by David Budin

Part 1: Picking Up Styx

It’s not often – and, actually, this may have been the first time – that a bunch of Cleveland-area teenagers have had the chance to perform a concert on the stage of Blossom Music Center. And for 7,000 cheering music fans. It is also, most likely, the first time that Cleveland’s Contemporary Youth Orchestra has performed while many in the audience drank beer. And yelled a lot, like people do (for some reason) at rock concerts.

In fact, it was a rock concert. Contemporary Youth Orchestra played with the rock band Styx to open Blossom’s 2006 season on May 25. The 115-member orchestra – made up of some of the top high-school-age musicians in the region – and its accompanying 40-member chorus of kids from age 18 all the way down to 5 performed nearly 20 songs with Styx, ranging from the group’s classic hits (like “Come Sail Away” and “Renegade”) to ‘60s cover songs (the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home”) from the band’s latest CD Big Bang Theory, to a few band-new songs debuted in this concert (which was taped by a TV crew for a future broadcast and recorded for a CD).

This was the sixth in CYO’s annual Rock the Orchestra series. Every year for its final concert, CYO collaborates with a rock artist to perform orchestral interpretations of the artist’s songs. Ray Manzerak, keyboard player and songwriter for the Doors, played on a couple of songs with the orchestra. Graham Nash sang one song. Pat Benatar sang all the songs in her CYO concert, as did Jon Anderson of Yes. This year, when CYO founder and conductor Liza Grossman asked Styx if one of their singers would join with the orchestra, they said, essentially, “No – we’ll all come.”

At that point everyone knew it would be too big an event to hold in CYO’s regular performance space, the 1,000-seat Waetjen Hall at Cleveland State University. So it turned into a major rock concert in the region’s largest venue.

But CYO was no backup band for Styx. They were partners. In fact, Styx flew into Cleveland a few times during the weeks before the concert to rehearse with CYO. Members also gave a lot of their time talking to the students, during and after rehearsals. And during breaks on the last two very long rehearsal days at Blossom, the band posed for hundreds of photos with the kids and engaged in many one-on-one conversations with them.

At one point during the final rehearsal, the group’s Tommy Shaw addressed the kid chorus, telling them not to hold back in their singing, and, as an example, demonstrated with a scream, and followed up by saying that if they were ever going to open up, that night would be the time to do it. Then later, on stage during the concert, Shaw told the audience about how he could barely finish singing one of the songs because he got so choked up listening to the music the students were making.

The experience was clearly an amazing one for the kids – performing at Blossom to loud cheers, playing to an audience about seven times larger than its normal crowd, playing music (and, in many cases, dancing) onstage with rock stars, being recorded by a TV crew, performing orchestral rock music. And there are aspects of this experience that most of the kids won’t even know until sometime later in their lives. If some of them become professional musicians, they may well look back at this a turning point in their lives. And if some never play music again in their lives, well, this was a pretty high note to go out on.

But it was also an experience for the band, too. Jaded as you might get being a rock star for 30 years, Shaw told the audience that this was a concert he was sure the band would never forget. CYO director Liza Grossman says that immediately following the concert, she and all five members of Styx and their manager went into the TV production booth to watch some of the footage, and that as they watched, literally all seven of them cried.

On the Styx Web site the next day, Shaw wrote, “We're in Long Island, New York, looking forward to our show with Foreigner tonight at Jones Beach, but to be honest it's going to be tough to beat what happened last night in Cleveland. Not just tonight but for a long, long time, this memory of our concert with CYO and the chorus will be there putting a smile on our faces. … To Liza Grossman and everyone involved at CYO & company, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for inviting us into your world and letting us take you into ours. We'll be talking about this one for the rest of our days.”

Part 2: Rocking the Future

It was not your normal career day. There’s nothing wrong with normal career days, but this wasn’t one of them. It was Grammy Career Day, which means that the Grammy Foundation picked Cleveland as one of a very small number of cities to host that event this year. On May 18, 300 high school students from all around the Cleveland area met at Case Western Reserve University to attend seminars on almost every aspect of the music industry, from pop songwriting, to DJ-ing and turntabling, to classical music production.

The day began with a panel discussion on the music business – the various job possibilities within it, ways to get those jobs, and the future of it – by a group of local industry heavyweights, including Agora founder and owner Henry Lo Conti?, Cleveland International Records founder and owner Steve Popovich, Rock Hall chief curator Jim Henke, Live Nation (you know, the company that everyone around here still calls Belkin) VP of marketing Barry Gabel, Telarc International’s chief recording engineer Michael Bishop, and Cleveland Orchestra trombonist and assistant personnel manager Steven Witser. The panel was moderated by the Grammy Foundation’s senior director of education programs, David Sears.

The group then broke into workshops. While Michael Bishop and Telarc’s director of audio production Erica Brenner were talking about things like how to create sound effects for movies, recording artist and Rock Hall VP of education Warren Zanes was explaining how to craft a pop song, DJ Doc and Progressive Arts Alliance founder and director Santina Protopapa were demonstrating turntabling, the Warped Tour’s Nicole Dejanovich was expounding on the elements of producing a rock tour, Rock Hall educator Jason Hanley was creating an electronic music track with help from his group of students, and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus manager Anna Stowe was discussing careers in classical music.

Sponsored by the Chicago Chapter of the Recording Academy (which is part of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, best known to the general public for its Grammy Awards) and Gibson Baldwin Music Education, the event, which was presented free to students, was coordinated on this side by Case assistant professor of music Mary Davis (who also serves as Case’s liaison with the Rock Hall).

With students from East Cleveland, Bay Village and points in between, there was the requisite number (small) of bored and half-asleep kids, but the vast majority were fully engaged and, no doubt, at least some were dreaming of getting out of school and hitting the big time in the music biz. If one of those 300 does, that will be a great thing. But getting kids to dream about a great future is even better. And in the past couple of weeks, these kids and the ones in CYO got a lot to dream about.

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