The Late Starters Orchestra Read online

  It soon became clear to me that this was also a chance for Joe to make some extra money. He puts out a canvas bag for change. How much does he make? “It depends on three things: weather, traffic, and mood.”

  “Wait,” I said. “It doesn’t depend on how well you are playing?”

  “Not at all. What is important is to make good eye contact, especially with children. Smile at a child and the father will give you a buck. Maintain eye contact with a single woman and she’ll put money in the bag.” He described one woman who fumbled for her change purse as he played. She got so flustered that when she found it, she simply dumped the contents into Joe’s kitty. That was probably his best day in the park. He earned eighteen dollars in two hours.

  Playing alfresco is no way to make money. Joe would have made more per hour working at the Gap. Somehow people expect music to be free. On a sunny summer day, passersby will pay for a hot dog or for a balloon for their child but will walk right by the street musician without feeling any obligation.

  There’s a German expression that Mr. J taught me that exhorts people not to take music for granted: If you enjoyed the dance, pay the musicians.

  WHEN JUDAH WAS SMALL, we had a succession of live-in nannies from a Christian community called the Bruderhof. Founded in 1920 in Germany, the Bruderhof was a socialist community modeled on the principles of the early followers of Jesus who proclaimed themselves of “one heart and mind, and shared all things in common.” Most of all they embraced the teachings concerning non­violence (they were strict pacifists), faithfulness in marriage (no divorce allowed), and compassion for the poor.

  Young women from the Bruderhof normally do not go out in the world to be nannies, but I had developed a special relationship with the community when I was a reporter. I had written several articles about their efforts to open the community to the larger world and, at one point, asked if one of the single women would help us out at home. (By that time, I had left the Times and felt there was no conflict in employing someone I had written about.) Eager to give their young people an experience with a Jewish family, the Bruderhof elders sent us one woman after another for five years. While they largely acted as nannies, helping us with the children and household tasks, they were really members of our family.

  The Bruderhof way of life shares a lot with the Amish community. When I first met them, the men wore beards and suspenders and the women all covered their hair with print kerchiefs. They did not shun technology the way that the Amish do, but they were wary of it.

  In this community, playing an instrument was a great virtue. Communal meals and church meetings always included singing along with the band. Our first nanny, Rebecca, played the auto harp and sang. Another, Susan, played the cello. A third, named Noni, wasn’t particularly musical, but she took it on herself to nurture Judah’s cello playing. When Judah was in elementary school, he claimed to have stage fright and routinely refused to sing in public or even participate in group performances. But he shed his shyness when he played the cello. Behind his instrument, he was confident, even masterful. There and only there, he loved an audience.

  Noni had an idea. One afternoon she and Judah baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies and put them in a tin. Then they grabbed Judah’s cello and bow and the two of them went to the Columbia campus and set up a sign that said, “CELLO AND COOKIES: 50¢.” Judah played while Noni sold cookies. We were never sure what the main draw was, the cookies or the cello, but they had a successful little business venture going. Judah got more and more comfortable with being the center of attention. And the crowd loved it. It was something of a variation on that German proverb. Perhaps: “If you enjoyed the cookies, pay the musician.”

  AT ONE POINT, JOE the cellist stopped coming to LSO rehearsals. After a few months, he returned and I asked him what had happened. “My financial situation fell apart,” he explained. “I was simply overwhelmed.” And there was another reason, he said reluctantly. “I felt that the other cellists were relying on me too much.”

  There was definite truth to that. When I play with the orchestra, I play the parts I know and skip the parts I don’t. Sometimes that means an entire piece. I just sit it out. The better players, like Joe, play every note.

  “A lot of people,” he said, “were playing ‘air cello,’ moving the bow back and forth but never engaging the string. It looks like you are playing the cello but you’re not. I am!”

  Joe wasn’t exactly angry. He just thought it wasn’t fair. After all, he practiced and practiced. He spoke about going over one passage eight thousand times—and I don’t think he was exaggerating. I have to admit that sometimes I would show up for rehearsal (after escaping my job, my students, my family, and my editor) and sight-read my way through. I was part of Joe’s problem.

  But now Joe was back. His financial situation had improved and he needed the orchestra. “You have to play with others and you have to play for people,” he said.

  I told Joe that I was glad to see him again but wondered why he chose LSO when there were many other community orchestras he could join. He admitted to liking something about the spirit of LSO. He enjoyed the repertoire, which included a lot of chamber music and string quartets scored for an orchestra, and he appreciated the democratic and open nature of LSO.

  “You don’t have to audition and you don’t have to practice,” he said, echoing Elena’s guidelines. “That’s what makes it so great. And that’s also what makes it so terrible.”

