The Late Starters Orchestra Page 16

  “It took me five years, but I think I finally nailed it,” she said. On the violin.

  People like Colin, Ed, and Chris made me feel as though I belonged.

  THE MAESTROS AND ME

  Unlike Ed, I had played a flat before. And unlike Colin, I did my practicing in one of the soundproof practice rooms. I spent a good hour a day practicing, which was not nearly enough, but then I had a very tight schedule.

  The day began at 7:30 a.m. with something called “low-impact yoga for musicians” taught by a short and compact double bassist named Victor, one of the gypsy-music instructors. Here was definitely something Shira would enjoy, so the two of us arrived early, unrolled our yoga mats, and assumed the lotus position in front of Victor.

  “Playing music here is like binge drinking,” Victor began. “How long do you normally practice a day?” he asked us. “Twenty minutes? Thirty minutes? Well, here you are playing for eight hours a day. It is a shock to the system! You have to be prepared.”

  Victor, who looked like he’d been up all night—and probably was, playing gypsy music around the campfire—showed us some quick exercises that cellists can do, as he put it, “while the conductor is yelling at the violinists.” The exercises involved a lot of neck rolling and pivoting in one’s chair and slapping one’s back. “This is like an internal massage,” he said. Afterward, Victor demonstrated “relaxation techniques,” including lying on the floor on a yoga mat supported by pillows and bolsters. Victor promptly fell asleep. We waited awhile for him to wake, but then realized that he was catching up on his sleep. Shira and I quietly wandered off to breakfast.

  After eating, we were divided up into technique sections. Shira took off to a special program for anyone interested in painting. I was assigned to a cello section with a perfectly coiffed, smartly dressed, precise, and very proper British woman named Susannah. She could not have been more different than my rumpled and disorganized Mr. J. Your strings are tuned in perfect fifths, he’d say when he’d lose something or arrive late. I’m not.

  A perfect fifth is the relationship between the four strings on the cello. The term means a tone that is five degrees above or below a given tone. And he taught me how to recognize one. Count, he’d instruct. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. The do and the so are a perfect fifth apart!

  That is why if you can get your A string in tune, you can tune all the others. Just use your perfect fifths.

  Most teachers will tune your A and leave the rest to you. But the precise Susannah wouldn’t settle for that. Susannah insisted on listening to each of the four strings on each of our cellos and made the necessary adjustments. With ten people in the class that meant a considerable amount of time, but it made everyone feel special—and in tune. Susannah then went through some basic exercises that every cellist with even a modicum of training knows: playing scales, holding the bow, stretching for what are called the extended positions. Still, Susannah gave me some new ways to think about playing. At one point she compared the moment when a cellist changes bow direction to “water lapping on the shore,” and at another point to “the artist’s paint brush, going back and forth, back and forth.” She spoke about holding the bow “with stability and flexibility,” noting that the proper position of the thumb and first finger were key. “Don’t grip the bow,” she counseled. “Let it flow through your fingers, supported by the strings.”

  About three times the first hour, Susannah mentioned that her hands were small (for a cellist) and that she had to compensate in certain ways. This inspired one of my classmates, a man in his sixties named Jeremy, to recall a conversation between the great pianist Artur Schnabel and an admirer. “Mr. Schnabel,” the admirer said. “Your hands are so small. How do you play piano with such small hands?” To which Schnabel is said to have replied: “Madame, I don’t play with my hands.”

  A great musician plays with heart and mind and soul.

  In stark contrast to the well-appointed Susannah was the free-spirited Deirdre, who later in the day was in charge of my cello ensemble. To be fair, Deirdre was suffering from a head cold, but she seemed sort of spacey. Maybe she, too, had been up all night with Victor and the gypsy musicians. Her long blond hair was unkempt and she wore an oversized Indian print shirt over a pair of torn blue jeans. She was our hippie teacher, both in style and in spirit.

