NY Times Reporter-Turned-Cellist's Memoir Salutes Late-Starters

By the time his 60th birthday rolled around, Ari Goldman had achieved a number of titles in his lifetime: New York Times reporter, husband, father, Columbia University journalism professor. But one descriptive had stubbornly eluded Goldman - musician. And that rankled him. So as his 60th birthday loomed on the not-so-distant horizon, he challenged himself to learn the play the cello well enough to play a Bach minuet at his 60th birthday party. The Late Starters Orchestra (Algonquin Books, $23.95) is Goldman's memoir about the experience. And as prominently as the cello figures in this book, Goldman's memoir is much more than a book about learning how to play a musical instrument at age 50-something. It's really a love story, a story about Goldman's love for the soulful sounds of the cello, for the classical music that fascinates and inspires him, for his family - especially for his former cello teacher-turned-father-figure, for the other devoted amateur musicians he meets on his journey and for his own youngest son, through whom Goldman might just be able to live vicariously all of his musical dreams. And speaking of dreams, The Late Starters Orchestra is really about loving and living the dream, whatever that dream may be and however unlikely it may seem, through the advanced chapters of one's life. Goldman, since 1993 a professor of journalism at Columbia University, didn't exactly come to music late. He grew up singing liturgical music at his Orthodox synagogue and Shabbat songs with his father, he soaked in the distinctive singing of the renowned rabbi Schlomo Carlebach and, during his teen years, he sang and strummed his guitar to the peace and protest songs of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Goldman went on to study journalism at New York's Yeshiva University and eked his way into the New York Times, working his way up from stringer eventually to reporter. He met the German-born cellist Heinrich Joachim by chance - if you believe in coincidences - when he knocked on the wrong door on his way to conduct an interview. Goldman commented on the cello case he saw in Heinrich's apartment. Heinrich asked Goldman if he wanted to become one of his students. Goldman said yes, and in his mid-20s his cello career began. That career has been a great white whale that Goldman pursues with an open mind and an open heart, passionately, relentlessly, yearning to achieve the high level of accomplishment that he is all too painfully aware other cellists have achieved. In The Late Starters Orchestra, Goldman takes us through his years of study with Heinrich Joachim, whose firm, fatherly advice on anything from cello technique to the real meaning of music echoes through Goldman's narrative like the voice of a guardian angel. He tells of his decades-long hiatus from cello playing as the demands of career and family filled his time. And he tells of picking up the cello again when his youngest son starts taking lessons on the instrument. That's when Goldman's musical pursuits begin in earnest, and that's when he learns about the Late Starters Orchestra, a New York City-based orchestra comprised of talented amateur musicians. Those musicians, Goldman learns, are all also human beings on personal journeys - some rebuilding after job loss, others resurrecting their social lives after the death of their spouses - learning right along with him that, whatever else life brings, it brings music, too. There is plenty of heartache in The Late Starters Orchestra, and there is also plenty of joy. Heartache in the ups and downs that so often leave people at loose ends, and joy in the redemption that music can bring solace to and make a community out of people thrust together by the whims of fate. Heartache in harsh realizations about talent, time and the way things are, and joy in the love of family and friends. The Late Starters Orchestra is, in one sense, about classical music, but its message speaks to anyone who loves, yearns, struggles and hopes - in short, to anyone who's human.