  LSO AND SUZUKI

  The Late Starters Orchestra approach that I had signed up for was not all that different from the Suzuki method that had worked so brilliantly for Judah. While Suzuki asserts that every child can learn an instrument, the LSO philosophy is that adults can, too, even into middle and old age. Both programs are essentially anti-elitist: good music is not just for the wealthy or the supertalented; it is within everyone’s reach. And many of the same behavioral initiations are there: immerse yourself in the music, learn music as you would a language, surround yourself with it and hang out with others who are learning. A chief difference between the two systems is that we late starters do not have parents who take us to lessons, pay for them, remind us to practice, and cheer us on.

  In Suzuki, children are praised at every step—and rightly so. A child’s slow, steady mastery of his or her instrument is nothing short of remarkable. When Judah was little—and here I mean six, seven, and eight—we pulled out the cello nearly every time a guest came over. He’d play “Twinkle, Twinkle” and later a straightforward Bach minuet, and the crowd would go crazy. Family and friends seemed to love it, and whether sincere or not, their applause gave Judah a sense of accomplishment and confidence. One of the first lessons that children learn in Suzuki is how to take a graceful bow and Judah used his often.

  But no one is going to rise to their feet after hearing an adult play “Twinkle” or a familiar minuet. More often their reaction is: “That’s it? That’s what you are spending your time doing? That’s what you learned in six months?” But “Twinkle” we must. At any age, music is learned in minute, deliberate steps. And, while we late starters bring a lot to the table in terms of life experience, intelligence, and motivation, we recognize that we can never recapture the plasticity of mind and the luxury of time that comes only in youth. Youth can achieve mastery; the most we can hope for is competence. In his best-selling book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell writes that there is no secret to greatness: in a word, it comes from repetition. “Ten thousand hours” is his mantra.

  Gladwell argues that everyone—from top hockey players to Olympic ice skaters to world-class chess players to master safe crackers to successful computer geeks to prima ballerinas—put in their ten thousand. Gladwell was criticized for being simplistic on this score when his book came out in 2008. There are, his detractors argue, certainly such factors as talent, health, genetics, environment, economics, parents, and teachers. All of these contribute to greatness, not just slavish practice.

  But practice h
as its virtues. The ten-thousand-hour theory was first advanced by the cognitive psychologist K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, who initially studied just what it is that makes a great musician. Ericsson and two colleagues followed violin students at Berlin’s Academy of Music. The violinists were grouped into three categories: those who were merely “good,” those who were likely to play in professional orchestras, and those who had the potential to become world-class soloists. All of them, the researchers found, started playing at around the age of five. “In those first few years,” Gladwell writes of Ericsson’s study, “everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge.”

  Some maintained their steady two or three hours, but others ratcheted it up year by year until they were practicing more than thirty hours a week by the time they were in their early twenties. The study of these three groups found that the more a student practiced, the greater their chance of being a world-class musician.

  “Elite performance,” Anders and his colleagues wrote in 1993 in the Psychological Review, the journal of the American Psychological Association, is “the product of a decade or more of maximal efforts to improve performance in a domain through an optimal distribution of deliberate practice.”

  In Outliers, Gladwell popularizes this as: “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” Without it, he says, there is none.

  I read this and shudder. I ask: Who at my age has ten thousand hours?

  The answer, of course, is no one. But then the goal of the late starter is not to be a virtuoso or prodigy (too late for that), but to be competent. And recent advances in brain science put competence clearly within reach of late starters. As Dr. Doidge explains in The Brain That Changes Itself, the science of neuroplasticity is overturning the notion that the human brain, developed in childhood, is fixed for life. Doidge documents the work of a group of physicians and researchers he calls the “neuroplasticians,” who “rewire” the brain through behavioral changes and without surgery. He tells of people who are able to move paralyzed limbs or restore vision to blinded eyes because of neuroplasticity. “I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised,” he writes. “I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas.”

  Examples abound of people late in life not only recovering from handicaps but achieving great things. Golda Meir did not become prime minister of Israel until she was seventy. Noah Webster was sixty-nine when he first published his famous dictionary, and Peter Mark Roget was seventy-three when he published the first edition of his famous thesaurus. Benjamin Franklin was seventy-eight when he invented bifocals, and Frank Lloyd Wright was ninety when he designed the Guggenheim Museum.

  It may be too late for late starters to develop the neurons that form extra brain mass in the brains of young musicians, but certainly new pathways into the brain can be created. New skills can be learned. And new instruments played competently if not with mastery, opening up whole new vistas of achievement and enjoyment. And that is what keeps me going.

  THE EAST LONDON LATE STARTERS ORCHESTRA

  The group of parents who started ELLSO in 1982 was led by a civil engineer with no musical background named Chris Shurety.

  “I will never forget the day my daughter Kate came home with a cello,” Chris told me when we met in England. “She was seven years old, she was so pleased. What was wonderful was that she hadn’t been singled out; the whole class had been given the chance to take home either a violin or a cello. They’d had a couple of musicians come in and play these instruments, then they said, ‘Who wants one?’ Everyone put up their hands, and they were each given one to take home.”

