by Steve Lopez
Nathaniel? Was that the name of the boy with the strong, elegant hands? The one who didn’t appear intimidated by any of the instruments or the dreaded dry recitation of music theory? The young man seemed rather astute, Moon thought, and determined, as well. Moon pegged him to play one of his own favorite instruments—the sousaphone.
Nathaniel was an A’s and B’s student, articulate, respectful and polite. He said Mister and Misses and rounded his O’s in a refined Midwestern way, but he was not about to wrap that brass pipe up around his head and over his shoulders like a pet python.
“No, thank you,” he said. “No, thank you, sir.”
Mr. Moon explained that the sousaphone was a traditional instrument in African-American bands, but Nathaniel wasn’t persuaded. He was intrigued by several other instruments and interested more in the idea of music than any one discipline. He liked trumpet, and flute, and piano, and he especially liked the strings. Whatever he picked up, he was one of Mr. Moon’s better musicians and a definite candidate for the school orchestra.
Mr. Moon, as it happened, had a daughter named Marjorie who was studying music on scholarship at Ohio University, where she played string bass. Moon was proud of her as both a musician and a gender-busting pioneer. At the time, music was primarily a boys’ club. The Cleveland Orchestra, in fact, was all male. At Harry E. Davis, Moon wanted to encourage African-American girls, in particular, to take up music, and he thought his daughter’s accomplished playing would inspire them. So when Marjorie was on break from Ohio U, Moon always arranged for her to come play in front of his students.
On one occasion, though, it wasn’t one of Mr. Moon’s female students who got taken in. It was a skinny young man who liked the idea of an instrument so tall you had to stand up and wrap your arms around it, an instrument that spoke in a deep and powerful voice you could feel coming up through the floorboards. Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, all of thirteen years old, was mesmerized by this instrument the size of a good strong man.
“That’s what I want to do,” Nathaniel told Mr. Moon, ending for good the teacher’s sousaphone dreams. “I want to do what she does.”
Marjorie Moon would wonder in the months to come, as her father enthusiastically updated her regarding his prize student’s progress on the school’s beat-up string bass, if there was another reason he had chosen that instrument.
“Does he have a father?” she asked her dad.
Mr. Moon didn’t know the full details of Nathaniel’s life, but wondered why his daughter would ask such a question.
It just struck her, Marjorie told her father, that maybe Nathaniel wanted to make Mr. Moon as proud of him as he was of his own daughter.
For the first time since his father had left, Nathaniel was alive, and he would race home from school to tell his family about band practice. Mr. Moon, determined to encourage the youngster, called Nathaniel’s mother to tell her how delighted he was at how quickly Nathaniel was catching on to scales, rhythm and music theory. He’s got a gift, Mr. Moon told her, and she would be wise to nurture it. Nathaniel’s mother wasn’t surprised, given the weekly piano lessons Nathaniel had taken for a couple of years along with his sister, Del. When she got the call from Mr. Moon, Floria called her son downstairs to tell him about it.
“So you like music?” she asked proudly.
“Yeah,” said Nathaniel. “I do.”
When his mother bought him a used bass, Nathaniel began passing up ball games in the street and in the schoolyard so he could practice. He was becoming so good that Mr. Moon couldn’t help him any longer. Fortunately, Moon knew exactly whom to call about his star pupil. His daughter Marjorie had studied at a celebrated institution called the Cleveland Music School Settlement, where her teacher was a bass player from the famed Cleveland Orchestra.
