The Late Starters Orchestra Read online

  CONDUCTING

  When we meet for rehearsals, Magda has no time for small talk. She spreads her score out on two music stands and keeps her violin on a small table nearby in case she needs to demonstrate something musically. Right after we tune, we play.

  Being in tune is essential. An out-of-tune instrument offends the ear, especially a sensitive ear like Magda’s. It doesn’t take much for a string instrument to slip out of tune (a change in temperature, a bumpy bus ride, a chance encounter in the elevator); that’s why musicians are always tuning.

  I usually managed to arrive at LSO on time, but one Sunday there was emergency subway track work on the Number 1 train and it took me forever to make it downtown. The orchestra was already playing. I found an empty chair, set up my music stand, took out my cello, and looked over the shoulder of another cellist to see what we were up to. I found the spot in the music and fell in line with the rhythm. At one point, we cellists had to shift to the open C string and that’s when I heard it: my C was woefully out of tune. That long commute had apparently taken its toll.

  I wanted to sing out, as Mr. J had taught me, but I wondered if I could do it by ear alone, like the pros do. Get the sound in your head, Mr. J said. Sing, but silently this time. I reached for the fine tuner—that little knob below the bridge—but I realized that we were talking about major surgery here, not fine-tuning. I lifted my right hand to the top of the cello, known as the scroll, and gave one of the pegs a sharp twist as I plucked the string. Bingo! My C was back in tune. I felt like a pro! Beaming, I joined my fellow musicians.

  The next piece was by Carl Nielsen, an early twentieth-century composer. We started together, but then Magda singled out the cellists for special attention. “It starts with an E,” she said. “I am hearing an A. Who is playing an A?”

  My heart sank. I was busted, exposed for being the musical fraud that I was. But just then, a woman in the front of the cello section fessed up. “It was me. I’m sorry, my strings keep slipping. Must be the weather.” I breathed a silent sigh of relief. But just to be sure, I double-checked my note and sang along to be sure. It was an E, after all. I had tuned right and stayed in tune.

  Magda, of course, worried about notes, but even more than the notes, she cared about rhythms. In one piece by Edvard Grieg we were having a particularly rough time. She told the violins to put down their instruments and clap out the rhythms while the cello section kept playing the base line. “Again,” she said. “And again.” She had us do this exercise six times. “That’s better,” she finally acknowledged.

  “Always start with the rhythm, even if you get the notes wrong. Skip the notes, if you must, but keep to the beat.” Magda constantly emphasized the importance of listening as well as playing. “Cellos,” she said, addressing us, “you have to listen to the violins. Otherwise you run off on your own.”

  Magda is extremely orderly and precise, but sometimes she surprises us. In the middle of one rehearsal—a rehearsal that wasn’t going well—she told everyone to stop, put down our instruments, and stand up. “We are going to rearrange the room,” she announced. She made me think of a fifth-grade teacher who was fed up with the class’s lack of decorum. If things don’t work, shuffle the deck.

  Instead of facing her, Magda wanted us to face in different directions at sharp angles to one another. “The only requirement is that no one faces me.” Chairs and music stands were soon scattered around the room. “Now find a place, sit down, and play.” No one could quite figure out what she was up to. All this was so un-Magdalike.

  “The goal,” she said, “is not to look at me but to listen to each other. Now play.”

  It is tough playing without seeing the conductor, but we did, guided by the music rather than our leader. It was disorienting, but a valuable lesson.

  After a few more tries at it this way, she grouped us once again by instruments and we faced her. We tried it again. “We are getting there,” Magda said. “Of course you must watch me, but most of all you must listen to each other.”

  Before a performance, Magda was especially inspiring. “Be confident,” she told us. “You should have no doubts. Believe in yourself.”

  You rehearsed it and you know it well. Confidence!

  Sometimes her words mingled in my mind with those of Mr. J. There were times I couldn’t tell them apart.

