The Late Starters Orchestra (10 page)

THE INTERSCHOOL ORCHESTRAS OF NEW YORK

Judah's musical life was divided between the school year, when he took lessons with Laura, and the summer, when he'd go to music camp. He attended a Jewish primary school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where his day was already chock-full of subjects. He took all of his regular classes—math, science, social studies, English, gym, and art—plus a heavy complement of religious studies, including Bible, Talmud, and Hebrew. Jewish Day Schools do a lot of things well, but music isn't one of them. While there was some music instruction and a lot of singing, the school did not offer orchestra opportunities like many public and private schools. There was no room full of instruments that kids could try out. The few kids who had serious music instruction were learning with private teachers.

This made Judah and his cello rather exotic in the school. Even in third and fourth grades, Judah was known in school as “the cellist.” And, frankly, he loved to flaunt it. He'd carry it to school assemblies with pride.

Still, being the only cellist at his school wasn't ideal for Judah's musical education. He needed to play with others. When he was in sixth grade, the mother of a young violinist in his school told us about an organization called the InterSchool Orchestras, which ran seven performing musical groups in New York City. Judah auditioned for ISO's youngest group, known as the Morningside Orchestra, and was given a seat in the cello section. Unlike me, auditions, rehearsals, or playing in public did not faze him. He was a natural.

Rehearsals for the Morningside Orchestra were held every Tuesday at four o'clock, which made sense for children in public and private schools, but not for Judah, whose school day ended at a quarter past four. After pleading for some early release time, I got Judah excused from his last period at school and took it upon myself to pick him up each Tuesday at three thirty.

I had my routine. On Tuesday mornings I'd bring Judah's cello to work with me and, at the end of the day, drive with it to pick him up at his school. His eyes would light up when I arrived to get him, although I couldn't be sure if he was excited about playing in the Morningside Orchestra or getting out of school early. Then we'd race downtown in time for him to unpack his cello and be ready for rehearsal.

The Morningside Orchestra was a wonder to behold. Little kids—ranging from seven to thirteen—were arranged in a semicircle facing their conductor, a cheerful, pudgy, and often ebullient man named Robert Johnston. This group of children had all the hallmarks of Upper West Side of Manhattan privilege: braces, pigtails, designer knapsacks, cell phones, school uniforms, and a gaggle of nannies and parents who waited patiently during the rehearsals. Each child held an instrument, often in the half or three-quarter size. There were violins, cellos, flutes, clarinets, and one oboe. The conductor kept them engaged and amused with corny and self-deprecating humor.

“Measure seventy-one,” he'd call out, signaling the point in the score where he wanted the orchestra to begin. “Measure seventy-one! My age!” In fact, Robert was barely forty, but the line always got a laugh.

“You're sounding lethargic,” he said one night, and then went about defining the word by sticking out his stomach and lolling around the front of the room like a stuffed monster who, he explained, just ate a huge Thanksgiving meal. “Okay,” he'd say when the laughter died down. “Measure 161. I said Measure 161! My IQ.”

One day Robert handed out the score for a new piece of music, a lyrical composition by Carl Strommen called “Irish Song,” and asked the group to sight-read the music as he conducted. The piece was beyond their abilities and the young musicians quickly got lost. Robert stopped. “What's the most important thing about sight-reading?” he asked, hands on his hips.

The youthful orchestra members called out answers.

“Rhythm?” one little girl asked tentatively.

“No!” he shouted.

“Sound?” another ventured.

“No!”

“Intonation?”

“No!”

“Melody?”

“No! No! No!” he said, pounding his music stand. “The most important thing about sight reading is
courage.
You have to have courage!

“Now let's try it again—and this time with
courage.
Ready? Measure sixteen . . . my shoe size.”

The rehearsal hour flew by. And every week, the kids got better and better.

AVERY FISHER HALL

Judah's first year with the Morningside Orchestra was the thirty-fifth year since the umbrella organization, the Inter­School Orchestras, was founded. Over the years, many of the young musicians who started with ISO went on to distinguished careers in music, among them the trumpeter with the Canadian Brass, the associate principal cellist at the St. Louis Symphony, the conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, the principal bassoonist at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a timpani player at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

ISO was celebrating the anniversary by holding a gala benefit concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. While ISO parents like me were dazzled that our children were going to have such an opportunity, the significance of playing on the great stage at Avery Fisher, home to the New York Philharmonic, was lost on most of the children. The New York Philharmonic is the orchestra of Leonard Bernstein, Gustav Mahler, Leopold Stokowski, Arturo Toscanini, and Zubin Mehta. All the great cellists I revered played on this stage, including Casals, du Pré, Rostro­povich, and, most of all, Mr. J.