Nathaniel could make the walk to the Music School Settlement from his home on the edge of the Glenville District in under thirty minutes. The Settlement, as he would come to call it, was situated in the most enchanted neighborhood in all of Cleveland. University Circle, named for the turnaround of the Euclid Avenue trolley from downtown, was home to Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the jewel of the neighborhood—Severance Hall. The Georgian-style home of the Cleveland Orchestra—financed by John Long Severance, the son of John D. Rockefeller’s treasurer—was hailed as an architectural triumph and had hosted its first concert in 1931, with conductor Nikolai Sokoloff leading a program that included Bach’s Passacaglia and Brahms’s First Symphony. By the time Nathaniel strode by on the way to his first music lesson, the Cleveland Orchestra had become, under music director George Szell, one of the greatest ensembles in the world, and no one was prouder to be a part of it than Harry Barnoff. He was a stubby-fingered son of working-class Cleveland—his father was a maintenance man and his mother a sales clerk at the May Company, and his Hungarian-born mother’s strudel brought a smile to the face of Szell, who was raised in Budapest.
One thing Barnoff had in common with Nathaniel was that there had been no musicians in his family’s recent history. He had found his own way, exposed first through the radio in his parents’ home, and later in band class at public schools in Cleveland, just like Nathaniel. He became serious in high school, later studied at Ohio University, and then won a scholarship to Juilliard. When he joined his hometown orchestra in 1960, Barnoff was determined to help younger students follow in his footsteps. This led to a job at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the more prestigious of the two schools on University Circle, but a friend talked him into considering an opening at the Settlement, which was literally a stone’s throw away.
“It was less pay, but it was a red-feather institution,” Barnoff says. “They took in everybody regardless of ability to pay, and I thought I could make a bigger difference there.”
That was the very mission at the Settlement, a nonprofit that had opened its doors in 1912 to people of all ages and all musical abilities. Music was too beautiful and powerful a force to be embraced by only a select few, believed Almeda Adams. Adams, born in Pennsylvania and blind from the age of six months, had studied piano and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music and later settled with her family in Ohio. It was in Cleveland that her father read her an article about a music “settlement” in New York and pronounced, “You must do that thing for Cleveland. There is your work.”
Adams went to New York to learn how it had been done, then returned to Cleveland to meet with an influential civic organization called the Fortnightly Musical Club. Cleveland was awash in money at the time, and certainly some of it could be used to foster the full development of the city’s neediest inhabitants. This was the charge Adams took to Adella Prentiss Hughes, a prominent Fortnightly member who had been a promoter of the Metropolitan Opera, the Diaghilev Ballets Russes, and orchestras conducted by Gustav Mahler, Leopold Stokowski and Richard Strauss.
And so it began. By 1938, having already outgrown its quarters on East Ninety-third Street, the school used budding support from Cleveland high society to buy at a nominal fee a forty-two-room English manor on Magnolia Street in University Circle. When Nathaniel arrived in 1964, thousands of students had already passed through what had become one of the nation’s largest community music schools. Built in 1910, it resembled a great country retreat or elegant hotel, with a sweeping cobblestone driveway. Nathaniel arrived to music wafting from the windows and mingling with the rustling of leaves on the shady estate. Once inside the building, he walked under carved ceilings and crystal chandeliers and past marble fireplaces. The place felt ancient and rich, with dark wood carvings and floors that creaked, sending echoes through a maze of hallways that had been walked by great musicians. Nathaniel descended a circular staircase to the basement, then walked down a long hall and into a carpeted space with one below-ground window that threw scant light into the room.
Over the next several years, that dark chamber would become his sanctuary while the world outside changed. Ind
ustry, the life-blood of Cleveland, was dying off and the signs included shuttered storefronts and weeds in the cracks of sidewalks. Crime was up, along with anger, hatred and resentment, and the sacrifice of local blood in the disastrous Vietnam War further split the city and the nation. Cleveland grew more divided by color and class, and both before and after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Nathaniel’s general neighborhood—Cleveland’s east side—was the scene of rioting, shoot-outs, looting, tear gas and firebombs. Harry Barnoff would see smoldering ruins in the distance as he drove to the Settlement, where he would always find his student at work in the basement. As Cleveland burned, Nathaniel, a black teenager with a white mentor, was hard at work on Beethoven and Brahms. If he kept at it, Barnoff told him, a music scholarship to Ohio University wasn’t out of the question. Maybe, Nathaniel told him. But he had even bigger dreams than that. Hadn’t Mr. Barnoff been to Juilliard?