  Deidre gave us a mighty A from her cello and sat back and listened to us tune. “Tuning is the beginning of playing. Listen to that sound! Wonderful! Wonderful!” All the A’s taken together did make quite a good sound. Deirdre assembled us in a circle, saying that we needed to listen to each other. Ensemble playing in this context meant music written for four cello parts. Since we were a group of eight, two cellists played each part. We warmed up with a piece by Haydn and then tried some Bach. We did our best—and sometimes got lost—but Deirdre was a forgiving coach. She minimized our mistakes and luxuriated in our successes. “Now hold that chord. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Perfection!”

  After an hour, I again packed up my cello, folded my music stand, and found the room for the workshop on gypsy, Balkan, and klezmer music. At breakfast, when I last saw Shira, I urged her to come and sit in on this class. If part of my agenda was to involve her in classical music, this seemed like my best shot.

  Shira arrived a few minutes late and sat in the back of the room near the piano. I set up my stand and cello in the front with a group of cellists. I gave her a wave and a smile to show that I was happy she came. Suddenly, a tall and rubber-limbed man—his name was Pietr, we would learn—came bounding into the room with his violin. There was no talk of tuning our instruments and, it turned out, no need for our music stands. “No sheet music now. No music,” Pietr said in a Polish accent, waving his bow at us. “You’ll get the music later.”

  “For now, just listen. I am going to play by the air. You play, too, by the air.” Occasionally he would call out a series of notes: “G, C sharp, A,” he would shout. “It’s the gypsy rumba.”

  “Play. Play. Play,” he said as he leapt around the room, and we did our best to follow. “Play. There are no wrong notes.” It was all by ear—or by “air,” as he put it—and soon we were making music. There was a set of bongo drums in the corner and he told one of the violinists to put down her violin and start banging. He started tapping on his violin with his bow and encouraged others. Shira was dancing in place.

  “My wife plays piano,” I shouted to Pietr over the din. “Can she join?” Pietr nodded yes, and soon Shira was banging out chords, I was plucking notes, Pietr was carrying the melody, and a dozen other musicians were trying to keep up.

  This went on for most of the hour until Pietr took one final leap, coming down as he bowed on his violin and we all laughed in amazement. He never did hand out any sheet music.

  My wonder only increased when I saw that Shira had attracted a small group of musicians, including Victor, the yoga teacher, who brought his bass over to the piano when she started to play. Victor invited her to stay and jam with the next gypsy, Balkan, and klezmer session.

  No one invited me. I looked at my schedule and saw that orchestra was next. Compared to the gypsy session, orchestra was a drag. It was back to the classics. The conductor was nice but colorless. I can’t even remember his name. And the music was rather unmemorable—Carl Nielsen, I think. Unlike the other groups, which were made up of eight to twenty musicians, we were an orchestra of one hundred. Everyone seemed uptight. I sat next to a diminutive older woman named Linda. We seemed evenly matched. Both of us were timid players, waiting for cues from the other cellists about stopping and starting. The conductor spent a lot of time yelling at the violinists. I recalled the exercises that Victor taught us for moments like this. When the conductor stopped yelling at the violinists, he yelled at the cellists. Finally the rehearsal came to an end. When it was over I said to Linda: “Nice meeting you. See you tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind but tomorrow I am going to share a stand with my friend.
”

  Had I been alone, I might have been depressed by the rejection. I was not at the top of my game. Even Linda could see that. But Shira was there to cheer me on. When I found her, she tried to assure me that Linda’s motives were more social than musical.

  While I seemed to be alienating people, Shira was drawing a loyal fan base. It wasn’t only the gypsy musicians who wanted her. At the very first session of her dance class, she suggested some choreography and then taught it to everyone while the dance teacher looked on. She quickly took an active role in the fine arts class even though she’s never painted in her life. If she wasn’t exactly a witch, I figured, she was certainly bewitching.

  That night at the bar, as Colin played his lonely solos and others caught up on the day’s activities, I introduced Shira to my new friend Aaron, the one who plays cello backward. Aaron expressed surprise when I made the introduction. “Your wife!” he said. I was waiting for him to say, “That is your wife? I thought it was your daughter.” I get that a lot. But Aaron was surprised for another reason. “My wife wouldn’t come along with me!” To which I responded with a wry smile: “My wife wouldn’t let me come without her.”

