Even if you’re not a sports fan, it’s pretty hard to escape the hoopla that surrounds baseball’s Opening Day every spring. Especially this year, and especially in Minnesota, where I’m clearly not the only one dying for my first up-close-and-personal Target Field experience. Football may be more popular by some measures, and soccer remains the truly global sports passion, but it’s baseball that has captured the hearts and minds of America’s poets, artists, songwriters, and historians for well over a century now.
Speaking of which, I’ve always wondered why, with the huge swing towards programmatic music in the concert hall during the 20th century, we haven’t seen more American composers attempt baseball-themed works. Sure, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid when it comes to writing serious music about something that is, at its core, a game. And yes, the smothering quilt of nostalgic Americana that covers everything associated with The Game these days might make it difficult for a composer to maneuver without coming off as either trite or unpatriotic.
But how cool would a John Adams take on the bottom of the ninth be? (Minimalism in general would seem to be a natural match for a game that consists of a seemingly endless series of nearly identical events that slowly become a narrative arc.) Or a John Corigliano dramatization of the seventh game of a World Series? What could Tan Dun, with his East-meets-West pedigree, do with an American pasttime that has become a sensation across Southeast Asia?
There’s at least a bit of a history here. Robert Russell Bennett penned a Symphony In D for the Dodgers back in 1941, which Time magazine said “had much of the [team's] elusive, faunlike charm,” whatever that means. And various composers have taken a crack at setting Ernest L. Thayer’s classic poem, “Casey at the Bat” to music – Sarah and I actually performed Frank Proto’s version at a set of Minnesota Orchestra young people’s concerts last season. But compared with the number of novels, movies, pop songs, and poems that get written about baseball, us classical folk haven’t exactly kept pace.
Interestingly, one of my favorite essays about classical music was actually penned by a writer beloved by generations of American sports fans. George Plimpton, in addition to founding The Paris Review, authored a hilarious and eye-opening series of books wherein he convinced professional sports franchises to allow his scrawny, unathletic self to join them on the field of play in an actual game, if only for a few minutes. What most fans of these tomes don’t know, however, is that he tackled the same challenge with the New York Philharmonic.
The short essay that resulted from Plimpton’s brief but heart-pounding turn as a NY Phil percussionist is almost exactly like his sportswriting: intensely personal, deeply respectful of the skill being displayed around him, and glinting with the patent ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. The complete essay is actually available online, thanks to Google, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Plimpton posits any number of comparisons between music and sports, but my favorite section is when he makes a deeply unsettling discovery about what makes playing a concert very, very different from playing a ball game…
“One of the terrors of orchestral music is that once it starts there is no earthly way you can stop it. It is utterly unlike sports where, if you think about it, the athlete has an almost God-like ability to stop time itself. The quarterback makes a crossed X sign to call time-out and everything stops. The batter steps out of the batter’s box and everything stops. An Olympic diver, poised on the board, can take her time, wriggling her toes and getting herself feeling just right before she commits herself to arch off into the water below.
“But in music, as soon as the conductor’s stick comes down, one is immediately put onto a treadmill that bears one inexorably up toward the moment of commitment and there’s nothing that can be done about it.”
Too true. But now he’s got me thinking about how much easier my job would be if I could call time out in the middle of a Mahler symphony. Gotta remember to talk to Osmo about that…