I was blown away by the thought of the impending concert.

Like the old joke about Carnegie Hall, there is only one way to get to Avery Fisher and, that is, “practice, practice, practice.” Robert put the children through their musical paces again and again and again. They rehearsed “Overture for Orchestra” by the twentieth-century Czech-American composer Vaclav Nelhybel, a piece called “Engines of Resistance” by the contemporary American composer Larry Clark, and the Finale from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The children played the music to death. Stopped. Started. Got lost. Got found. Laughed. Joked. And played it again.

More than thirty hours of orchestra practice for what amounted to barely fifteen minutes on the Avery Fisher stage. And that, of course, does not include all the hours and hours of practice that each child prepared on his or her own.

The night of the concert was a triumph. Judah's orchestra began with its three musical offerings, and then the more advanced musical groups in the InterSchool Orchestras took over, playing increasingly sophisticated works with greater confidence and musicianship. It was an evening of Stravinsky, Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi, all played by the young musicians of the InterSchool Orchestras. But for me nothing equaled the moment in which the smallest players, Judah among them, came out onto the Avery Fisher stage at the end of the evening to join all the musicians in a chorus of “America the Beautiful.”

As I watched my son on stage, I thought of another evening almost forty years ago in this same hall. It was 1970 and it wasn't called Avery Fisher yet—that happened in 1973 after Fisher, an amateur violinist who made his fortune inventing and marketing stereo equipment, donated $10.5 million to refurbish what was then simply called Philharmonic Hall. I was twenty and was seated between my mother and a man she was dating, at a performance of Beethoven's famous mass called the
Missa Solemnis.

Jack knew a great deal about classical music and during one of our first meetings, he grilled me on my tastes. I told him that I liked “light” classical, such as Mozart, Handel, and Tchaikovsky. I didn't really know what I was talking about since my exposure to Mozart was
Eine kleine Nachtmusik,
Handel meant
Messiah,
and Tchaikovsky meant the
1812 Overture.

Then I dug myself even deeper by adding, “Tell you the truth, I can't stand the heavy stuff like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.”

Jack furrowed his brow and announced, “That's because you don't know them.”

“Judy,” he called to my mom, “I've got to educate this boy.”

The night of the
Missa Solemnis
concert, Jack bought three tickets. My mother and I went to the Philharmonic together, took our seats, and, as the lights were dimming, Jack slid into the seat next to me.

The music was indeed “heavy.” Beethoven began this solemn mass—one of several he wrote—in 1819 to honor of one of his patrons, the Archduke Rudolf who was being installed as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. The story goes that Beethoven was so obsessed with this symphony that he missed the deadline to perform the work at the installation. Instead, the
Missa Solemnis
was first performed in 1824 in St. Petersburg. It is a grand and ambitious work that makes great demands on its soloists, chorus, orchestra—and audience. This is about as heavy as it gets, and, yet, I felt myself drawn into its spectacle and majesty. My eyes scanned the stage and I took in the violinists, the flutists, the French horn players, and the percussionists with their cymbals, timpani, and drums. But I kept coming back to the cellists and their beautiful instruments. I could isolate the sound—the deep, dark, and rich timbres of the cello—and thought it the most wondrous on the stage. If any instrument spoke to me, this was it.

But even more powerful that night was the drama unfolding around me. I had not met many of my mother's suitors in the years since her divorce and this night's circumstance was most unusual. After the concert, Jack took my mother's hand and said, “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Goldman.” He then turned and was off. My mother and I went home alone.

A short time later, Jack married my mother. They were married for twenty-five years until my mother's death from cancer in 1995. Over the years, Jack, a physicist and successful corporate executive, was very good to me. He supported me financially (through grad school and until I landed my first job) and he encouraged me in my career as a reporter. He would sometimes proudly show to his friends an article I wrote and call me not his “stepson” but his “son.” And, as he had done with “heavy” classical music, Jack enriched my intellectual and social skills in ways that helped me in my personal and professional lives.

As I watched Judah on the stage in 2007, I wished my mother could have seen this: her grandson playing cello at Avery Fisher Hall. For now, I focused on the music. As I had done so long ago in this hall, I took in all the wonders of the orchestra—the violins, the woodwinds, the percussion section—until I came again to the cellos. And there, among the players, was Judah, playing the music that spoke to me on this night in a whole new way.

