Sports
Sportsmen

My Americas' Game (1996)

Two decades ago I began to compose a series of audiotapes that were initially both of and about the sound of certain familiar experiences. For the first composition, Invocations (1981, 1984), whose theme and subject is the sound of the language of prayer, I recorded more than sixty ministers speaking over two dozen languages, and from these tapes mixed sequences of solos, duets, quintets, and grand choruses roughly along the structure of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion. My fundamental motive was to reveal acoustically that particular sound that transcends linguistic differences. For New York City (1984, in three versions: 60', 87', 140'), I recorded sounds indigenous to my hometown and composed these into sections intended less to represent the city than to reveal acoustic qualities unique to it. For instance, in one section the shouting traders at the Commodities Exchange are combined with aggressive street vendors, acoustically fusing similar selling sounds from radically different physical (but distinctly NYC) spaces. In another section are several people speaking languages other than English with the rhythm and mannerisms of New Yorkers, such as running words together or quickly fluctuating volume. And so on. Though these audiotapes lack introductions or other explanatory commentary and thus proceed as musical compositions do, they are not obscure. At every point in its length, each of them is fundamentally about its theme, which is the unique sound of its subject.

Remembering that my initial idea for what became Invocations was to use sports announcers, who sound roughly alike around the world, apart from differences in language, I decided for a new composition to focus upon a sport that was acoustically distinctive. Tennis was possible, but too limited in its sounds. I thought about basketball and hockey, as well as soccer, but not only were these sports acoustically limited too, they prompted audiences to respond in unison ways that, to my ear, are uninteresting. Golf, needless to say, was quickly dismissed.

No, it became quickly evident that the best choice for me would be American baseball—not my favorite sport, but aurally the most resonant. Not only do hardballs hitting bats and gloves resound distinctively, but a baseball crowd sounds like no other, mostly because, for most of its time together, it is audibly more chaotic than harmonious. A common joke holds that a three-hour baseball game has only seventeen minutes of real action, and it is only in those rare moments that a baseball crowd begins to resound in unison. Otherwise, spectators are talking to one another, addressing players, buying edibles or excusing themselves to go to the bathroom. A German friend, more familiar with soccer and its pacing, judged that the most active, interesting element in even a professional baseball game is the audience! This inadvertent chorus not only makes music; but much of the music made is unique to baseball.

Though disorganized, the baseball crowd is not unruly, in part because with so many games in a professional season—almost one each day—no one of them is absolutely essential to ultimate season victory. Precisely because baseball has no cheerleaders (while the attempts of the public-address system to prompt cheers aren't always successful), the audience generates enthusiasm spontaneously, sometimes for only a few seconds, among a few people, while at other times for several minutes among many people. Since extended cheers become a music unto themselves, each attains a unique acoustic trajectory that, as Reynold Weidenaar pointed out, can be visually scored. (One is reminded of Marilyn Monroe telling her husband, Joe DiMaggio, about her visit to the troops in Korea. "You should have heard the cheering." He replied, "I have.") Another peculiarity of baseball is the emphasis upon individual performance, and upon the audience's responses to individual performers, down to addressing them as unresponding gods. It is for the chaos of the crowd, as well as this emphasis upon individualism, that I consider baseball acoustically reflective of America, all the Americas, and thus entitled my piece with the plural possessive, "Americas' Game." Remember that Jacques Barzun, a Parisian-born American professor and critic once wrote, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game."

Another concern in my mind in beginning this piece was my composer-colleague Frits Wieland's subtle criticism of my earlier long tapes Invocations and New York City. He judged them more literary than musical because they had discrete sections, like scenes in a play, rather than a sustained continuous flow. As my audio work has more and more approached the character of music, I decided that, first of all, the stream of sound in this new work must never be interrupted. Another difference between it and its predecessors was that the new work lacked a determining literary model comparable to Finnegans Wake for my Invocations and both Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood and John Dos Passos's U.S.A. for my New York City, which is to say that whatever particular literary example or experience might lie behind Americas' Game cannot be identified by me.

Even though my material has been exclusively speech and sounds recorded in the environment, I think it best for me to proceed with a musical model as well, if only to give structure and pace to my sounds. For Invocations, I had Bach's St. Matthew Passion; for The Gospels, Beethoven's Grosse Fugue. In searching for a musical guide for baseball, I looked first into the music of Charles Ives, who not only portrayed American chaos, but also appreciated baseball. No luck, however. Most of Ives's chaos is rapidly articulated, whereas baseball is a languid summer game. This last point reminded me of George Gershwin's masterpiece from Porgy and Bess, "Summertime"; and the more of it I heard, mostly in my head, the surer I became that that familiar work should guide my baseball piece, not by its explicit presence, but by informing its pace.