  Do not be timid. Just play. Express yourself. Think about the sound, the music, the colors. Don’t worry that you will miss a fingering or a bow direction. If you skip a note, no one will know. It is about the character of the music.

  “Be confident. And look confident,” Magda said. “Articulate each note. Good actors in the theater don’t mumble. They articulate each word. Articulate.”

  And even if you don’t feel confident,” she said, “look confident.”

  If you look frightened, the audience will only feel bad for you, Mr. J agreed.

  “Now give them something they will remember,” Magda added.

  There was one performance where, despite the pep talks, the first violins were not convinced. In the hour before the performance, when we were having our final rehearsal, Magda demonstrated a particularly difficult passage in a Vivaldi piece, the “Spring” movement from The Four Seasons. She played it once with the first violins and then with the whole orchestra. “Now, play it yourselves,” she instructed. But the first violins went awry.

  “I think we need you at the concert,” said a violist named Ron.

  “People aren’t coming to hear me, they’re coming to hear you,” Magda said. “You are on your own.”

  But when we got to the Vivaldi at the performance, Magda took pity on us. She pivoted to the side so that she half faced the audience and half faced us and she played the Vivaldi while conducting with her head and eyes. She was magnificent.

  And we sounded pretty good, too.

  NISHANTI

  The LSO members I played with came from all different backgrounds. While Elena was a true late starter, coming to the violin after college, Andrea was a returning late starter, someone who read music and played an instrument as a youngster, gave it up for years, and then came back to it later in life. Perhaps Nishanti, a woman in her thirties, had the most enchanting story.

  Nishanti was born in Sri Lanka and moved to the United States when her father, an emergency room physician, found work in rural Pennsylvania. Nishanti took piano lessons as a child and picked up the violin in ele­mentary school and played through high school. But, she told me, she associated the violin “with being a kid” and left it home when she went off to college. Hers was a long route through college with time off to waitress, it seemed, “in every coffee shop in Pittsburgh.” She graduated college in her late twenties and made her way to New York, and eventually found work in financial operations on Wall Street, where she developed a specialty in derivatives. When I commented that it must have been exciting work, she said, “I didn’t particularly enjoy my job. In fact, I hated it. It got to the point where I was crying at my desk every day.”

  It was a stable, if unhappy, place to work, but then an opportunity arose. One day she learned that her company, RBS, was moving to Stamford, Connecticut, and she was one of the lucky ones who was promised continued employment and asked to make the move. But there was another good offer on the table: “A really good exit package.” She took the latter and never looked back.

  “I quit my job and I made this decision that I was only going to do things that I love to do. No more doing things that I hated. Like finance.”

  And then the uncanny happened. One day Nishanti was waiting at a bus stop in Brooklyn with her gym bag. “I saw this woman across the street with a cello on her back,” she reminisced. “The cello! I’d always wanted to play the cello! So I made a deal with myself. If she walks this way I will ask her about her cello. I will ask her to teach me. And then I will dedicate my life to the cello. If, however, she walks in the opposite direction, then it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Nishanti a
rticulated to me her inner monologue. “Wow. She’s walking this way. She’s really walking this way. This was meant to be!”

  “Then I saw my bus coming. I didn’t want to miss it. I was going to the gym. So I accosted her. ‘Do you just play or do you also give lessons?’ I asked her quickly. ‘I do both,’ she told me. I quickly took her contact info and hopped on the bus.

  “That was a Friday. I called her after the gym and said, ‘I’m not just some crazy lady on the street. I know how to read music. I used to play violin.’ She said: ‘That’s okay. It happens to me all the time.’ ” The teacher’s name was Melina and she told Nishanti where to rent a cello and what music to buy. By Sunday Nishanti had a cello and on Monday she took her first lesson with Melina.

  Nishanti didn’t quite dedicate her life to the instrument, but she did find her way to LSO. Eventually she had to go back to work but steered away from Wall Street and found a job in the nonprofit sector. Now she has what she describes as “a more balanced life” of work and music.