  MUSIC CAMP AMERICAN STYLE

  There was, however, a music camp experience that Shira was ready to forgo. That was my next stop on the summer music circuit. After coming back from ELLSO, I decided to sign up for a program in Maine called SummerKeys. I had heard about SummerKeys from my LSO friends one afternoon at the Chinese restaurant after rehearsal. Several people were comparing camps that they had attended. A cellist named Patty said that SummerKeys was the one for serious players who had a specific musical goal in mind. No dorms or bars or communal meals there. “SummerKeys is like a musical monastery,” Patty said. “It’s in this remote part of Maine where there are absolutely no distractions. There is just one reason to go to SummerKeys: music.”

  “Will you come?” I asked Shira. Even for my adventurous wife, this was too much. Or too little.

  “You go,” she said. “I’m staying home.”

  SummerKeys is in the little fishing village of Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States, right at the border with Canada. One of the chief attractions is West Quoddy Gifts, which dubs itself the “Easternmost Gift Shop in the U.S.” It’s so close to Canada, in fact, that you can walk over the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Bridge and have dinner in New Brunswick. Which is a good thing since there aren’t any restaurants in Lubec. Or at least none worth mentioning. The local population—and local economy—have been on a down­slide for decades. The canneries and smokehouses that once gave life to the harbor area are all shuttered now, the victims of changing tastes, overfishing, and business that has moved abroad.

  SummerKeys was founded by a man named Bruce Potterton, a New York City piano teacher, who bought a house in Lubec in 1991 for what he recalled was “the price of a used car.” A year later he opened a summer music retreat with three pianos and fifty students. Since then, he’s expanded the range of instruments to include violin, cello, mandolin, guitar, and woodwinds. The original three pianos have grown to thirteen and they are housed in churches and homes around Lubec, including two in a garage that has been dubbed “Car-negie Hall.” Most participants come for a week, although some for two or three. The program draws about 250 students over the eleven-week season.

  Students stay at local bed-and-breakfasts and take meals on their own. Adding to the isolation, many cell-phone networks do not reach Lubec (mine didn’t) and there is no Wi-Fi outside of the Lubec Memorial Library, which was open only four hours a day, four days a week when I was there.

  Lubec is a good ten-hour drive from Manhattan and three hours from the biggest nearby city, Bangor. I’m not a big fan of long-distance driving so I booked myself a New York-to-Bangor flight and looked into a bus service for the last stretch into Lubec. My decision to fly solved one problem (that long solo drive) but created another—getting my cello to Lubec.

  When I told the registrar at SummerKeys of my travel issues, she said she’d be on the lookout for a cello that I could rent while there. She came through a few days later with the perfect solution. “There’s a cellist from the Bangor Symphony who is coming to Lubec and she’s got an extra cello she’s willing to rent,” the registrar said. “And not only that, but she’s driving from Bangor and will pick you up from the airport.”

  The cellist’s name was Ruth and she was just as she described herself to me in an e-mail: “Fifty-three, tall, thin, long hair and sharp nose.” And a big, warm smile. She was waiting for me at the gate in Bangor and we made our way to her car, a 1996 Subaru hatchback with two cellos inside. Ruth explained that I’d be renting the cello she’d been playing since she was twelve. It was an old, slightly beaten-up Italian model with a rich sound. “I used it for my audition to the Bangor Symphony,” she said. After joining, though, she bought herself a new cello, a pristine, handcrafted one from China.

  As we drove, Ruth, an engineer by training, told me that she spent her career as an officer in the air force, mostly serving in bases out west. She moved to Maine in her retirement to be near her elderly parents. “I thought I’d be spending my retirement making and selling crafts and jewelry,” she told me, “but then I saw this small ad in the newspaper from the Bangor Symphony. They were looking for a cellist!”