I taped a universe of baseball sounds—in the seats of professional stadiums, on the practice fields of spring training, among the fans at a minor league park. I recorded amateurs in Central Park, kids in an open field as well as Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Chicanos, Panamanians, and French Canadians. What and where I could not do or go myself, I got help. Thanks to Ceil Muller, I did spring training with the Los Angeles Dodgers; thanks to Reynold Weidenaar, who once recorded the Cleveland Orchestra, I got both the acoustic details of both batting practice and dense crowds. Other helpers included Jay Godfrey in New York and Thomas Hammar and Magnus Fredriksson in Stockholm, as well as the dedicatee, a Dutch artist long resident here, Jan Henderikse. A grant from the Media Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts made initial production possible.

All this recorded material was audited and evaluated and then summarized on forty pages of single-spaced notes. Remembering that I wanted not to portray a single game, but to reveal its sounds, I then composed, again at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm, overlapping shorter passages—acoustic essays, so to speak—of sounds distinctive to baseball, such as pitched balls hitting bats (both wooden and aluminum), balls thudding in leather mitts or striking the earth, the imprecations of individual players, heavy steps exploding in four-second bursts, umpiring decisions, players shouting at one another, audience expletives, collective cheering and groaning, hawkers of food and souvenirs moving through the crowd, etc., all of these elements fading over one another.

In composing I remembered not only my reportorial theme but musical and literary considerations. Whatever words are heard, for instance, are those I might have written for such a composition, had I not already recorded them on tape; for one theme is my appreciation of uniquely American language. Where sounds are placed in relation to one another customarily reflects my musical judgments. Since reel to reel tape moving at 15 inches per second is most conveniently composed in segments no more than a half hour long, I divided the hour into two and made a doubleheader, so to speak. Each segment has its own beginning and conclusion, and within that structure the piece then alternates roughly between sounds from the field and sounds from the crowd. The first part is 29:40; the second 29:55. As more than two hundred separate sources were used, another structural characteristic is combining games from a wide variety of venues, both professional and amateur, so that sandlot hobbyists appear, acoustically, alongside major league players. In its dense mix of sounds with speech Americas' Game most resembles, within my work and in contrast to others, my earlier New York City.

I also made illustrative documentation in the form of a visual-verbal score. In the upper left-hand corners of each page are numbers identifying each minute within the two halves mentioned before. Thus, page 0, for instance, portrays not only the opening sixty seconds but the thirtieth minute. Along the top are numerals identifying ten-second periods. Along the left-hand margins are enumerated the tracks on the 24-track tape. (Because of a technical limitation peculiar to the EMS studio, tracks 19 to 24 were not used.) Tracks 9 to 18 contain the first thirty minutes, while tracks 1 to 8 contain material from the second half hour. The descriptions begin where each sound begins and end approximately where the sound ends; sometimes arrows are used in place of words to extend a sound's duration. The purpose of this experiment in scoring is discovering whether a composition like Americas' Game can be documented in print, much as a score with staves and clefs is a representation of musical experience; and just as a musically literate person can tell from "reading" an instrumental score what a piece is like, so someone reading this score might get a sense of my piece.

One critical question raised by my audio compositions is whether they should be considered "collage." Because they are composed from so many fragments separately gathered, some think that term appropriate. I think not. Collage, we remember, is about the fusing of dissimilars, usually of materials originally from separate sources, whether in image or sounds. In most of my sections, I fuse elements similar to one another, whether bat cracks in one section or vendors in another, albeit in ways more condensed than would be possible in reality; and in that respect, it could be said that I compose harmonies, though they hardly sound harmonious to the ear, and further that such kaleidoscopic harmonious composition of fundamentally nonharmonic materials is made possible only by audiotape. The relevant term is Mauricio Kagel's metacollage, which is defined as a collage-like-composition using only a single source. In the overlapping pastiche of several versions of the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is, of course, an allusion to Charles Ives, who remains a prime influence upon my music.

One quality I wanted for Americas' Game is that it be primarily acoustic. Though filled with details and cross-references for the cognoscenti, little in the appreciation of it should depend upon the listener's knowing English, and in this respect it differs scarcely from other avant-garde musical works whose words happen to be English. If its subtleties and complexity are sufficient to demand rehearing, then perhaps it is ultimately not for broadcast over radio or in a concert hall, but for media that can be easily re-experienced, such as records and audiocassettes. Perhaps it could become, like other audiotapes of mine, the sound track of a film or videotape. I also wanted Americas' Game to epitomize the kind of composing possibilities that are available, even to someone as musically limited as I am, at the turn of the millennium.