Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

CELLO, A CHOICE FOR LIFE

WHAT: An Evening of Spanish Cello Music featuring UNLV associate professor of music Andrew Smith on the cello and Alfredo Oyaguez-Montero on the piano. Admission is free.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Doc Rando Recital Hall in the Beam Music Center at UNLV

To the classical musician, his instrument is his voice, the organ through which he speaks to the world.

Without his cello, his horn, his flute, the player becomes mute.

The instrument is like a friend or lover the musician knows intimately. He understands how it reacts to his touch. And the right one allows the musician to elevate his playing.

So, like parents giving sons and daughters marriage advice, music teachers approach with patience and care the task of helping students procure instruments.

Take Andrew Smith. In 12 years in Las Vegas, Smith, a cellist and UNLV music professor, has helped dozens of young string players find matches.

"Most of them do not have really high quality instruments when they come here," he said. "They're adequate, they work, but I'd say mostly, the talented performers, they end up finding something else."

Students turn to him, he said, because "I have the experience to know what to look for."

It wasn't always so.

In 1986, Smith was a young musician ready to enter the job market. The $650 cello his mom purchased for him when he was 10 had gotten him through a decade of training. But a student instrument would make a poor companion for a professional classical musician, Smith's teacher Timothy Eddy warned.

"You're not going to be able to compete in auditions with people who have better quality cellos," Smith recalls Eddy telling him.

With little money and few connections in the music world, Smith knew he would need help finding the right cello. Had Eddy not been around, Smith might never have acquired the 1886 French instrument he still plays.

Twenty years later, the student is a teacher. And in his new role, Smith follows Eddy's lead.

Carlo Pereida, 20, entered UNLV in 2005 knowing he wanted a career in music and a good cello to help him reach that goal.

But like Smith years before, Pereida - whose mother had raised him and four siblings in a home east of the Strip - had little money. So in college he worked to save for an instrument.

And he began asking Smith for advice.

Chance drives so much of what happens in life. Who we become, what careers we pursue. In each of these areas, we surrender in small ways to luck.

As children, Smith and Pereida both picked the cello over other instruments their schools offered. Neither agonized for long over what to play.

Smith grew up in Teaneck, N.J., a town on the Hudson River across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. He and a couple of buddies (including the actor Matthew Broderick) encountered the cello at a private elementary school where Smith's mother was a teacher.

"We all had to try either violin or cello," Smith remembers. "It was difficult to choose. They brought in a professional violinist and a cellist. They were both so fantastic."

In the end, Smith and his cohorts turned down the violin after one boy decided for the group, "let's play the cello."

From that time on, Smith's life was tied to the instrument.

He took private lessons in middle and high school and studied music in college. In 1986, with a master's degree from New York's Mannes College of music, he was ready to enter the job market as a professional cellist.

Pereida, Like Smith, chose the cello on a whim. He took up the instrument in seventh grade because he was curious to find out what it was.

He loved it instantly, locking himself in his room over winter break to practice with a borrowed cello. Within a year, he could play at a high school level.

His dedication to music taught him to work hard, and his grades rose.

"Music was just something that I have always loved and it's always moved me," he said.

By his junior year at the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts, Pereida knew he wanted a professional cello to replace the student instrument the high school had given him.

Like the human voice, with its infinite tones, a cello can whisper, yell or plead. The best instruments allow a musician to express the broadest range of emotions, to create the broadest range of sounds.

"All of us have a sense of what sounds are more beautiful than others, and I think it's tied in a basic sense ... to the way we communicate with each other and what we find beautiful in voices," said Eddy, who teaches cello at Mannes College and The Juilliard School.

But not all young musicians need a top quality instrument. Sometimes students tell Eddy they want a new cello because their instrument cannot produce certain sounds. Eddy plays the instrument and if he finds that they are wrong, "I'll try to figure out a way to gently bring them to an understanding that we've got more work to do," he said.

Twenty years ago, Eddy offered the opposite advice to Smith, suggesting he had outgrown his old instrument.

For serious musicians, investing in a good instrument is crucial, Eddy said, because, "This instrument needs to be capable of producing the kinds of sound that are in your imagination, that are fired by your feelings."