  DAN

  Several members of the orchestra were newly unemployed or underemployed. This was not entirely a surprise since, as I was entering my sixtieth year, the United States was entering its greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The economy was reeling and unemployment nationwide rocketed to new heights. The Great Recession was upon us and it hit New York particularly hard. In the next two years New York City’s unemployment rate would top 10 percent, even higher than the national average.

  A lot of LSO members were hurting. For some, music might seem like a luxury. What they needed was work, not recreation. But music provided a refuge. Music is the best cure for a souring heart, Mr. J said. I was not sure what it could do for a souring economy, but it could certainly help some people through hard times.

  One LSO violinist, a middle-aged man named Dan, had just been laid off from a New York advertising firm when I joined the orchestra. He was fifty and had been at the firm for twelve years, working mostly in ad placement and customer service. Dan’s musical journey went back to violin lessons in his fourth-grade class at Riverdale Country School, an exclusive private school in a tony section of the Bronx. It wasn’t exactly love at first note. “Like a lot of the kids I couldn’t get much more than a squeak out of it,” he said of his first violin. “I continued in fifth grade but then I gave up on it and turned to piano.” Piano is a pleasure after the violin. You hit a key and you get a note. No squeaks. Dan stayed with the piano through high school and then went off to college in Colorado where he eventually got a degree in piano pedagogy.

  He never did much teaching, however. He took advantage of the economic boom of the 1990s and moved to Manhattan. Dan continued to play piano—he still has a 1946 Steinway baby grand in his New York apartment—but music was on the back burner. Eventually he was drawn back to the violin playing of his youth, in part, curiously, because of the computer revolution.

  An early devotee of the social networks of AOL, Dan became one of the hosts of a classical music chat site, where people traded tips on musical news and offerings. In one chat, he told an online acquaintance that he fondly remembered playing violin in grade school. “You should definitely pick it up again,” his AOL friend urged. “You can get a violin for next to nothing on eBay.” This being the early days of eBay, such deals were possible, and before he knew it, he had a bow from a seller in Mississippi and a violin from another in Los Angeles. The whole purchase came to less than two hundred dollars.

  In retelling the story, Dan marveled at how this online buddy, someone who he never met, inspired him in a way that a good friend or relative couldn’t. A good friend might have said, “Stop being a dreamer,” or, “Come on, you’re not a violinist, you’re a pianist,” or, “Don’t try to be a jack of all trades.” But a stranger on AOL could encourage him to “go for it.”

  Why did he want to play the violin? “I was always fascinated by the power the string section has in an orchestra,” Dan said. “Also, I wanted to see if I could get more than the squeak out of it that I got in fourth grade.”

  Dan found a violin teacher through a music school in Greenwich Village, where he lives, and began to take lessons. “She was impressed by my musicianship,” Dan recalled. “But she said that I had to stop listening with a ‘pianist’s ears.’ ”

  Pianist’s ears. It was a term I hadn’t heard since my lessons with Mr. J. And it wasn’t a flattering one. For the string player, the pianist takes the easy way out. The piano lies! For the pianist, the C sharp and the D flat are the same. You get them by striking the same black key. But they are not the same note. You can hear that on a violin. You can hear that on a cello. But you can’t hear that on a piano. The piano lies.

  String instruments like the violin and cello have no keys; they just have the musician’s fingers. And fingers can do what piano keys cannot. Fingers can find that halftone, that microtone—that nuance—that can never be achieved on a piano. On a piano, the note higher than a C and lower than a D are the same, but not on a violin or a cello. But you can hear it only if you listen with a violinist’s ears. Dan developed his violinist’s ear and soon was able to play in community orchestras like LSO.

