clear to me that the late in the orchestra’s name referred to the age of the participants, not to the starting hour.

The players, a smattering in their thirties but most of them approaching sixty like me and still others well beyond it, were readying their instruments and setting up their music stands when the conductor — a tall, thin, blond, serious, and yet stunning-looking woman, decidedly younger than her late-starter participants — silenced us all with an A note from her violin. It’s called “tuning,” and we all did our best to get the A string on our instruments to match hers.

The A is the highest of the four strings on the cello. There are a thousand steps to making music in an ensemble but it all begins with making sure the instruments are in tune, which means, in effect, that everyone is on the same page.

Ari, mein liebe, I heard my late cello teacher, Mr. J, say gently. I speak German. You speak Hebrew. But if you speak Hebrew and I speak German we cannot understand each other. We must find a common language and that common language for us is the key of E, English. You understand, right? In music, like in language, we must find common ground. When an orchestra tunes, that common ground is A.

What’s nice about the note A is that all the classical string instruments — the violin, the viola, the cello and the double bass — have an A as an open string. An open string means the note is played with just one hand, the right hand — the hand that holds the bow. No left hand pressure is necessary. There’s a purity to this that enables a clear conversation to get going between all the instruments.

Here was something familiar to me. A, the highest string on the cello, is my favorite letter, and not just because my name starts with A. I relate to A. For me it signals beginnings and taking chances — something I’ve tried to do both in my career as a journalist and in my religious life.

As the conductor played her A, I strained to listen to my cello’s A. I could hear that it was off — my ear was that good — but I wasn’t sure if I was too high or too low. I suddenly remembered a trick that Mr. J taught me. The note is inside you, he said . Just sing it. Let it come out. Sing! Even though everyone else was bowing, I was singing. I sang the A—“Aaaa,” I sang above the din — until I could hear it and then try to match it on my cello. My A string, I now knew, was too low. I reached up to the top of the cello, turned the peg up a notch and suddenly — and remarkably — my A sounded exactly like all the others. It joined the great flow of A strings in the room, and through all time, and through all orchestras. It seemed like the most perfect sound I had ever heard. I experienced an inexpressible joy. I almost burst out laughing with the sheer delight of playing a single note. I remembered why I had come.

You are not playing a note. You are playing a song, Mr. J would say when I’d complain about having to play a note over and over and over again until it sounded the way he thought it should. Every note is a song. Sing! Play it!

Our A’s in tune, the conductor raised her baton to begin. Suddenly, the door opened and a gray-haired woman in her seventies came rushing into the room with her cello. The conductor paused to allow the new cellist a chance to find a seat. For some reason, I felt an immediate connection with this woman. Maybe it was because she reminded me of my Grandma Nettie, who will forever be associated in my mind with brownies so delicious we called them “yum yum cake.” I waved at the woman to indicate that there was a place in the cello section next to me but then realized that there was no chair for her, just the old bed frame left over from the actors who normally used the room. I put down my cello and went into the hall in search of a folding chair for this grandma look-alike.