THE OLDEST KID IN THE ORCHESTRA

After his Avery Fisher debut, Judah signed up with the youth orchestra for another season and then I hatched a plot. Simply put, I was jealous. I, too, wanted to play in an orchestra. I had had a few experiences with amateur orchestras in my twenties but I found that the conductors had little patience with rookies. To make matters worse, I had hardly touched a cello in years, unless you count a few failed efforts to jump-start my cello playing. Most of my contact with the cello was carrying and unpacking Judah's instrument. I went to our storage closet, fished out my old cello, and gave it the once over. It was Bill, the beat-up student cello that Mr. J sold to me for five hundred dollars in 1976. Now, with the passage of time, it looked even worse. It suffered from the years of neglect and the vagaries of New York apartment living where heat seemed to be coming out of the old radiators in all four seasons. The cello's bridge, the fine wood structure that held up the strings, had collapsed. There were hairline cracks in the wood and some of the joints—the places where two pieces of wood came together—had separated. Like many aging beauties, my cello was in need of reconstructive surgery. Mr J used to talk about his cello repairman as his “luthier,” from the French word
luth
or lute. A luthier makes and repairs string instruments like violins, cellos, and guitars. This was certainly a job for a luthier, and I sought out my very own at a violin repair shop near Lincoln Center. The proprietor took one look at my ailing instrument and dismissed it out of hand.

“It would cost you more to fix that than you paid for it,” he told me without even asking me how much I paid for it. And then, turning up his nose, he added: “I don't fix student cellos.”

“How much,” I asked him, reasoning that even luthiers must have their price. “Fifteen hundred,” he told me.

Sparsamkeit erhalt das haus
, I heard Mr. J say.
Frugality keeps the house. Move on.
You can get a new one for less.

But it connects me to you,
I heard myself responding.
I need to keep trying to get the sound out of it that you did.

Mr. J did not argue.

“Fifteen hundred it is,” I said. The luthier, fearing I would never come back, made me pay up front.

MR. J'S OLD CELLO
restored, I needed a teacher. Judah was doing so well with Laura that I asked her if she would be willing to spend an extra hour at our apartment on Sunday mornings teaching me.

“How tough do you want me to be on you?” Laura asked at our first lesson. Although it was obvious, I told her that my goals for myself and my goals for Judah were quite different. “I think he can be great. As for me, I just want to make music.”

I had no illusions about what I could do on the cello. I remember once joking with Mr. J that I was going to quit journalism and spend full time on my instrument. Apparently that was not something to joke about. “That's not a good idea, Ari,” he said sternly. “Being a musician is a very hard life. Besides, you have a profession. Let us just play for the love of it.”

I wanted to be sure that Laura understood that, too. I knew that she was an exacting teacher. I saw the way she worked with Judah. I told her that she did not have to correct my every missed note and wrong bow direction. “Go easy on me.”

Laura and I went over the basics of holding the instrument and doing the C scale. She was pleased I knew as much as I did. “You had a good teacher,” she said admiringly. After some more preliminaries, Laura and I settled on a piece that I could comfortably play, Minuet no. 3 by Bach, the last song in the first Suzuki book.

Judah took my first lesson with Laura as an opportunity to turn the tables on me. I had sat in on his lessons for so long, now he sat in on mine. “I think you should start with ‘Twinkle,' ” he said, referring to the first song in the first Suzuki book. “No shortcuts!” He was just drawing on his own experience with Laura. She would not let him go on to the next piece in the Suzuki book until he mastered the one he was working on.

I was caught, but came up with something of a re­joinder.

“I'm learning it the Hebrew way,” I told him with a weak smile. “We start at the end of the book.” Satisfied, Judah lost interest and went off to his room.

Laura and I got off to a good start, but progress was slow. I was trying to get back my game and take it a step further. As I began to play again, I remembered all over again how the art of making music involved so many moving parts: the cello, the bow, the fingers, the hands, the strings, the bridge, the pegs, not to mention the other elements Mr. J emphasized: the body, the voice, and the mind. I found that I could get some of them right, but not all of them right at the same time.

With a few weeks of lessons under my belt, I felt confident enough to approach Judah's conductor, Robert, and asked if I could play with the Morningside Orchestra. Much to my surprise, he was receptive to the idea. “You'll be the oldest kid here,” he told me with a smile. All my fears about not being good enough faded away. Here, at last, was a conductor who liked rookies. Best of all, Robert didn't even make me audition. I asked and was instantly admitted.

