The Late Starters Orchestra (4 page)

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.

PART TWO

Overtures

There are two things that don't have to mean anything; one is music, the other is laughter.

—
IMMANUEL KANT

I
f the people in my immediate circle were skeptical, I found encouragement from the words and examples of other late starters. Eve, with whom I sat that first day in the Late Starters Orchestra, stood five feet, one inch tall and wore her hair in a pageboy cut that shook and flopped around like a white mop when she played. Cello was not her first instrument; in fact she did not pick it up until she was in her late sixties.

Eve grew up in Philadelphia. There was a piano in the house, but that was the instrument of her older brother, so, wanting to be different, she took up the flute and played through high school and college. She also sang in choruses and spent two summers of her youth singing at the summer music festival in Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Eve didn't marry until she was thirty (she was a “late starter” to marriage, too, she joked, especially back in the 1960s). In fact, she and her husband met in an amateur orchestra. She played flute, he the trombone. But music took a backseat in her life as she raised three children and worked as a proofreader and secretary for organizations that she believed in, like the ACLU. Later, she worked in her husband's photo print shop.

With her children out of the house and the shop closed, Eve's thoughts returned to music. “One day I was walking by the Third Street Music School and saw this sign that read:
NEW CELLO CLASS FOR ADULT BEGINNERS. LIMITED TO THREE STUDENTS.

“To be honest, I was always terrified of the cello,” she told me, explaining that she found “daunting” the notion of carrying it around and tuning its four strings. “But I figured I should confront my fears. . . . So I walked in and signed up. They even supplied me with a cello.” It was not a natural fit. The cello was big for her small frame, but Eve compensated by moving around the instrument more like a double bass player in a jazz quintet than a cellist in an orchestra.

She picked it up at sixty-seven and still hadn't let go a decade later. From what I could see, in those ten years she had achieved something extraordinary. In ensembles, you don't often hear your fellow musicians playing individually. It's one of the aspects that I like about it. You can hide and even get lost in the crowd. You are in an orchestra but you've got cover. Every so often, though, a cello solo is called for and, for that, the first cellist takes center stage. One day at rehearsal, we were playing a short, upbeat, dance-like piece by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg called “From Holberg's Time,” a composition written in the nineteenth century meant to evoke the eighteenth. As often happens, the violins carry the melody at first and then it shifts to the cellos or more precisely one cello. The cello ensemble is instructed in the music to “pizz,” which means to pluck strings in what is properly called pizzicato. My fellow section cellists and I were plinking, while one cello—Eve's—began to intone the melody. It took my breath away.

I dared not play with her, but I sang along with her melody, quietly and under my breath.

If rhythm emerges from the body, melody springs from the voice,
Mr. J would say.
Everything is a melody, even a baby's cry. It may start with a whimper and escalate to a screech. But then the baby finds the mother's breast and a gentle cooing is heard. Of course, the baby doesn't know he's singing, but he is. He doesn't know he is in the middle of a drama—a grand opera, perhaps—but he is.
Th
ink of melody as a plot, a tale of love or conflict or struggle. Melody tells a story.

When I heard Eve play, I heard the melody but I also heard her story, the story of a late starter who, to my ears, played like an early starter. How did she become that good? After the rehearsal, I asked Eve about the place of music in her life. “What does your typical week look like?” I asked her. Maybe if I followed her model, I could play like that, too.

I was astonished to learn that music wasn't a side dish for Eve, but the actual main course of her life. Indeed, she was actively engaged in playing every single day. Her week was all music, all the time:

Sunday: The Late Starters Orchestra

Monday: Amateur Chamber Music at the 92nd Street Y

Tuesday: The Downtown Symphony

Wednesday: Cello lessons with Allen Sher, formerly of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Thursday: Trombone lessons at the Third Street Music School Settlement

Friday: More coached chamber music at the 92nd Street Y, these sessions specifically for those sixty or over

Saturday: Practice, practice, practice.

It all made sense, except Thursday.

“Trombone lessons?” I asked.

