“Anne L. Taylor loved playing the cello while studying music as a college student. But when she decided, at age 27, to enter medical school, she sold her instrument. ‘I said that part of my life was over,’ she recalls,” writes Julie Halpert in Sunday’s (6/22) Wall Street Journal. “Today, she’s playing the cello again—as a member of the Adelphi Orchestra in River Edge, N.J. Forty of the group’s 50 members, including Dr. Taylor, are over age 50. She squeezes in practice and rehearsals around her job as a cardiologist…. Across the U.S., older Americans are dusting off instruments—or starting anew—to play in orchestras.… Music directors and others in the field report a significant increase in the number of amateur orchestras and chamber groups made up solely of people 50 and older.” Also covered in the article are the Senior Pops and the Island Symphony Orchestra in Brentwood, N.Y., the Cincinnati New Horizons Orchestra, and the Brigham Young University New Horizons Orchestra. Additional coverage of Ari Goldman’s newly released book The Late Starters Orchestra—about the author’s middle-aged quest to achieve “just above-averageness” with a cello—appears in Sunday’s (6/22) NPR “Weekend Edition” and in Monday’s (6/23) Boston Globe.
Posted June 23, 2014
Pictured: A member of Brigham Young University New Horizons Orchestra in Provo, Utah. Photo by Elizabeth Bean
