The Late Starters Orchestra Read Online Free

day of practice and who kept improving. “I can’t continue to teach you unless you try harder, much harder.” I was shocked at his strident tone. After all, I was paying him handsomely—and he was going to drop me? I assured him that I was practicing, although practicing is one of those things you can never seem to do enough of.
    â€œAri, I expect more,” he said sternly.
    I started playing every night. Some nights it was just fifteen or twenty minutes and some nights longer but not much longer, except on the weekends, when I had more time and could play during the day. My commitment was to at least hold the cello every night. You can’t even begin to call yourself a musician unless you play every day, Mr. J said.
    With practice, my cello playing improved but not my relationship with our neighbors. We live in a sturdy one-hundred-year-old apartment building on a busy avenue in New York City just a block from Columbia University, where I teach. The apartment has thick walls and high ceilings, but a cello can sound rather loud especially late at night when the traffic on the street slows down. Our neighbor András complained. I didn’t know much about András. I knew he was from Hungary and that he and his wife had two small children (we saw them in the elevator). We knew he ran marathons (we saw him dashing through the park) but that was about it. They were extremely quiet people. We never heard a peep out of them—no music, no singing, no raised voices—and it seemed that they expected the same from us.
    We, however, are a volatile bunch, a lot like Tevye’s clan in Anatevka. Music, singing, and raised voices are just the beginning. Arguing, fighting, and debating—all good-natured, of course—are common in our house. We have no milk cow, but we do have two Pomeranians, Alfie and Nala, who can get pretty yappy at times. András had at times complained about our upright piano, which our son Adam played with abandon in his youth, but he seemed especially sensitive to my cello playing. András would often call the house to ask us to keep it down. He got so annoying that we stopped answering the phone. Then he took to climbing the flight of stairs between us and knocked on our door. “Can you keep it down? Do you know what time it is?” András was standing there in his pajamas. I often wondered if András would complain if I was any good at the cello. After all, it wasn’t that late. Maybe it wasn’t the hour but the music?
    My children were far more tolerant of my cello playing, but I had a feeling that they were not fully convinced of my abilities. I told them I needed their forbearance just a little while longer. “Let me get to my sixtieth birthday. If I can’t play by then, I’ll give it up.”
    Adam, who moved to Germany after college to start a writing career, asked Shira during one of their marathon Skype conversations, “Is Dad really going to subject every­body to his cello playing at his birthday party?” Adam wasn’t a roll-your-eyes-at-Dad teen. He was twenty-five and making a living as a freelance music writer and opera critic in Berlin. He knew good music . . . and bad.
    My daughter, Emma, took a gentler approach. “Dad, you have such a nice voice. Why don’t you sing some folk songs at your party?” Emma was twenty-one and a college junior who had just given up as a voice major and turned to philosophy. She had to stop singing because she developed polyps on her vocal cords. But she loved music more than ever.
    The only one who believed in me was my fourteen-year-old son Judah, himself a cellist. “It’s really not hard, Dad. You can do it.” Of course, it was easy for Judah. He’d been playing cello since he was six years old and was damn good at it. When I thought about it, the whole thing didn’t make much sense. Judah had been playing for eight years and I’d been