Seniors Shed Their Geriatric Blues, Explore Red-Hot Musical Horizons : Retirement: Their 100-member band is composed of people ages 50 and up, nearly all retired.

When his wife of 45 years died in 1990, Charlie Rose was a lost soul. A year later, at age 76, his lone journey took an inspirational leap: The retired teacher and magistrate bought a saxophone, an instrument he’d yearned to play since childhood, and joined a band.

Geriatric gigs are gettin’ down!

They transport Rose and his new wife--a widow in the alto sax section--down parade routes, into parks, festivals, retirement homes and onto many a splendid concert stage.

The 100-member New Horizons Band they belong to is composed of people ages 50 and up, nearly all retired. Many hadn’t played musical instruments for half a century, if at all, when they came together in January, 1991.

“Music, I think, gives people a sense that they have something to contribute,” said the band’s founder and conductor, Roy Ernst. “And I’m not sure that that’s so common for people as they get older.”

Ernst, 56, thinks beginning bands for seniors will catch on as baby boomers slide into retirement. The nation’s 65-plus population is expected to double to 65 million in 35 years.

A professor of music education at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, Ernst helped a similar band get going in Madison, Wis., in 1992. Others are starting up this fall in Indianapolis and early next year in Phoenix and Iowa City, Iowa.

Initially taught by graduate students, the players in Upstate New York rehearse twice weekly, working on staples by Hoagy Carmichael, John Philip Sousa and Irving Berlin. As they’ve improved, ensembles have splintered off for chamber recitals or for extra hours of jive at dance halls and conventions.

Although exhilarated by what they’ve accomplished, few found it easy learning. Some struggle to adapt: One woman with severe arthritis plays a curled flute; poor eyesight can blur the conductor’s instructions.

“I’ve never felt there was anything I couldn’t accomplish, so I went along with great confidence, and I almost got defeated,” recounted Robert Marsey, 60, a businessman turned flutist. “Oh, it was terrible. Terrible! But I stuck with it after quitting 26 times.

“Roy said, ‘If you can only play one note, sit there and play that one note.’ I stayed with it.

“I’m not sure how good we are--we’re not bad. We’ll never be there. It doesn’t mean we cannot enjoy it and bring pleasure to others, too. People should retire to something. This is better than basket weaving.”

“Next to my family, certainly, the musical activity is the most important thing in my life,” said Roger Christensen, 68, a retired professor of microbiology who took up clarinet “because Benny Goodman is a hero.”

“It’s very gratifying just being in a group,” he said. “And once in a while, the group gets grooving on something and you’re just having a ball.”

Leon Katzen, 76, a trombonist, said he played violin at age 10 “but I didn’t remember any of the notes. I had other interests--baseball!”

Maybe the instrument was wrong, or the time of life. Katzen wonders now if he might have become a professional musician like his son, who plays for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

What he has learned is it’s never too late. At first, he said with a chortle, “the sounds that came out of the instrument were unbelievably bad. . . . Maybe they still are.”

“Once you start, you don’t want to be a failure,” said Katzen, who still works as a lawyer. “It would be more enjoyable if I had more time.”

For most others in the band, time is aplenty. And besides getting a second chance to try something that passed them by in their youth, music can freshen their sense of identity when their careers comes to a close.

“You have a sense of fulfillment here,” Rose said. “You feel, ‘Well, maybe I’m important again.’ I don’t want to be in life a day without a challenge. I’d like to feel it’s something I’ll master before the Lord takes me along.”

Growing up on a dairy farm near Geneva, N.Y., Rose figured out how to play piano between milking cows. The Depression, and then college, came between his ambition to learn the sax. All five of his children play various instruments, but he just didn’t have the time. For 60 years.

These days, he practices one hour a day. “This was something that got me back in with people again,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoy it.”

Rose found a new companion in Rita Blum Boyer, whose husband had died in 1985. “We had something like six or seven saxophonists,” she said, “but I chose to sit down next to Charlie and thereby lies a tale.”

They were married a year ago. Both turn 80 later this year.

Using volunteers from the band, the University of Rochester’s medical school is studying whether music stimulates brain function.

“Becoming part of something that’s really thinking toward the future is really healthy,” Ernst said. “We adjust to having some kinds of imperfections in the group all the time, and that doesn’t detract from having a really satisfying performance. Most concert-goers don’t just want to hear a dazzling display of technique or a very complicated composition. They want to hear a person perform music and have something that comes from the heart.”