July 20, 2011
Music of the Spheres
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
For most fans attending a baseball game is a summer diversion, an addiction, an act of devotion. I’m a
music critic, so for me it’s something else too: an immersion in bustling, jumbled, enveloping sound. And if
you think of the Yankees as an athletic orchestra, the team has a comfortable and acoustically lively new
concert hall. What if I treated a game as a kind of outdoor musical piece?
I had been to the old Yankee Stadium many times, starting in my childhood. But I had not made it to the
new one until a recent Sunday for the game with the Tampa Bay Rays, a pitcher’s duel between C. C.
Sabathia of the Yankees and James Shields of the Rays. The Yankees won, 1-0.
To experience this baseball symphony in fresh ways I brought along some companions. Kingston Liniak,
an 11-year-old nephew of my partner, Ben McCommon, was visiting New York for the first time. Kingston
is a huge baseball fan and a gifted player in his league. To complete our party of four we brought Amitav
Mitra, the discerning 13-year-old son of our neighbors down the hall in our apartment building.
Going to a game with the intent of paying attention to the sound of it all certainly affected my perceptions. I
was struck more than ever by the constant buzz of voices. At the old stadium significant numbers of seats
were tucked underneath upper tiers. If you were sitting in one of those enclosed areas, the sounds in your
section were intensified, and you had a distorted impression of the overall aural experience.
More rows at the new stadium are open to the sky, or so it seems. So from where we sat, in the first row of
the grandstand on the first-base side, the gaggle of voices blended more organically. And individual shouts
pierced the pervasive rumble of chatter. During one lull someone high up in the grandstand actually yelled,
“Hip, Hip, Hooray!,” which struck me as an antiquated phrase. People all around me laughed, but I gather
it’s also a name-bending cheer for the Yankees’ Jorge Posada.
Kingston knew I would be writing about the sounds of the baseball game. And without any prodding from
me he offered a pretty good description of what was going on.
“It sounds like people’s voices just bounce everywhere,” he said. “When one person talks, another person
talks, and the sounds just bounce.”
When fans got into chants of “Let’s Go Yankees” and rhythmic clapping, the sounds careening from one
side of the stadium to the other were almost antiphonal, like the effect of choirs singing from spatially
separated lofts in a cathedral.
For all the hubbub of constant sound it is amazing how clearly the crack of a bat, the whoosh of a pitch (at
least from the powerhouse Sabathia), and the leathery thud of the ball smothered in the catcher’s mitt cut
through the textures. And if the hum of chattering provides the unbroken timeline and undulant ripple of
this baseball symphony, the voices that break through from all around are like striking, if fleeting, solo
instruments.
The most assertive soloists are the vendors. My favorite was a wiry man with nasal snarl of a voice who
practically sang the words “Cracker Jack” as a three-note riff: two eighth notes on “Cracker,” followed by a
quarter note on “Jack,” always on a falling minor third. (Using solfège syllables, think “sol, sol, mi.”) After
a while I heard his voice drifting over from another section, and he had transposed his riff down exactly
one step.
Of course, baseball is a game of expectations. The crowd waits eagerly for what could happen at any
moment with a pitch, a swing, a long throw. I loved one moment when a Tampa Bay batter hit an arching
ball into right field, and almost everyone started saying, almost quasi-singing, “Whoa,” as if convinced that
their voices would lift the ball and nestle it into the fielder’s glove. It worked.
That Sunday was the day after Derek Jeter had reached, then quickly surpassed, his 3,000-hit milestone.
Naturally, in my party we were hoping that Jeter would have had just one hit, for 2,999, so he could have
reached the mark on our visit. The baseball symphony on Jeter’s big day must have been like Mahlerian
ecstasy, the “Symphony of Three Thousand.” Sunday’s game was mellower, and the rousing cheers for
Jeter were tinged, I thought, with a little disappointment that we were a day late. Still, his 3,004th hit
roused the crowd to a big fortissimo outburst.
There is lots of actual music in a baseball game, which is good and bad. I love the organ playing, but the
baseball and musical purist in me could do without the canned pop songs. I must admit, however, that some
of the choices on Sunday were amusing. Sunday was Ring Day, meaning that every youngster got a free
Yankees ring. When the donors from Manfredi Jewels were introduced, guess what we heard? Beyoncé
singing “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
Now, like everyone, I always love hearing the recording of the Village People singing “Y.M.C.A.” as the
grounds crew rakes smooth the infield during a break between innings and does its little group dance moves
with outstretched arms. It is both odd and sort of charming to see the stadium rock — the crew and the fans
— to this joyous 1978 song that was early on embraced by gay people for the double entendre of its lyrics,
which celebrate the Y as a great place for men to meet.
Alas, the ritual may be losing its steam. On Sunday the dance moves of the grounds crew were rather
desultory. And Amitav was unimpressed. How did he know this song? I wondered.
“At one unfortunate point in my life,” he said drolly, “I was at someone’s wedding, and there was
karaoke.” But he loved the game and the whole buzz of being there. He did not sing along, but smiled right
through “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
I wish the Yankees would let their organists play more during games. Since 2004 the weekend organist has
been Ed Alstrom, who has an impressive résumé, has performed with Chuck Berry and Leonard Bernstein,
works as an organist and choir director in New Jersey, and played joyously on Sunday.
In the top of the ninth, with one out to go for the win, the fans were on their feet, shouting, coaxing, trying
to will Sabathia, still on the mound, to get that final strike. The shouts of encouragement had a little bit of
“don’t you dare blow it” mixed in. Imagine opera buffs standing up and shouting before a tenor’s climactic
high C.
Sabathia did the job, the fans screamed, and the baseball symphony concluded, through broke up is the
more precise musical term, since the chatter continued as people filed out the exits.