17
Pete Snyder steps jauntily through the door of the Disney Hall lobby with a wave and a smile. He puts his cello in the backseat and gives me a firm handshake, looking natty in a light olive-colored leather jacket, his salt-and-pepper mustache freshly trimmed.
“I’m very excited about this,” he says. “And a little bit nervous. I don’t really know what to expect.”
Snyder is Brooklyn-born and was raised in Los Angeles by two professional pianists of Russian and Romanian descent, and his mother had been his accompanist for his European debut in Vienna in 1966. He taught at two universities and joined the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1969 and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1973, but music is only one of his pursuits. Snyder studied animation, once published a comic strip and dabbles in sculpture. As far as he can determine, he tells me, there have been musicians and artists in every generation of his family dating back to at least 1800.
I note the irony of my being introduced to so rarefied an artistic community by a homeless man, reminding Snyder that I don’t know classical music and can’t judge Nathaniel’s ability on cello. Snyder says it doesn’t matter how well Nathaniel plays. He’s hoping to be able to help him find his way. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought,” he says. “I must say that he made a very deep impression on me.”
Nathaniel is waiting for us in the courtyard of the Ballington. He nervously greets Snyder, taking two steps back, just as he did on my first encounter with him almost a year earlier. I suggest we move quickly into the apartment so as to get the most out of Mr. Snyder’s visit, and Nathaniel raises no objection. So far, everything is working as planned.
“When did you last have a lesson?” I ask after Nathaniel has once again managed the engineering feat of squeezing his cart through the doorway.
He answers while breaking down the buggy, carefully moving a blue tarp and a white sheet that cover his cello and two violins. It had to be in the early 1970s, he says. It was right before a concert in Aspen.
“Did you play in Aspen?” Snyder asks.
“Yes, but I got into trouble with the psychiatrists there,” Nathaniel says. “Straitjacket,” he adds without further comment.
Snyder looks for my reaction, and all I’ve got for him is a shrug.
There’s nothing in the room but a sheetless twin mattress and a dresser. I drag a couple of patio chairs in from the communal kitchen down the hall. Nathaniel and Mr. Snyder, as he calls him, are carrying on about musicians and music directors who were regulars at Aspen in the seventies.
“I brought you something,” Snyder says, handing him the music to Pablo Casals’s “Song of the Birds.” “It’s something appropriate, because you’re kind of a wandering bird.”
Nathaniel acknowledges the gift, but he’s not quite with us. He grows distant and looks confused. It’s as if a storm is moving through his head, tossing things around.
“I’m playing in the tunnels,” he tells Snyder, “where Don Quixote and Colonel Sanders have been involved in a bloody battle.”
If Snyder thought this was going to be easy, he now has reason to believe otherwise. But the cellist has come to this task with an open mind and more than a little confidence.
“That’s a nice story,” he says kindly, asking Nathaniel if he wouldn’t mind having the cello tuned and ready to go at his next lesson, so they waste no time. Nathaniel gives off the slightest hint of an objection, but maybe this is just what he needs—a firm but supportive tutor. Despite his earlier confession, Snyder doesn’t seem at all nervous now. If anyone’s nervous, it is I. I want this to work. We couldn’t have been luckier than to have a member of the orchestra volunteer his time to a homeless man who is mentally ill, selflessly trying to help in Nathaniel’s recovery. And willing to come to Skid Row for the lesson.
Nathaniel begins playing without prompting the moment he’s in tune. He does a little finger-dance sprint that nearly works him into a sweat, and his vibrato brings a smile to Snyder’s face.
“You know, you’re a very natural player,” Snyder says, drawing a bashful shrug out of Nathaniel. Snyder tells him he likes his left-hand position, but he needs some work with his bowing. Nathaniel seems hungry for the feedback. It’s been years since anyone as accomplished as Snyder has taken any time with him. Snyder, it’s clear, has been touched by Nathaniel, as were so many teachers before him. I wonder, though, how much time Snyder has, and how much patience.