Even now, all these years later, I marvel at how easy it was. After all, if this had been Little League or the school play or the science fair, I'm sure I would have been shown the door. How absurd for an adult to join any of those activities—and how potentially suspicious. But here I was given complete trust. I was supremely grateful. Robert could have told me to find an adult orchestra, to play with people my own age. But this was even better. What better place to restart my unfulfilled cello ambitions than in a youth orchestra?

And so, in my late fifties, I became the oldest member of Morningside, the youngest music group of the InterSchool Orchestras. Judah, who was then twelve, was cool with my joining. A year later that might not have been the case, but the sullenness of adolescence had not yet kicked in with my youngest son. I was not (yet) the embarrassment I was destined to become.

What's more, Judah even let me sit next to him in the cello section! Still, while Judah was happy to have me nearby, the conductor did not think that was a good idea. “A large part of being in an orchestra is socialization,” Robert explained after I spent a couple of sessions sitting next to Judah. “So we are going to mix things up,” he said. However, I suspect there were other factors at play. After all, Robert didn't need a six-foot-tall adult sitting in the front row, blocking out all the little kids. Obediently, I took a seat in the back, sharing a stand with a confident fifth grader named Francesca who, when I got lost in the score, was kind enough to point out the place where I should be.

One of the first lessons about being in an orchestra with children was this: I needed more practice than they did. Orchestral playing came a lot easier to Judah than it did to me. In truth, he never practiced the orchestra music during the week—he was working instead on the solo pieces that he was learning with Laura—but I desperately needed to practice. In fact, Laura and I spent most of our lessons preparing for the Morningside Orchestra rehearsals.

Among the pieces the orchestra was preparing that season were selections from Holst's
Th
e Planets
and Rimsky-Korsakov's
Snow Maiden.
I was having an especially hard time with the sixteenth notes in
Th
e Planets.
They were itty-bitty sounds that suddenly came bursting out of all the instruments around me. I heard them, I could even sing them, but my bow and fingers just wouldn't move fast enough to play them.

Just play the first note of each bar,
Mr. J whispered in my ear.
Th
e important thing is to keep up a steady rhythm. Stopping is not an option.

Robert spent a good deal of time on dynamics, especially when it came to the Holst piece.
Dynamics is your volume control button,
Mr. J reminded me.
You can turn it up or you can turn it down.
In a piece of music, dynamics are indicated by markings centered on two terms, piano and forte, indicated in the music by
p
and
f
.
But there are more subtle variations like mezzopiano (
mp
), which is moderately soft, and mezzoforte (
m
f
), moderately loud. But why deal in moderation when you can deal in extremes, like music noted
ppp
(as soft as possible) and
fff
(as loud as possible).
Th
e Planets
by Holst, asks for even more,
ffff,
which I guess means even louder than possible. What a great piece to play with a bunch of kids. We got as noisy as we could without ever losing the music.

Louder! Louder!
Mr. J was now shouting in my ear
. To get louder, check your ninety-degree angle. It's not about pressing hard. It's about the ninety degrees.
Th
e bow must be at a ninety-degree angle to the string.
He stood in front of me. I saw his familiar face and his strong hands, but his body had become a full-length mirror.
Look in the mirror! Is your bow at a ninety-degree angle to the strings? Looks like fifty to me. Okay. Now, sixty, seventy, eighty. You've got it! Ninety degrees. And your sound! Forte-fortissimo!

TH
ERE WAS NO BIG
Lincoln Center gala planned the year I joined ISO as there had been for the thirty-fifth anniversary. Instead we played at a smaller and funkier venue called Symphony Space, a performing arts center on Manhattan's Upper West Side. To me, though, the venue hardly made a difference. I was about to experience playing cello with an orchestra before an audience in a proper concert hall.

There was great anticipation and excitement on the night of the concert even though we had the most forgiving of audiences: parents, siblings, and friends. Shira was there in her dual roles. While many of the orchestra members had mothers in the crowd, I was the only one with a wife sitting there.

We boys wore black pants, white shirts, and ties and the girls wore knee-length dark skirts and white blouses. Though I did my best to blend in, I felt that I stood out like Mr. Johnson's lethargic Thanksgiving monster. Still, I played, surrounded by beautiful, if not perfectly executed, music. Of course, we made some mistakes but you wouldn't have known it from the audience's reaction. We were praised, cheered, applauded, and lauded. I loved the warm embrace of the crowd, but perhaps the greatest compliment came when Judah and I were packing up our cellos backstage after the concert. “Nice going, Dad. I knew you could do it.”