  It was all part of an experimental musical enrichment program in the East London public schools. Soon Chris and other parents were spending their Saturday mornings watching their children make music. “Three or four of us looked at each other and said, ‘We could do this!’ ” On behalf of the group, Chris, who was then working for the City of London, approached the school and asked if there were any instruments left over. The school not only gave the parents instruments but arranged for lessons. The classes, however, were offered on a weekday afternoon, and Chris, being a city employee with a flexible job, was the only one able to attend.

  “I went and then taught what I learned to the others,” he said. He held his sessions on Saturday mornings while the children played nearby. But ELLSO, as the group came to be known, grew in unexpected ways. A turning point came in 1998 when the Sunday magazine of the Times of London published an article. It was written by Rose Shepherd, who chanced upon an ELLSO concert at “Hawksmoor Church off the Highway at Wapping, East London,” and declared that “it wasn’t half bad.” But what happened to her next, Shepherd wrote, was nothing short of remarkable. “After the proper concert anyone from the audience could choose an instrument—violin, viola, cello—and have a bash. Then the whole ensemble launched into the waltz, and the new recruits were free to string along.” Shepherd was swept up in the moment. “I plied the bow, I sawed about on open strings . . . and heard something almost tuneful in my left ear. I was reluctant, at first, to get involved. I’m cloth-eared, if not actually tone-deaf (a far more rare condition I am assured, than most of us imagine), and was appalled by the idea of making a public spectacle of myself. But the people were so persuasive, so supportive, and it had been so long since anyone proposed making beautiful music: in the end, I just couldn’t say no.”

  Shepherd was hooked. “I hadn’t ‘played’ an instrument since, at age five, I banged out ‘Oranges and Lemons’ on the triangle with my school percussion band, on stage at the Civic Hall, Croydon. To have the chance, even to hold a violin was . . . well what everybody says: a revelation.”

  She ended her article this way: “You know, you really ought to try it.”

  They did. “At the first meeting of ELLSO after the article appeared, there was a line of people around the block carrying instruments and waiting to get in,” said Carol Godsmark, who remembers the scene vividly because she was one of those people. She is now the executive director of the East London group. But back then she was just another aspiring late starter who brought her violin, which she hadn’t played since she was a youngster in Czechoslovakia. “Some of those people got up at five in the morning and drove 150 miles to get to London on time.”

  Today, some two hundred people participate in the East London group on a weekly basis. “There’s a very strong amateur tradition in this country,” Chris explained. “It grows out of the role of music in the nineteenth century workers’ movement. There were certain composers associated with it. These composers wrote music not for the rich but for the working folk.” Add to that a mandatory retirement age in England of sixty-five and you’ve got a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands who want to turn their attention to music. Many, of course, find more solitary pursuits, such as gardening, painting, quilting, and even playing the piano, but England is a nation of joiners.

  America, on the other hand, is a nation of rugged individualists. In most American professions, there is no official retirement age and, in this economy, even those who can retire often postpone it. And all of this accounts for big differences between amateur music in the United States and England. If, for example, you Google “Making Music U.K.,” you will learn that there are 2,850 voluntary and amateur music groups throughout the British Isles, including choirs, orchestras, samba bands, jazz groups, festivals, handbell ringers, barbershop choruses, brass bands, folk groups, and many others. Making Music is a nonprofit organization that represents and supports these groups.

  Then try Googling “Making Music U.S.” and you’ll find a for-profit organization that books professional musicians for “anything and everything,” from a soprano or harpist for “your wedding ceremony” to a brass quintet for a corporate event.

  Of course t
here are many amateur orchestras in the United States. But my point is that the first thing that the music seeker finds in the United States is professional musicians; in the United Kingdom, you find the amateur musicians themselves. It’s the difference between doing it yourself and ordering in. When it comes to music at least, we Americans are better at ordering in than playing ourselves.

  THE REALLY TERRIBLE ORCHESTRA

  Before I wax too poetic about community orchestras, I should point out that there is a downside to them, a caution best expressed by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who said, “Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.” Shaw was probably referring to the bad fiddlers and fife players of his day who subjected everyone at the pub to their latest jig and reel. But there’s a lot of bad amateur music today, too, as one can see in everything from auditions for American Idol to the incessant postings of Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel covers on YouTube.

  Some amateur groups simply give music a bad name; in fact, one even has it in its name. It is the RTO, the Really Terrible Orchestra. The RTO, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and made up of middle-aged musicians and late starters, is actually proud of its terribleness. It grew out of the same soil as the East London Late Starters but took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.

  One of the RTO’s founders and champions is Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the immensely popular No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. As McCall Smith, a rookie bassoonist, tells it, he was among a group of adult players who were “unable to infiltrate” amateur orchestras in Edinburgh. “We shall start our own orchestra!” McCall Smith declared. “It won’t be a very good orchestra, in fact it will be a really terrible one.”

  And so the name was born. The RTO began with ten players and has grown to sixty-five. Like with the LSO, the RTO has no audition requirement. But unlike the LSO, the RTO takes pride in its limitations. After all, we may call ourselves late, but they call themselves terrible.