The Late Starters Orchestra Read Online Free Page B

migrated to the opinion-laden and endless talk shows of Fox and MSNBC. Instead of “that’s the way it is,” we were hearing “that’s the way we want it to be.” Young people were getting their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. Books were rapidly being replaced by handheld electronic devices called Kindle and Nook. The growth of e-books was so steady that many predicted that old-fashioned paper books would soon disappear.
    On top of all that, the economy was tanking in the year I was turning sixty. The venerable investment house of Lehman Brothers had declared bankruptcy the year before and the government was faced with the decision of either letting other businesses, especially the auto industry, go under or trying to shore them up with government bailouts.
    There was much to do and so much to say, both in my private life and in my professional life. There were classes to teach, parties and dinners to attend, books to read, movies and museum exhibitions to see, and a rich religious life to explore.
    But all I wanted to do was play the cello, formally called the violoncello, an instrument that was beginning to take its modern shape in Gutenberg’s time.

THE CELLO
    The music that Tevye heard—or thought he heard—came from a fiddle, which is pretty much just another name for the violin. What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle? One Irish folk musician I know put it this way: “A fiddle is a violin with an attitude.” Fiddling refers more to the style of music than the instrument itself. It is used for jigs and reels, while the violin is used for symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. People sit when they listen to a violin; they dance when they hear a fiddle. And just as you can fiddle on a violin, you can fiddle on a cello. Yo-Yo Ma, probably the most famous classical cellist of our time and known for his mastery of the classical music repertoire, has gone the fiddling route more than a few times to record with folk, jazz, and Celtic musicians.
    What’s the difference between a violin and a cello? Here, it’s more than simply attitude. The cello is easily three times the size of the violin. Given its bigger body and thicker strings, the cello produces a much lower sound. It is held vertically, between the legs, rather than horizontally under the chin like a violin.
    In musical history, the violin came first. It dates back to the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and its sound reflects the fashion of the day. Ideal sound of the early middle ages was high-pitched, whiny, and nasal, not unlike traditional Asian and Indian music. The violin was designed with the female musical voice in mind.
    But around 1450, composers sought a lower range, not so much to be played by a solo instrument, but as a lower-register—or bass—accompaniment to the high-pitched voice and violin. Bass parts began to appear with some regularity in musical notation. The cello as we know it—bigger, fuller, more robust in sound than the violin—began to take shape. The viola da braccio, as a smaller and earlier version of the cello was called, was cradled under the chin, but it was soon moved down to the ground and held between the legs. These early cellos rested on the ground when played, or they were clasped between the player’s calves or were supported by a string roped around the player’s neck. It was much later, in the eighteen hundreds, when a peg or “end pin” was added to lift the instrument a foot or so off the floor.
    The first known cello maker was Andrea Amati (1520–1578) of Cremona, Italy, a luthier who made elaborately decorated cellos for the court of the French king, Charles IX. Amati’s was a family business and he passed his skills on to his sons, Antonio and Girolamo. The greatest of the Amatis was Andrea’s grandson, Nicolò, who practiced and taught the luthier art to many, including