The Late Starters Orchestra Read Online Free Page A

playing—off and on—for thirty-five. So why was he so good and I wasn’t?
    JUDAH HAS THE MOST important advantage for any musician—youth. It’s not just that learning is easier and the fingers move quicker, it’s the brain. As the neurologist and psychiatrist Oliver Sacks explains in his book Musicophilia, people who learn music at a young age actually grow a set of brain neurons that we late starters simply don’t have and will never have. Modern brain-imaging studies have enabled scientists to visualize the brains of musicians and to compare them with those of non­musicians. “The corpus callosum, the great commissure that connects the two hemispheres of the brain,” Sacks writes, “is enlarged in professional musicians.” Were the musicians just born with these bigger musical brains or were they developed over time? Sacks wonders. He cites studies that conclude “beyond dispute” that the brain of a person given intensive musical training at a young age develops differently from that of someone without musical training. “The effects of such training,” Sacks concludes, “are very great.” The anatomical changes, he adds, quoting the results of one popular study, “were strongly correlated with the age at which musical training began and with the intensity of practice and rehearsal.”
    Norman Doidge in his outstanding study Th e Brain Th at Changes Itself is even more pointed. Doidge, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, writes: “Brain imaging shows that musicians have several areas of their brains—the motor cortex and the cerebellum, among others—that differ from those of nonmusicians. Imaging also shows that musicians who begin playing before the age of seven have larger brain areas connecting the two hemispheres.”
    In short: the earlier you start and the more intensive practice you have under your belt, the bigger your “musical brain.”
    The ancient Jewish sources that I studied as a youngster corroborate Sack’s scientific findings. What you learn as a child sticks with you, says the Talmud, the library of Jewish lore and law. I guess I remember that one because I learned it as a kid.
    The odds were stacked against me. I was in my late fifties, my musical brain was puny, and many of the people around me thought I was crazy. “Don’t you have better things to do?” a few of them asked. I had a wife and three children, one in college, one in middle school, and one living abroad on his own. I also had a bad back—a ruptured disk on the third vertebra to be exact—and it went out every so often, making tying my shoes, let alone toting and playing a large instrument, a challenge. And I was a professor of journalism, with an ever-renewing cohort of students and a growing number of former students, many of whom were panicked about their jobs or prospects for employment in the increasingly unstable field of journalism.
    My profession was undergoing the greatest upheaval since Gutenberg invented movable type almost six hundred years earlier. The Internet had changed everything, from how news is gathered to how it is consumed. The authoritative names in news like the Washington Post and CBS were being replaced by Yahoo and Google and the Huffington Post and other outlets that didn’t even exist a few years earlier. The New York Times, where I worked for twenty years before coming to teach at Columbia, was laying off reporters and editors. Newspapers around the country were cutting back their operations or simply folding.
    The newspaper business that I grew up with was becoming the news business. In my youth if you didn’t read the newspapers, you tuned into the evening news. But almost no one was watching them anymore, either. I remember gathering around the television after dinner to watch Walter Cronkite assure us that “that’s the way it is.” Instead, television viewers had