Those who can, should

With age, liberation:
The young cellist, the mature writer and the rest of us

TOM PURDOM

Sometime between nine and ten p.m. on July 20, 2006, I resolved a personal issue that had harassed me for almost half a century. I achieved this belated epiphany because a cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra offered a serious answer to a frivolous question.

2007 is a landmark year for me. The first piece of writing that ever earned me a check— a science fiction story titled “Grieve for a Man”— appeared in the August 1957 issue of a magazine called Fantastic Universe. This year, the editor of the magazine that publishes most of my current science fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, marked the anniversary by publishing my latest science fiction story in the August 2007 issue of her magazine. (Which left the stands in July, in accordance with the standard practices of the publishing industry. This is not an advertisement.)

During those five decades, I have somehow managed to convince editors they should send me checks for novels, short stories, novelettes, magazine articles, book reviews, opinion pieces and 19 years’ worth of pontifications about musical events. For 49 of those years— right up to the evening of July 20, 2006— I was plagued by the fear that I had made a colossal mistake when I decided to pursue a writing career. Was this the best way for me to spend my life? Was I just engaging in a self-indulgent pursuit of attention and self-expression?

Some writers don’t worry about that. Some just don’t care. Many— the lucky ones—- seem blindly convinced that the world needs their sacred words. But for genetically pre-destined agonizers like me, it’s a perennial issue.

‘What I’m supposed to do’

The cellist who helped me pull this particular thorn is named Yumi Kendall. She’s Philadelphia Orchestra’s assistant principal cellist, which means she sits in the third chair in her section, right behind the principal and the associate principal. She became the assistant principal in 2004, shortly after she graduated from Curtis, and her contribution to my soul searches appeared in one of the informal one-page profiles of Orchestra musicians you can read in the Orchestra program notes.

The profilers like to ask the musicians what they’d be doing if they weren’t playing with the Orchestra. Most of them, as you’d expect, mention interesting hobbies and other extra-curricular activities. Ms. Kendall was an exception.

“This is what I’m supposed to do,” she said.

I love it when young artists say things like that. It’s an attitude that can keep you plugging away through all those years when you’re the only person who thinks you can create anything of value. Despite my self-doubts, I probably felt that way myself when I was mailing short stories to magazine editors and papering my wall with the more interesting rejection slips. I might not have come right out and said it, even to myself. I couldn’t have endured all those rejections if some primitive section of my mind hadn’t believed the gods were on my side.

An epiphany, with a little help from Beethoven

But that was just my initial reaction to Ms. Kendall’s reply. On July 20, 2006, somewhere between nine and ten p.m., two years after I read her profile, I decided she wasn’t merely engaging in a bit of youthful bravado. She was stating a truism. You could even argue she was stating a fact.

That evening the Philadelphia Orchestra finished its summer stint at the Mann with the ninth symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich and Ludwig van Beethoven. The principal and associate principal cellists were absent that night, as happens in the summer, and the assistant principal was sitting in the first chair. The Orchestra’s newest cellist led her section when it launched into the long passage for massed cellos and basses that introduces Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” movement.

It’s one of the great moments in music— a musical pronouncement that's just as moving visually as it is sonically— and it prompted a thought. Some things are so marvelous that anyone who can do them should do them. If you can sit in the first chair of the cello section when the Philadelphia Orchestra plays Beethoven’s Ninth, you should. If you can sit in any chair in the Orchestra, you should.

That isn’t just my personal opinion. I’m certain most people in the Mann audience that night would have agreed with me. I’m certain most people reading this agree with me. If you don’t agree, why are you visiting an online arts review?

Musicians who make the final cut

I don’t know the details of Ms. Kendall’s career, but I do have some idea of the process musicians go through. Most string players begin studying when they’re pre-schoolers (Yumi Kendall started when she was five, according to her official Orchestra bio.) If they display exceptional talent, their first teacher will refer them to a more advanced teacher, and that teacher may refer them to someone even higher in the hierarchy if their ability justifies it. Eventually, if they have what it takes, one of their teachers will tell them they should audition with a major school, such as Curtis.

At Curtis, the audition for each available opening pits them, on average, against 20 other candidates who’ve survived the same kind of scrutiny. After they finish their conservatory training, they participate in more auditions for orchestra jobs. A Curtis graduate once told me, with glowing enthusiasm, about the audition that landed her a position with a Big Five orchestra: Four hundred musicians competed for the fourth chair in the viola section.

By the time musicians win a place in a major orchestra, they’ve undergone years of evaluation and competitive testing. No selection process is perfect, but I think it’s fair to say that anyone who has been through that process has a right to feel they can do what they do about as well as anybody can do it. And if they truly believe— as they should— that they’re doing something incredibly valuable, then they have every reason to say, “This is what I’m supposed to do.”

But if that’s true of musicians, isn’t it true of writers, too?

Writers survive a selection process, too

As I noted in an earlier piece for this publication (click here), the last editor of Asimov’s once mentioned that he received 800 to 1,200 manuscripts every month. He could only purchase about six stories each month, so he rejected almost 200 every time he accepted one. Other magazine editors can quote similar numbers. So can book publishers.

At some point, writers, too, have the right to feel they’ve proved they can do the job. They’ve submitted to a process that’s just as competitive as the process that selects musicians. People who make their living choosing words— editors whose own careers depend on the choices they make— have consistently chosen a few particular writers’ words from the truckloads of manuscripts that flow through editorial offices.

My mind had started pondering the realities of the musician’s life and jumped, as minds will, to the logical corollaries. It hadn’t even troubled itself with the possibility that it was pursuing a line of thought that could be considered self-serving. Do I think anyone who can write the kind of stuff I write should write it? Of course I do. I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t feel that way. Wouldn’t I feel they should do it if I were discussing someone else’s life? Of course I would.

So why shouldn’t I apply the same logic to me?

As somebody once said, Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.

How important is the work you do?

And so, three months after my 70th birthday, near the beginning of my 50th year as a check-depositing writer, I decided, once and for all, that I hadn’t wasted my life. That moment of personal liberation came, furthermore, with one of the best musical accompaniments any composer ever put on paper.

Does this attempt at wisdom only apply to artists and writers? What about the rest of humanity? Can’t we generalize the principle?

Have you survived a rigorous competitive selection process? Do you think your work is so important that anyone who can do it should do it?

Next week, of course, the world may decide we shouldn’t do it any longer. Dan Rottenberg may even decide I’ve reached that point when he reads this piece. So be it. That happens. In the meantime,