Take Me Out to the Ball Game: Stadium Chamber Music & Sam Beckett at the ‘Organ’

T    ext to #24609 ...

A) Buxtehude Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne BuxWV 137
B) Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor BWV 565
C) Laurin Prelude and Fugue in F Minor 44.”
  —  Jumbotron.

S    am Beckett plays the organ at Kauffman Stadium. Nine innings a game; eighty (or so) games a year. ‘Charge’ and ‘Mexican Hat Dance’ and a little bit of Usher. When the pitching coach is talking the pitcher down, maybe Beckett will play ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ with two-handed jazz chords. When the first baseman hulks into the box, maybe a crazy ‘Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh...Batman!’ Everything is played live, including the grace notes after a crisp double play and the percussive tap-tap-taptaptaps that make you clap without thinking, along with the thousands of people around you.”
  —  Alan Scherstuhl, The Pitch, 10-JUN-2004.

T    here’s a rhythm to it some find boring, but I don’t need to fill every hole. There’s enough jock-jam music and advertising [in sports stadia—] already. I want to do something tasteful that gets people tapping their toes, enjoying it... It’s the fabric of the ballgame... it’s the froth on the cappuccino. It’s like ice cream and apple pie. Breyer’s vanilla ice cream, with homemade apple pie.”
  —  Kansas City Royals’ keyboardist Sam Beckett, interview by Alan Scherstuhl, The Pitch, 10-JUN-2004.

I  t’s cool to figure out what song Sam Beckett just played a bar or two of, in—What the heck?!?—some sort of obscure salsa beat... Some wry, permuted musical allusion—a tongue-in-cheek innuendo as to what just happened on the ballfield. And it’s great that, in an era where opera orchestras are being subbed by recordings and electronics, live keyboardists are still employed in professional sports stadiums in this country. Great, too, that artists like Sam Beckett have such fun, impromptu senses of humor. More than ‘miniatures’, these are micro, nano, pico, femto, atto pieces... 2 or 3 bars long at most. Six seconds, tops. Tiny, improvised ‘chamber music’ in a very, very big chamber...

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