The Late Starters Orchestra (19 page)

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!”

Energetic was her middle name. When I had problems with my rhythm, she jumped around the room, almost as if she was on an invisible pogo stick, to demonstrate the proper rhythm.

On day three, though, her mood turned dark. “Brutal private lesson with Joanne,” I wrote in my diary. “The room is cold and damp. Joanne is wrapped in a coat and is congested. Her ugly little dog is sniffing about in the corner. Joanne has lost all patience with me. She hurled the most painful insult: ‘You are playing like you did before,' she declared.

“I feel like I am disappointing yet another teacher,” I wrote. “I am not sure I can ever get better.” But Joanne was determined. As I was playing, she grabbed my right elbow and began directing my bow, back and forth, back and forth. First she guided me firmly, then roughly, pushing my arm like it was a child on swing.

She laughed, but I could feel her frustration, even her aggression.

“I guess you've worked with all kinds of students,” I said to break the tension.

She took her hand off my arm. “Little ones, big ones, professionals, semiprofessionals, superprofessionals, and everything in between.”

I had to wonder: Was I the worst student she ever had?

I came away from that session dispirited. That night I sat in the chilly summer night air on the steps of the Lubec Memorial Library, which had mercifully left its wireless connection on and sent an e-mail to Shira. “What am I doing here?” I wrote. “This was a dumb idea.”

TH
E WEEK AT SUMMERKEYS
built to a crescendo with musical performances on the last night. This was finally the time we would be able to hear the other groups—the pianists and the mandolin players—perform. And they would hear us cellists. Our little cello ensemble had been preparing a variety of pieces for the performance, mainly transcriptions by Mendelssohn and Vivaldi, since there is really so little music written for five cellos.

Most of us were anxious. We planned to play four pieces together and then each take a solo turn. Ruth, who had been working all week with Joanne on the Saint-Saëns, was in good shape, but a student named Tobie was having a meltdown over her little slice of Vivaldi. “I've got major performance anxiety,” Tobie told me. But at least she had the courage to play in public. I felt so dispirited by my week at SummerKeys, I told everyone that I would not perform my Bach solo. I practiced it a hundred times but felt I was not ready for prime time, even if prime time meant a concert in the local church.

“I'm just not ready,” I told Joanne at our last lesson. I was bracing for an argument from her but she seemed relieved by my decision and didn't press me further.

The concert was a success. I played with the ensemble and then sat out the solos. I was not sure anyone even noticed.

So here I was, ten weeks before my sixtieth birthday—with years of lessons behind me, a hundred nights of practice with Judah and on my own, and weeks spent at cello camps—and still no closer to my goal. If I couldn't play in Lubec how could I play in Manhattan? I began to think that I would never get there.

The trip to Maine wasn't a total waste. I did fall in love . . . with Ruth's cello. I had rented it from her for a week and now couldn't part with it. I figured that even if I ended up quitting in frustration, I knew that Judah would enjoy this instrument. It did have a beautiful tone. We had been renting a half-size cello for Judah in New York. Here was the full-size cello that he could step up to when he was ready.

I FLEW HOME FROM
Maine, and Ruth's cello came via UPS a few days later. Ruth sent it in a huge cardboard refrigerator box surrounded on all sides by foam rubber. It arrived in good shape—and still in tune. Although I was expecting that it would be a while before Judah was ready for this cello, he took to it immediately. It was the next step both in size and in sound. He brought out the best in the instrument. Soon after I returned to New York, we attended Judah's middle school graduation, which included a musical presentation with Judah on cello.

On stage, waiting his turn, Judah appeared supremely at home. A group of his classmates was singing, and Judah was just jamming along naturally, like you or I would hum along. At times he spun his cello around on the end pin, just like a wild jazz musician might do. It made me nervous—I had just spent thirty-five hundred dollars on that instrument—but when Judah started to play I calmed down. I listened and realized that Judah on the cello was everything I was not: strong, precise, passionate, and consistent. I watched him not in jealousy but in awe.
Th
is is perfect,
I told myself.
Why do I need anything more? I have a son who is a cellist. And his music brings me great joy. Maybe this is the end of the story.
Th
is is the end of my cello dream. And it is fulfilled.