In a year when Princeton’s arts organizations, both on and off campus, are focusing on the relationship between art and memory, I can’t help but think of my own memories, personal and collective, that have been inspired by the arts. Whether in a museum gallery or a concert hall, the arts create a kind of civic space, where people are connected by a shared, intimate experience. Some of my earliest memories are of playing the violin with my mother. I began taking lessons at the age of six, and she and I would go together to Suzuki camp in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. During “play-ins,” when the entire camp would play through the Suzuki music books, it was the youngest kids who were left standing in the end. I revered them.

At Interlochen Summer Music Camp, one of my favorite traditions was “roll call,” when each of the campers stood when the name of their state or country was called— talk about one’s world expanding! By the end of my first summer, I was convinced that I knew at least one person from every country in the world: my cabin alone housed a clarinet player from Lebanon, a dancer from India, and a harpist from Panama. During that first summer, and the four that followed, I was required to attend a concert every night. When I think back on the talent that I was exposed to, it makes me gulp: I heard performances by pianists Van Cliburn, who, by then, rarely played in public, and Dave Brubeck, clarinetist Benny Goodman, and violinist Itzhak Perlman. Although close to fifty concerts a summer sometimes seemed like a chore to a ten-year-old, I had already found the experience that would define my life’s choices.

When I was thirteen, my family moved from the Midwest to Princeton and I began lessons at Juilliard pre-college. Every Saturday morning I would take the 6:40 a.m. train into the city, where I encountered peers who were far more talented than I was. I was inspired to improve, and haunted the Princeton Record Exchange, where I listened to virtually every concerto ever written for violin. In college, I worked during the summers at the Marlboro Music Festival. One night, Rudolf Serkin, the legendary pianist and founder of the festival, came into the office. He took my hand and quietly asked if I would mind if he practiced in the hall while I was working. After I said, “no, of course I wouldn’t mind,” I stayed at my desk until 2:00 a.m., listening to him finger passages from Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy.

I moved to Princeton just under a year ago, to become director of Princeton University Concerts. I never could have imagined that Richardson Auditorium, the same stage I walked across during my graduation from eighth grade, would become my professional stage thirty years later. But here I am back in my hometown and on a campus where the arts are thriving. I couldn’t be more fortunate. There is no better place to be a presenter than at a university, where people are dedicated to learning, stretching, and growing, and where students, at a formative time in their lives, are ready and even expected to take risks. And there is no better job than bringing those experiences to life.

The University’s rich intellectual and cultural life presents many opportunities for collaboration across artistic disciplines, and I am so happy to have found a partner in the Princeton University Art Museum, a place where I saw my first Manet and where my five-year-old daughter recently encountered her first Monet. Collaborating across disciplines, as is the case in the Memory and the Work of Art project, not only uses one art form to learn about another, it highlights our shared creativity and serves as a visible reminder of the human imagination.

I come to this job with a deep belief, stretching back to my own childhood memories, that the arts can change one’s life forever. I am grateful to be back in Princeton and look forward to sharing many more moments when we are lifted outside of ourselves, transcended, and yet, at the same time, made deeply aware of what is common among us.

Marna Seltzer
Director, Princeton University Concerts