Harry Barnoff took Nathaniel’s collect calls from the Aspen Music Festival and from mental hospitals in Cleveland. They were always the same. Nathaniel was manic, paranoid, confused. He needed to hear a familiar voice, and Barnoff would try to calm him by asking about the music he was playing. Homer Mensch, Nathaniel’s first teacher at Juilliard, once called the police to his home across the street from Juilliard. Nathaniel was rambling in a delusional, menacing way.
Gary Karr was Nathaniel’s next teacher. A legend among bass players and only a few years older than Nathaniel, the Juilliard grad was one of the few bass players in the world good enough to build a career as a soloist. Karr had studied under Stuart Sankey in Aspen, just as Nathaniel had. He also had been a featured soloist, at the age of twenty, in a nationally televised performance of the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert. With Leonard Bernstein conducting, Karr played “The Swan” from Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals.
In Nathaniel, Karr saw great promise and little discipline. He’d assign him a piece to learn, and Nathaniel would return without having taken it seriously. Instead, he’d show Karr something else he’d been pouring his heart into, and whatever it was from one week to the next, it was good enough that Karr would let him slide. If Karr was partial to his fellow bass player, it was partly because of lingering resentment over his own experience as a Juilliard student. A star system was in place, as he saw it, and it worked to the detriment of a majority of students. Violinists, pianists, cellists—those were the quarterbacks on the Juilliard team. The bass players were like lumbering offensive linemen, clearing the way for the stars to shine. And yet they faced the same unbearable pressure to excel. But Karr says Nathaniel had bigger problems than that.
“He seemed to be struggling with his racial identity in a nearly all-white environment,” recalls Karr, who himself was aware of a growing racial division in the professional community of musicians. African-Americans, particularly in jazz, were speaking up after years of getting shafted on record deals and banishment from the hotels where white colleagues stayed. Karr was empathetic, but also disappointed in black jazz musicians who were giving him the cold shoulder after years of friendship. He wanted badly to make his relationship with Nathaniel work for both of them.
“He had a way. Anyone who came into a room would be drawn to him. He had a kind of charisma, and it being the seventies, I don’t recall many black students, so he kind of stuck out.”
When Nathaniel flubbed assignments, Karr directed him to more work by Ernest Bloch, whose music he considered soul explorations. Maybe Nathaniel would find himself in Bloch’s inspired expressions.
“Hi
s sound was very good. He was a natural talent and there was always real passion. I think most of what he learned at Juilliard was from his own instincts rather than anything I or anyone else taught him. I found him really hard to reach. He marched to his own drummer, always.”
At about this time, Karr noticed that New York’s population of addled street dwellers was exploding. Mental hospitals were emptied and with too few clinics to manage their problems, many former patients ended up squatting in subway stations, on street corners and in Central Park. Mental illness was on public display, and in the army of lost souls, Karr saw some of the same anger and disorientation he was seeing in Nathaniel. As the school year progressed, Nathaniel’s problems became more pronounced, and Karr began to suspect that the hostility he had attributed to race had an entirely different origin. Was it even safe to set foot in a room with Nathaniel, one-on-one? Karr wondered. Nathaniel would occasionally erupt, commandeering the conversation and driving it from music to racial injustice. He insisted Karr had no way of appreciating the black experience. At times, his tone was threatening. He trembled and seemed on the verge of coming unraveled.
“I said something to him like, ‘Hey, man.’ He said, ‘Don’t you ever call me Hey Man.’ I remember walking on glass with him. I was so guarded. I remember he raised his hand up like he was ready to strike. I don’t remember what I said to back him off, but he got something in his head and I think he was going to strike me. I went to the administration and said, ‘You know, this guy has problems.’ And I was not going to continue giving him lessons without someone else in the room.”