It's Never Too Late

When I was a child there were two interests that occupied most of my time: music and science. I had a small telescope and a chemistry set, and I took violin lessons. The telescope was a health hazard because the sky was clearest in the middle of winter, when it was easy to get frostbite. The chemistry set was mostly a fire hazard. The violin wasn’t a hazard exactly, except to the dog’s hearing. None of these did much for the social standing of an already nerdy kid with thick glasses, but that’s another story entirely.

I had always intended that my career would involve science in some way, but when I was about sixteen, I briefly entertained the notion of becoming a professional violinist. “Briefly” means about two weeks and one conversation with friends who told me I was nuts and that “they played better than I did and even they didn’t have a snowball’s chance.”

My friends’ advice was well intentioned, albeit hard to accept, but unnecessary: I came to my senses on my own. I decided that doing science for a living and playing music for fun was far more secure than the other way around and, given the level of my playing at the time, a great deal more realistic.

So I chose physics as a major in college. Four years later (yes, this was back in the days when a four year degree could actually be completed in four years), I discovered to my shock that the job opportunities available to a fresh graduate with a BS in physics varied all the way from scarce to nonexistent.

What did I do? I did what anyone would do—I went to graduate school, duhh. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I sort of fell out of physics and into metallurgy, but that turned out to be a good thing. There were actual job opportunities (I never did any real science except in graduate school, but I did get to do a lot of sciencey stuff).

I played violin or viola (there’s that Dark Side again) occasionally for the next forty years or so in chamber music groups, church services, and the like. I even messed around with country and folk fiddle. I had always liked fiddle tunes, but it’s hard for a classically trained player, even a not-very-well-classically-trained one, to play them without sounding like--well, a classical player.

After retirement a few years ago, since I had more time to do pretty much what I wanted, I started to play more. I was still in country fiddle mode, but classical music must be part of my DNA, and I happened to attend a performance by a local chamber orchestra one evening. Watching the string players, I realized that some of them appeared to be roughly on my level. I thought to myself, “I can do that.”

Auditions were required, so I thought it prudent to find a teacher and clean up my technique a bit. And what better place to look than in the orchestra? I asked the leader of the second violin section if he would take me as a student. Although he wouldn’t admit to being an actual violin teacher, he not only helped me a lot, he even talked them into letting me in without the audition.

Now I’m in the orchestra, and I love it. And I have begun studying with the concertmaster, a woman who turned to teaching after a very successful concert career. She is without question the finest violin teacher I have ever encountered. I am incredibly lucky, and it is only luck; it just never happens that violinists in my situation get to study with teachers of her caliber.

So, being nearly seventy with arthritic hands and fifty years of bad violin habits to overcome, I’m again doing what I really love, warts and all. It really is never too late.