Some Surface-Level "Spurious Associations" between Milton Babbitt's Whirled Series and Baseball

[Baseball] should be compared not only with other sports, but with our other indigenous arts––our painting, music, dance, and literature. … A subtle and complex activity, it rewards not mere brute strength, but agility, intelligence, imagination, and daring. … [It] is a game for poets and priests, philosophers and scholars, worthy of contemplation and rich in wonder.

—George Grella, "Baseball and the American Dream"

Milton babbitt completed Whirled Series, a work for alto saxophone and piano, on September 6, 1987, just a little over a month before that year's Major League World Series. An avid follower of baseball, he likely allowed the season's last games to hum in the background as he copied the final draft of his score.¹ The year had been exciting. The number of home runs so shattered previous records—up twenty percent from 1986—that many baseball fans believed (and continue to believe) that the MLB had altered or "juiced up" the composition of the ball in order to promote better hitting.² Many sports buffs felt this "enhancement" cheapened aspects of the game that had given baseball its merit: namely, its difficulty. It also confirmed what many had felt for some time: that the League was desperate to attract a crowd.

The impulse to assuage difficulty for the sake of an audience paralleled a larger trend at the end of the twentieth century, the purview of which extended beyond the realm of baseball to include other leisure and cultural activities. In music, trends toward simplicity, neo-romanticism, and accessibility often sought to repair what was perceived as the ever-widening gap between "high art" and contemporary society. And yet, for Babbitt, prioritizations of such "compromised exhibitionism" for the sake of the "marketplace of the concert hall" not only demonstrated a cultural acquiescence to "anti-intellectualism" and "populism," (1958, 52) but moreover "seriously threatened the survival" of his "difficult" and "serious" music (1983, 163).

In light of his coupling of baseball to serial music in Whirled Series's title, one must wonder to what extent Babbitt saw similarities between the politics surrounding the 1987 World Series and those influencing contemporary musical culture. On the face of it, not at all: "Any association [of Whirled Series] with baseball is spurious," he insisted in a discussion before a performance of the work at the 1992 Network for New Music's annual fund-raising concert (quoted in Valdes [1992]). Yet, given the power of titles to frame one's listening experience—by contextualizing compositions within specific historical, political, and social circumstances, by evoking personal associations, and by ultimately shaping expectations—the punning referent in the work's title cannot be so easily disregarded. (Indeed, pointing to the Carmichael experiments in "What Do You, as a Composer, Try to Get the Student to Hear in a Piece of Music," Babbitt asserted that "verbal concepts" decidedly influence how music is perceived [Westergaard 1968, 69–70].³ And, more often than not, Babbitt's punning titles do have relevance to the music: All Set [1957], as is well known, alludes to jazz in instrumentation and structure.)⁴ In fact, examining Whirled Series through the lens of baseball helps explain certain aspects of the compositional structure (especially "whirling" trichords) that Babbitt emphasizes on the musical surface. Moreover, by considering how the discourse surrounding baseball and serialism shifted during the 1980s—both were attacked for perpetuating conservative and patriarchal values, and both became codified symbols of arbitrary and meaningless signification—we might come to better understand how Babbitt conceived his musical aesthetics at the close of the century.

This article is, in several ways, about time. It argues that the "whirled" trichords and retrogrades that dominate the closing measures of Whirled Series might be interpreted as symbolic of baseball and serialism's timelessness and associated timeless values. And, following J. Peter Burkholder's claim that "composers in some sense recognize an analogy between historical and musical continuity and manipulate time and continuity in their music in order to argue for a particular interpretation of history and their...