“I couldn't resist,” Eve said with a smile.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

What Eve was experiencing in her late seventies—and what I was beginning to feel in my late fifties—is part of a much larger trend. Simply put, people are living longer, and, with leisure time increasing and jobs disappearing, often have more time on their hands. Over the course of the twentieth century, life expectancy in America rose from an average of just over forty-nine years to seventy-seven and a half years. The baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964—my generation), the twentieth century's noisiest and most demanding generation, are now moving into their sixties and their quest for learning, meaning, growth, and attention is unabated. American universities are increasingly catering to this population by opening up their classrooms and offering special nondegree programs to the boomer set. Sociologists have a variety of names for the transition into this phase of life.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a Harvard sociologist, calls it “the third chapter” and writes about it in a book by that name. She tells the stories of people who, late in life, are learning to speak a foreign language, play jazz piano, surf, act, and write plays. What characterizes them all, she writes, is “the willingness to take risks, experience vulnerability and uncertainty, learn from experimentation and failure, seek guidance and counsel from younger generations, and develop new relationships of support and intimacy.”

Patricia Cohen, the author of
In Our Prime:
Th
e Invention of Middle Age,
believes that education is the key. Discussing a brain study conducted by two psychologists at Brandeis University, Cohen writes, “For those in midlife and beyond, a college diploma subtracted a decade from one's brain age.”

Music is even better.
I can hear Mr. J saying
. It shaves twenty years off brain age.
Rhythm springs from the body and melody from the voice. But harmony, he taught me, springs from the mind.
To find harmony we must find balance. It is about constantly making judgments. Above all, harmony is exercise for the mind.

Several studies show that musicians tend to remain sharper in old age than those who do not have music in their lives. Those with musical training outperformed nonmusicians in both visual and verbal memory tasks. It wasn't only in aural memory that they exceeded the others; it was also in remembering what they read and saw as well. Those who started musical training young had a greater advantage, but even late starters did better than non­musicians in memory tasks.

In one study, conducted at the University of Kansas, researchers compared three groups of seventy healthy older adults ranging in age from sixty to eighty-three. They divided their subjects into three groups: nonmusicians, low-activity musicians (one to nine years of musical training), and high-activity musicians (ten years or more). The researchers did their best to control for every possible condition of importance, including intelligence, physical activity, and education. Still, the results showed that the more music, the better the memory, the quicker the processing speed, and the more adroit the cognitive flexibility. Music, it seemed, was able to take an eighty-year-old mind and turn it into a mind more befitting of a sixty-year-old.

You can read about the benefits of adult learning in such places as
Psychology Today,
a magazine where the median age of readers is forty-five. (One recent
Psychology Today
feature article had this headline:
MUSIC LESSONS:
TH
EY'RE NOT JUST FOR KIDS ANYMORE.
) And, of course, music isn't the only way to sharpen the mind. There are also numerous inspirational books on the market touting the value of any kind of lifelong learning, books with the titles
Aging Well,
Th
e Art of Aging, From Age-ing to Sage-ing,
and this one with a cautionary title,
Th
e Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies.
Magazines like
AARP
often feature stories about actors, writers, and painters who come to their craft late in life. Julia Child did not even know how to cook until her late thirties; Grandma Moses didn't pick up a paintbrush until she was in her seventies; Tillie Olsen published her first book at forty-nine; Danny Aiello didn't act until he was forty. However, in all these compilations, there is no list of great classical musicians who start late.

Guitarists, yes, but cellists, no.

In his book
Guitar Zero,
Gary Marcus writes about his personal quest to learn guitar as he approaches his fortieth birthday. Marcus, a psychologist, takes comfort in the stories of rock stars who came relatively late to their craft, like Patti Smith, who didn't seriously consider singing until her midtwenties; and Tom Morello, who didn't pick up a guitar until his late teens.

At thirty-eight, Marcus knew that the cards were stacked against him but he believed that he could master the guitar. “I wanted to know whether I could overcome my intrinsic limits, my age, my lack of talent,” he writes. In the course of the book, he actually becomes quite com­petent on the guitar.

Marcus also revels in the ignorance of many famous guitarists when it comes to reading music. “None of the Beatles could read or write music,” Marcus notes, “and neither can Eric Clapton.”

It's a good thing none of them played a classical string instrument. Cello is different. An ability to read music is required and there is no greatness unless you start young. Very young. “A string player should begin at 5,” the great violinist Alexander Schneider said. “Later is too late.”