  Ruth was an unlikely candidate. Her life in the air force meant a lot of moves to different places—California, Colorado, Arizona. She always took her cello with her. She played when she could find the time but had not had formal lessons since she was twenty. After seeing the ad for the Bangor Symphony opportunity, she practiced like crazy for the audition. She was admitted as a “sub,” which meant that she was technically an extra cellist but in reality played almost every concert.

  Even as a sub on the orchestra roster, Ruth was suddenly in demand. After all, she could now say that she was a cellist with the Bangor Symphony. She has been called on to perform at weddings, at retirement homes, and in library concerts. She also picked up a number of young students.

  “You’re a professional,” I observed. “Why are you going to SummerKeys?”

  “There’s an opening for a regular chair in the Bangor Symphony,” Ruth explained. “And I want it.”

  Ruth felt that she had gone as far as she could working alone. She wanted a coach to help her prepare her audition piece, the Saint-Saëns cello concerto. I was only a little embarrassed when I told her what I was working on: a Bach minuet from the third Suzuki book, a piece my son Judah had perfected when he was ten. So here we were: Ruth a professional and me a late starter on our way to the same summer music camp. Any program that could teach both of us, I figured, had to be pretty versatile. I wondered if Ruth and I would, in fact, be studying with the same teacher. As it turned out, we were. The cello contingent for our week at SummerKeys was quite small: there were only five of us. The week we were there, right after the Fourth of July holiday, was a quiet one at SummerKeys. The five cellists, plus six pianists, and eight mandolin players. Not your dream week for chamber music. As it turned out, each group really kept to itself.

  The cello teacher was a highly accomplished—and rather excitable—soloist and music educator named Joanne. She often brought her preteen daughter and their little dog to sessions.

  It takes two hands to play a cello, the left hand to hold and finger the instrument and the right hand to bow. If there are left teachers and right teachers, then Joanne was, by far, a right teacher. All she talked about was the bow. “The bow is your voice,” she told us at the first meeting of our little group. Holding the bow is an art, she said. “Hold the bow like you are holding a live bird—firmly enough so it doesn’t fly off yet not so hard as to crush it.”

  Of course it wasn’t all bow all the time, but it would always begin with the bow. “The bow is your lungs,” she said a day later, “the strings are your vocal cords, the body of the cello your diaphragm.” Joanne did exercises with us; one of them resembled
the butterfly stroke you’d see someone doing in the pool. “Hold your arms open wide, lean back, and then lean forward and embrace your cello. Open your arms. Close your arms. Open. Close. Open. Close.”

  She demonstrated how we could vary the sound by placing the bow at different intervals between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge that holds up the strings. Think of it, she said, not just as variations in sounds but as different colors. Red was fortissimo (really loud). Orange, forte (loud). Yellow, mezzo forte (medium). Blue, piano. Light blue, pianissimo (quiet).

  She was quite a colorful character herself, given to passionate outbursts of joy or pain at our playing. She barely sat still, at times hopping around the room to make a point about rhythm or sound.

  Joanne handed us our schedules, which gave each of us time alone with her, time as a group with her, and then time—endless time—alone. We were each assigned a practice space: a walled-off room in a church or house or office to practice on our own. It made my time at ELLSO feel like a bacchanal. There were so many activities, both music and social, at ELLSO that I barely had an hour a day by myself. At SummerKeys, I practiced three and a half hours the first day and five the second day. There was nothing else to do. I kept up that level of commitment throughout the week.

  Joanne made my day at our first private lesson. “You are not a beginner,” she said. “You know the notes. You have a good ear. But you need to learn to make sounds with confidence.” On day two she was harder on me. “You are not applying the bowing lessons I showed you. Did you practice?”

  I was afraid to tell her how many hours I did practice.

  She said that I needed to relax between the notes and the bowings. She dramatically pulled a hair out of her auburn head and waved it in front of me. “You must stop, but just for a hairsbreadth.”

  “Every note has integrity,” she said at another point. She played a note and as she played she explained: “A note is born. A note lives a full life. A note dies. Now be sure to give it a chance for a proper funeral!”