The Late Starters Orchestra (12 page)

Unlike Elena and the Late Starters, Magda was classically trained from a very young age. She was born in the western Polish town of Szczecin, near the German border, and began violin at the age of six. “It fit me right away,” she said of the instrument. “My mother had this huge dream of becoming a musician but she never got to do it. She pushed me very hard to play and practice.”

Szczecin was a great place to practice. Magda grew up in the waning days of Communism and, as she recalled, “There were very few diversions. We had only two TV channels . . . I practiced all the time.” Magda excelled at the violin and, while in high school, was sent to Warsaw to further her studies. There, under the guidance of a demanding teacher, she studied Beethoven's violin concerto. But she soon locked horns with her teacher over the proper musical interpretation of the piece. At this time, Poland was opening up politically and friends suggested that she continue her studies in the United States. Magda heard about a Polish violinist who was teaching at the music program at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, applied to that program, and was accepted. In Kalamazoo she fell in love and married another musician, an American jazz bassist named PJ.

It was PJ, in fact, who first saw the Craigslist ad for a NYLSO “tutor” soon after the couple moved to New York. Magda was in school, and PJ, a freelance musician, was just beginning to find work. PJ thought this would be a great job for Magda and a good way to supplement the family income. He urged her to apply.

Working with LSO has been part of the continuing process of the Americanization of Magda. “I am just getting used to the idea that it's okay not to be perfect,” she said in something of an understatement. The core group that began to develop at LSO were eager, to be sure, but far from polished. What's more, they were old, or at least older than Magda, who was barely thirty. Suddenly, she said, she was in the position of “bossing around people who are my parents' age.”

“I come from a cultural setting where if someone is an adult, they are right,” she added. “The hard thing for me at LSO is that I'm one of the younger ones. And I'm in charge!”

Early on, the group had its travails. Some Sundays just three or four musicians showed up for a rehearsal. Other Sundays the organizers booked a room only to find that someone else had booked it, too. (Rehearsal instantly cancelled.) But Elena and Andrea and Magda and the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra persevered.

Magda, who is often stiff and unforgiving at LSO rehearsals, seemed happy, relaxed, and at ease when we met to talk in my Columbia office. She's well aware that she comes off as harsh. “It may not always look like it, but I truly enjoy the rehearsals,” she told me. Less appealing for her, she said, were the performances that the orchestra puts on several times a year. She prefers to call them “open rehearsals” to which family and friends are welcome. She is not quite convinced that LSO is an orchestra ready for prime time.

Magda told me that she does have one fundamental disagreement with the way that Elena and Andrea run the orchestra. “I do wish there were auditions, not so much for who should be admitted but just so I know where everyone is musically.”

“Too intimidating,” Elena said when I repeated the suggestion. And then she repeated her LSO mantra: “If you think you can play, you can play.”

At times, Elena even goes beyond her mantra. Sometimes she tells people, “Even if you can't play, you can play.” On several occasions she has organized what she calls a “Newbie Day,” a Sunday afternoon when people come just to explore what it might be like to play an instrument. On those days, “experienced” LSO players (who are already beginners) show visitors how to hold a violin or cello and demonstrate the rudiments of making music. By the end Elena has everyone playing “Twinkle.”

In Elena's mind, an instrument is more than a vehicle for making music. It is an agent of transformation. The mere act of taking up an instrument shows people that they can reach beyond their capabilities and even their imaginations. Elena told me about a woman named Sarah, a widow, who hardly went out of her house after her husband died. A friend dragged her one Sunday afternoon to LSO where she revived an interest in the violin. One day, she agreed to join the group for drinks at Chef Yu. “Last I heard,” Elena said, “she had signed up for Match.com.”

TH
E YEAR THAT I
joined the orchestra, my sixtieth year, Andrea was still out with her firstborn and Elena took the lead at LSO. This meant everything from choosing the music—finding the score, listening to it on YouTube, and determining if it was something the group could handle—to renting the hall and collecting the fees that players pay. LSO charges eighty dollars for a six-week cycle, although players can also drop in for a single session for eighteen dollars.

Running LSO takes a lot of time and energy but it has its pleasures as well. “Making music does make my work life more bearable,” Elena told me. “It's like I have this whole other world that I can retreat to in my head. I love that.” Sometimes, she has to bring her violin with her to work in order to make it to lessons or rehearsals on time. “I talk about this a lot with other adult learners, the fact that having an instrument with you automatically makes people assume you are a ‘musician,' especially in New York.”

And then Elena raised the same question I have been struggling with ever since my first day with LSO: “At what point,” she wondered, “do you get to call yourself a ‘musician' and not feel like an impostor?”

I know what she means. After one LSO rehearsal, I walked under the marquees of a half dozen Broadway theaters and hopped on the Fiftieth Street crosstown bus. A young woman saw me coming down the aisle with my cello on my back and offered me her seat. I thanked her but explained that it is easier to stand than to take the cello on and off my back in order to sit. “But you must be tired,” she insisted. “It's hard playing a matinee. And you have to go back in a few hours to play the evening performance. Right? ”

I smiled knowingly and said bravely, “It's okay, I'm used to this.”

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.
Th
ink 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
Th
e 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 articulated 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.