T H E B AC K PAG E
HEARING IS BELIEVING
A MUSICAL JOURNE Y WITH THE CLE VE L AND ORCHESTR A thoughts on three decades as a small part of one extraordinary team . . . by ERIC SELLEN I FIRST HEARD Cleveland’s orchestra, live and in
person, in August 1987 at Blossom Music Center. It was an ear-opening evening for a kid from Iowa, whose interest in classical music had been nurtured by a pair of remarkably discerning and caring parents. I was, of course, well versed in The Cleveland Orchestra’s strengths and reputation, and many of its recordings were lined up amidst the rows of LPs on my shelves. I had listened from afar via the weekly syndicated radio broadcasts, in junior high school and on up into graduate school. But a living, breathing performance is something different. I was mesmerized. Although, in truth, what held my attention most was the remarkable acoustics at Blossom. How was I to know that an outdoor facility could so ably carry sound to so many at once? Severance Hall came later that year, where I was shocked once more, this time with the clarity and immediate depth of detail. And while I am remembering and attributing the sound to these two remarkable buildings, it took some years to more fully understand the symbiosis between ensemble and architecture — that the Cleveland Sound and Severance Sound were one and the same, built and grown together as one. My thirty-some years knowing and working for The Cleveland Orchestra has not been a simple straight path. I went away for a few years in the middle, following my husband’s work assignment to other places (including two years living in England). In 2005, I started back in what I often call my “second tour of duty” — but a duty of respect for this ensemble. Based more than a thousand miles away, I started working remotely when that was less common than the past year’s forced shift.
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than once — how best to talk and write about music in our modern age. Not how to talk with a musicologist or specialist or a musician, but how to engage everyday audience members, whether experts or novices. And to offer something insightful and meaningful for every reader, first-timer and fifty-year subscriber. The Cleveland Orchestra doesn’t play Mozart or Beethoven the way they did sixty years ago, or even twenty years back. Times change. Our understanding of music history, how music is performed, and how it reflects our lives today, also evolves. So does language. And in recent years I have been more and more willing, nay intent, on pushing language forward in how we talk about and discuss and present music. To put on the page how we talk. To not sound stuff y and elitist about a mysterious artform, but to be enthusiastic and energetic and daring in talking about how music works. Music is as much about how it makes you feel, how the composer felt in writing it, as it is about the details and history. It is as much about feelings as about structure. It is about form and function, two sides of a coin (or concerto). So it is with the language we use to describe it. If music is architecture in sound, we talk more today about unity and design, and less about the engineering details. We talk most about how it flows and feels, how the piece “works” for an audience. Today, it’s more about the emotional journey, as much as the actual nuts and bolts of how the journey takes place.
Both times The Cleveland Orchestra hired me, it was for the program book. Taking on editing and design and production. Across three decades I’ve steered the book forward, into the modern age of computer design and more. But this isn’t and has never been about me. It’s about the Orchestra and the audience and the music.
Part of this is how we employ the language, or more specifically what language we use. Less of the stiff formal language of yesteryear, and more of the the approachable, day-to-day language that we live in and with all the time. The idea these days is less to “explain” the music, but to help attendees listen, or get ready to listen — pointers and perspectives on how the musical journey of any one piece, or tonight’s concert, might go. What to listen for, yes, but more in recent years about what you may feel when listening, and encouraging you to listen for yourself, through your own feelings.
Over the years, I’ve thought a great deal about — and Franz Welser-Möst and I have discussed more
Understanding of the past (and the present) changes our approach . . . to performing, talking, writing,