At the time, a professional cello cost upwards of $10,000.

"It was a lot of money, but you had to do it," Smith said. "You had to find a way."

Smith tried cellos at music stores throughout New York, but none struck him as worthy of a $10,000 investment.

Then, Eddy called to say that a friend and musician with the New York Philharmonic was selling a cello. The instrument needed an adjustment, and Eddy introduced Smith to a colleague who could perform the job.

During the adjustment, Smith fell in love.

"It just sounded so deep and beautiful that I knew it was the instrument with which I was going to be able to express myself the best," Smith said.

His mother was not a professional musician, but she saw how important this cello was to her son. So she persuaded Smith's grandmother, who had recently sold a house, to buy the cello, priced at $24,000.

All these years later, the cello still fills Smith's life with pleasure and beauty. In summer, Smith and his cello travel to play in festivals and recitals on Italy's Adriatic coast and on the Spanish island of Majorca.

Seeing what Smith has accomplished as a musician, Eddy said, "I can't help but to be proud."

"It is a feeling of great satisfaction to see someone that you've worked with go out and make a life for themselves that is as rich and as creative and productive as Andy's life is."

By the time Pereida entered UNLV, he had already scoured local music stores without success, looking for a cello.

Shortly after he began studying with Smith, he started sending his teacher photographs of instruments listed on eBay. Smith would respond by telling Pereida to be patient - the cellos may have been pretty, but without handling them, Pereida had no way of knowing how they sounded.

"Andy, he's very knowledgeable," Pereida said. "He knows what he's talking about, he can tell me things I don't know. I could easily go out and look for a cello myself and end up with something that is not quality."

Finally, in spring 2007, came Pereida's break.

A couple had contacted Smith, hoping to find a buyer for an old cello that had belonged to a woman who played for the Houston Symphony. The cello needed a new fingerboard and bridge, and was cracked in a few places, Pereida said.

But Smith loved the way it sounded, and the instrument felt right to Pereida.

The student paid $3,500 - "virtually nothing" for a cello of such high quality, Smith said. Smith brought the cello to a repair shop in Los Angeles. Fixing the instrument cost more than $1,000 and took a few months. In late August, Pereida's sister drove him to California to pick it up.

"They handed it to me and they let me play right away, and it was just so - it spoke to me," Pereida said.

To pay for the cello, Pereida had worked year-round as a program assistant at UNLV's Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach, making from $8 to $10.50 per hour.

"He had a job, saved pretty much every penny that he could get, to save for the instrument," said Jannette Turner, a friend of Pereida's who has known him since high school and who now studies under Smith.

In the end, the cello was a worthwhile investment. An appraiser estimated it was worth $15,000 and guessed it was made in the late 1800s.

Though Pereida transferred to the Berklee College of Music in Boston this fall, he still turns to Smith for advice on issues such as how to choose a music teacher.

"Andy was my first private teacher ... a father figure, in a way," said Pereida, who never knew his dad. "I just have a lot of trust in him."

And down the line, Pereida hopes he too will have the chance to work with students.

"I'd like to help them out like Andy helped me."

To spare his cello from the ravages of heavy-handed baggage carriers, Smith buys it seats on airplanes. To protect it at home in Las Vegas, he keeps it in a humidified room.

"If I lost this cello, I would be heartbroken," he said. "It's irreplaceable. I would get another cello, (but) it just would never be the same."

A cellist knows that with his care, his instrument can last many lifetimes. And Smith and Pereida both wonder about the their cellos' pasts and futures.

"Who was playing it, and then where it's going after me," Pereida said.

"I hope it's going to go somewhere where someone will benefit from it," he said. "The couple who sold it to me ... wanted to give someone the chance, the opportunity to have a nice cello they usually would not be able to. I grew up in a low-income family, I grew up in bad neighborhoods and all that stuff. I turned out to be a good kid."

Smith, too, thinks about who will play his cello after him. Isn't it fascinating, he said, how an instrument has a life and story of its own - not just one owner, but many.

How intriguing that an inanimate object could touch so many lives, giving generations of musicians a way to share with the world the music they would otherwise hear only in their minds.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy