Before this begins let me be clear: Beethoven never set foot in Mansfield, Ohio. I have to say this or I’ll hear about it.
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) spent his entire life on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and he was never anywhere near my community.
Yet he was unquestionably present here in 1999, and that is the point of this reflection.
That year I worked for the Mansfield Symphony. I was part of a small team who operated at the core of the orchestra by keeping to the outer edges of the musicians. We arranged their chairs, wired the lights to their music stands, hauled in the grand piano at intermission.
We were the stage crew. We wore dark clothes so as to be invisible to the audience and, as professionals, were hardly ever noticed by anyone on stage or in the theater.
It was the best job I ever had. They paid me to sit through rehearsals and performances of the greatest music in the world.
Once the stage was set, once the musicians were seated under the spotlights on their risers, there was nothing more required of me until applause signaled it was over. I got to spend the entire time on the clock simply listening.
Setting the Stage
Listening, to me, is an art form in itself; and I am very earnest in approaching the practice of it.
In order to find the exact spot in the auditorium where listening was most ideal I sat successively in every single seat in the Renaissance Theatre. There had to be a location where the acoustic pitch of the architecture bounced the sound most perfectly from every section of the orchestra to one specific point of confluence. That was where I wanted to place my ears.
I sat with my eyes closed so my senses would be wholly focused to their single audio receptive purpose.
In the end the seat I preferred was not in the audience at all, but up above the stage on a metal catwalk, about fifteen feet over the heads of the String Bass section.
There was an old comfy seat up there, left behind from the movie house days of the theater, positioned right behind the proscenium. Overstuffed and faded, worn around the edges and flattened from 50 years of gravity, it was without question the best seat in the house.
From up there looking down at the stage, the musicians were spread out like a roadmap of the spectrum of sound. The Brass came from the lower east side; the Strings from the west; Woodwinds scattered about the midlands.
It was authentic surround sound.
It was as close to being inside the composer’s head as it was possible to be. Not even the Conductor had such a good view of the sound. For him it was all coming from a relatively shallow plane in front of the podium; for me it was spread out not only from curtain to curtain, but with a depth of field as wide as the oaken stage.
The catwalk where I perched was made of corrugated mesh that allowed sound to travel through it, so I was wholly immersed and suspended in the music to the bottom of my feet.
When I closed my eyes it could be as if the entire symphony originated dynamically within the sphere of my own head: the vaulted, curtained, amplifying stage was set within my own being.
All I had to do was be quiet and I was at the very heartbeat of the music.
The Program
One night they performed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
It is one of those pieces that you hear so often in your life that it becomes a sound bite in your mind.
If you start singing the first four notes at someone they will respond back with the next four with a smile, because it is a common dramatic cliché we share simply by growing up on the same planet.
That is why I learned to listen with my eyes closed. It helps me to truly hear the music coming at me without anticipating it from the recordings already stored in my memory.
If I can be quiet enough inside my soul, it is like hearing the music for the first time.
That is what happened with Beethoven that night at the Mansfield Symphony.
The Performance
With my eyes closed, and facing the orchestra, the piece began with those four distinctive notes pounding on the door. From the very first downbeat I heard them not only as wholly familiar, but also as entirely new at the same time.
This AC/DC current of simultaneous old and new stimulus sent an electric shock through me—a deep challenge to my system—that blew open doors of perception I didn’t even know were there.
It was like being shaken awake when I didn’t even know I had fallen asleep.
Suddenly the music was not just alive and vital: it was essential as the very pulse in my neck.
It was animated and moving quickly like the blood coursing through my body. It was surprising and startling as when you jolt alert in bed because you dreamt you were falling.
And suddenly, for the first time in my life of experience with the 5th Symphony: I got it. I understood what the music was doing. There was a pattern to it, a method: a system.
It was making a statement and then analyzing it, amplifying it; explaining it; echoing it. It was proving its point in a way that made the logic irrefutable and self-evident.
I was astonished. I had heard this piece a hundred times and yet I never saw the shape of it before: the framework of it; the sense of it.
It made sense.
And it was remaking my senses. It was like I had never used all of them before in such dynamic utility.
It made the act of listening into a procreative force.
As the music flowed and washed over my consciousness, and danced and raced and stormed through my imagination, it became wholly absorbing: It had a life force that subsumed my own. It was like my life was being lived and expressed in sound right in front of me; right through me.
The Transcendence
It was somewhere in the last movement of the Symphony when all of this synthesis suddenly and unexpectedly hit a saturation point. It was overwhelming me, and all at once I hit sensory overload.
And in that instant my eyes popped open.
What I saw in front of me, from my elevated position above the orchestra; what I witnessed in that moment is the part of the Symphony experience that I will never forget:
I saw this small corps of humanity spread out like a map before me; each of them furiously sawing away on their instruments; each of them wholly focused to the task at hand; each of them striving, working, trying so hard to be perfect at their job.
These were people I knew, people I recognized from around town.
I was well acquainted with enough of them to know that quite a few of these people did not like each other at all, or even get along civilly: they were individually opposed in values, in temperament, in politics, in religion. I had heard them arguing. They were anything but unified in their backgrounds.
Yet they were each of them essential to this process of accomplishing music, and they were all working together as one single mind and body and spirit. Each of them was rising to the top of their ability, wholly synchronized with others who were each doing their very best to accomplish something much larger than any of them.
This is what I keep seeing in my mind’s eye to this day. It was what I recognized as a vision of my own community, my nation.
It often appears as if our society is divided and broken and pulling in every different direction; yet it is possible to rise above the differences and work as one to accomplish something sublime.
I know it’s possible. I witnessed it that evening. Beethoven proved it to me.
Richland County History 