  Dan is not a calm guy. He fidgets. I found this observing him at the orchestra and when we went out one day for dinner at a deli on the Upper West Side. “I had anxiety as a student,” he said. “I was smart. I should have done better in school, but I’d freeze up at examinations.” Public performance is a real challenge for Dan but that is also one of the reasons he threw himself into orchestral playing. “I realize the value of sitting under pressure where there is a great reward,” he explained. “It has taken me some time to get this into my head. Getting on stage is a different ball game. No matter how well it goes in the practice room, this is where the real test is.”

  Orchestral playing has improved his game. It’s a mountain for him to climb but it is worth the ascent. He revels in compliments, like the nod from Magda after playing a Bach fugue. “Exemplary,” she said. Dan’s elderly parents and his siblings have also come to appreciate his playing and have attended the LSO “open rehearsals.” His parents’ first reaction was, “What about the piano?” but they’ve come to appreciate the violin in their son’s life.

  “The praise I get from all different levels of people has helped me realize that I am definitely an above-average player,” Dan said. At this stage in life, he is not after greatness; just above-averageness.

  I asked Dan how he could sustain his musical interests in the face of losing his job. Unemployment is not a permanent state for him, he assured me. He’s found part-time work as a bartender and is planning to take the actuarial qualifying exam. In the meantime, he’s done some downsizing. Rather than violin lessons at the music school, he is taking them at his teacher’s apartment, where the fees are slightly lower. Two of the community orchestras he plays with have agreed to waive the weekly charges while he is out of work. He told me that it gladdened his heart to find that “the musical organizations I’ve been in don’t act like the phone company, demanding payment or threatening to cut off service.”

  “What if things turn worse for you financially,” I asked. “Would you sell your baby grand piano? Your violin and bow? What if you had to move to a city that didn’t have all the musical enrichment that New York City offers?” As soon as the questions came out of my mouth, I regretted asking them. Sometimes the journalist in me takes over. What passes for a question in an interview is not always polite dinner conversation. But Dan did not seem put off.

  “I’d never sell any of my musical possessions,” he said emphatically. “My music is my life and I would only sell my instruments to upgrade them, for new instruments. Some things just have to remain in that they’re part of one’s essence. That’s certainly how I’ve experienced music in my life.”

  JOE

  Another LSO member who’d fallen on hard times was Joe. If Dan was slight and fidgety, Joe was centered, calm, and solid. He wa
s the unofficial leader of the cello section; perhaps not the best player, but certainly the most confident. He was also one of the more striking-looking members. Balding on top, he had straight white hair falling to his shoulders and a neatly trimmed white beard. With a cello in his arms he seemed invincible.

  Like Dan, Joe was given the opportunity in grade school to play a string instrument. He chose the cello but when it came time to get his instrument, they were out of cellos and the teacher handed him a violin. “A few years ago when I turned fifty-one, I said, ‘I’m probably going to die soon’—anything can happen to us at this age—I must get that cello she never gave me.”

  Joe turned to eBay and bought what he called “a cheapo cello” which was a big mistake. “It was more of a wooden object in a cello shape.” He couldn’t afford lessons, so he taught himself. “In some ways, I relied on my old violin lessons. In theory, I thought the transition would be easy. You just take the violin from under the chin and turn it upright.”

  Joe’s big leap in his cello playing came when he was laid off from the design firm where he was working. “I practice every day without fail, between four hours and one and a half hours. I cannot go for a day without practicing.”

  When I came to know him, Joe was living on Long Island but he was frequently in Manhattan, sometimes to play with LSO and sometimes just to practice in Central Park. He took the train into the city and carried with him his cello, his music, his music stand, and a small wooden stool. He explained that since LSO was soon going to be playing as part of an early summer program called Make Music New York, he thought it would be a good idea to practice in Central Park. Joe would set himself up in one of the park’s many arched tunnels under a roadway or footbridge and play. “The sound is incredible” in the tunnels, he said. “I sound like a genius.

  “And I get a lot of foot traffic, but since there is no place to sit, nobody stays too long, which is a good thing since my repertoire is not very extensive. I play the same things over and over again.”