The Late Starters Orchestra (18 page)

ED, COLIN, AND CHRIS

After a long day of playing at ELLSO, many of the musicians would retire to the bar that was set up in the far corner of the campus dining room where we gathered for meals. During the day there was very little time to socialize. Participants went from session to practice room to session to practice room. Most of the daytime conversation was about a piece of music or an instrument that needed some quick repair. But in the evening, people drank, relaxed, and caught up on each other's lives. Their instruments were never far away and no one ever locked them up at ELLSO; they were strewn about the halls and along the dining room walls. Sometimes, a spontaneous jam session would break out at the bar. A musician would whip out a fiddle, another a double bass, and someone else would sit down at the piano. A woman would get up and start dancing in place and then another and yet another would join her. Soon people would be doing reels and jigs as more and more dancers and musicians joined the fray.

It was at the bar one night that I met Colin, Ed, and Chris.

Colin was old, Ed was young, and Chris somewhere in between. One night, Colin, dressed in a frayed tweed jacket and tie, stood in a corner of the room and played his violin diligently as everyone around him chatted. Tall and thin, with a music stand in front of him, Colin played the basic repertoire of a young Suzuki musician: easy classical pieces in first position. It was an odd scene since there were practice rooms open on the campus from seven in the morning to midnight. “Why here?” I asked him. “Why play in a crowded bar when you can have your very own private room?”

“Just about everybody here is better than me,” Colin explained between songs. “I have to get over the fear of playing in front of people. And this helps.” Colin played his songs over and over again above the din of the bar. When he was finished he packed up his violin and folded his stand. With that, the bar patrons erupted in applause. Colin took a shy bow.

Ed and I shared a beer at the bar. Ed was thirty-three, unmarried, and worked for a human rights organization in London and Geneva. He took up the violin just six months before coming to summer school and had no idea what he was in for. Like everyone else who participated, Ed was asked to fill out forms in advance about his level of musical abilities so the organizers could place him in the appropriate musical classes. Ed boldly inflated both his musical knowledge and ability. “I figured that by the time the summer came along I would know what I was doing,” he said. “But to tell you the truth before I came here I never played a flat.”

Ed was placed in the top orchestra group and matched for chamber music with the most proficient chamber players, but once his lack of experience and know-how were noted, he was downgraded. “Was that embarrassing?” I asked.

“No,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone here is very forgiving.”

A woman named Chris overheard our conversation and told how she, too, had underestimated how hard it would be to learn an instrument.

When she grew up in England in the 1960s, Chris recalled, a child had to make a choice between athletics and music. “If you were good at sports, you didn't get an instrument,” she said. And she excelled in sports. She played hockey and football, joined the track team, skated, and danced. She was happy with her choices but carried a memory from her high school graduation. One of her classmates played an old English folk song, “The English Country Garden,” on her treble recorder. “It sounded so beautiful,” Chris recalled as if graduation had been held earlier that day. “I wondered: why wasn't I given a chance to learn an instrument?”

She continued to play sports and be physically active through a career in the British Army until a back injury sidelined her. “I was really depressed for a year and then I remembered the girl playing ‘The English Country Garden.' ”

In her mind, the treble recorder was too complicated. She thought the violin would be easier. “It was only four strings so I figured: how hard could it be?” In the thirteen years since she picked up the violin, she's found out. But she's never looked back. Like me, she first played with a youth ensemble and then graduated to an amateur orchestra. Her musical group has one of the best names I've ever heard. It's called the Cobweb Orchestra because so many of its musicians have retrieved their instruments from attics and dusted them off for the first time in years.

“And what about ‘The English Country Garden'?” I asked Chris.

“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.
Th
e 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.”