On Sports Journalism and baseball, On Mastery and Teamwork:
Or how our innate need for excellence and for human connection can lead us to peak choral performance (maybe)
Before the ESPNing-dumbing down of sports journalism and before the sports section became more like the business section (Player X signs four-year $500m contract: Billionaire Oligarch Team Owner Y suckers citizens of City Z into paying for a $5 billion dollar stadium, etc. etc.), there used to be great sports writing in newspapers by skilled wordsmiths who just happened to love sports. Names like George Vecsey, William Rhoden, Ira Berkow, Frank Litsky and Gail Collins, come to mind, just to mention just a few.
Nonetheless, recently there was a brilliant column in the Times by Brad Stulberg celebrating the hard to fathom achievement this year by LA Dodger player Shohei Ohtani who hit 53 home runs and stole 56 bases in a single season! Just wrap your head around the idea of a player who combines the power to hit balls out of the park like Babe Ruth with the explosive speed of a Lou Brock. And he made it look easy because of his hard-earned mastery.
Stulberg went on to reflect on the idea of how we can be “inspired by” an achievement such as Ohtani’s and springboard from it to an “inspired to” feeling, transforming awe into an energy that can push us to aspire to our best possible selves.
But as always, the devil is in the details, because mastery of any kind does not just happen. It requires infinite amounts of hard, focused work over long periods of time. Sure, some folks have won the lottery talentwise (luck or chance plays a huge role in everyone’s success or lack thereof; consider a fertilized human embryo, it is the result of the random singular mating of one each of 400+/- eggs with 100 million +/- spermatozoa, which makes the odds of any of the masters of the universe out there existing about 1 in 40 billion! Which when you think about it applies to Ohtani or Mozart or me or you.)
The other idea that Stulberg plays with is the concept of “self-determination theory,” the idea that the pursuit and achievement of mastery–the positive energy we all feel when we make progress at something through practice–is one of the essential human needs, not exactly up there with food, shelter etc., but nonetheless critical to our intellectual well-being. Here is where the practice of singing in a choir comes into play. Choir is essentially a team sport, take you pick which one. Ohtani’s achievement did not happen in a vacuum, he and all the players around him practiced alone and together for untold amounts of time to achieve the team mastery that allowed Ohtani the opportunity to achieve his ultimate potential.
What is most interesting about the concept of “self-determination” is that beyond our natural gravitation towards those who possess mastery, there is a connection between our work towards mastery and our connection with others, which is to say, when we are mastering something in a group, say in The Bagaduce Chorale, we are participating in something larger than ourselves, we are in communion with the music director, with the singers around us, and even with the singers and composers who have come before us who created the foundational structure of what choral singing is and what it can be.
Ah, but back to those devilish details! In my last blog I spoke about our Music Director’s awareness of and appreciation for “The Gap”, that distance between what we as a singer and a choir sound like and what we imagine we could or should sound like. Hard work, both as individuals and as a group, slowly moves us across the yawning crevasse of learning. Curiously, going down some dusty rabbit holes a while ago, I stumbled across more thoughts on “The Gap” by Ira Glass which captured some of the struggles we go through trying to reach the other side of the crevasse. He talks about how our “good taste”, that is our appreciation for things of great beauty, leaves us always so disappointed in our own efforts at excellence. This seemingly unclosable gap between the art we produce and that which we imagine we could produce (our cursed “good taste”!) can be frustrating, even stifling, if we allow it to be so.
But, this writer at least, finds solace in the mathematical conception of infinite regression, the idea that you can never actually get to the point of zero by fractions, that you can never get back to the beginning of the universe, that, perhaps, we humans can never achieve ultimate perfection. But we can come darn close! Ohtani did, Mozart did, dare I say Morten Lauridsen did!
They say the more you put into love, the more you get out of it. Singing in a choir is exactly the same and as we reach the point in our rehearsals where we all begin to smell the possibility of mastery like hounds in hot pursuit, we are pulled collectively with thrilling steps across that icy crevasse, that gap between practice and mastery, toward the glittering icy castle of sublime sound echoing on the dazzling sun-illuminated glacier above us.
Oh, and by the way, case you were wondering, the Dodgers masterfully mastered the Yankees 4 games to 1 in October. Bummer!
Or how our innate need for excellence and for human connection can lead us to peak choral performance (maybe)
Before the ESPNing-dumbing down of sports journalism and before the sports section became more like the business section (Player X signs four-year $500m contract: Billionaire Oligarch Team Owner Y suckers citizens of City Z into paying for a $5 billion dollar stadium, etc. etc.), there used to be great sports writing in newspapers by skilled wordsmiths who just happened to love sports. Names like George Vecsey, William Rhoden, Ira Berkow, Frank Litsky and Gail Collins, come to mind, just to mention just a few.
Nonetheless, recently there was a brilliant column in the Times by Brad Stulberg celebrating the hard to fathom achievement this year by LA Dodger player Shohei Ohtani who hit 53 home runs and stole 56 bases in a single season! Just wrap your head around the idea of a player who combines the power to hit balls out of the park like Babe Ruth with the explosive speed of a Lou Brock. And he made it look easy because of his hard-earned mastery.
Stulberg went on to reflect on the idea of how we can be “inspired by” an achievement such as Ohtani’s and springboard from it to an “inspired to” feeling, transforming awe into an energy that can push us to aspire to our best possible selves.
But as always, the devil is in the details, because mastery of any kind does not just happen. It requires infinite amounts of hard, focused work over long periods of time. Sure, some folks have won the lottery talentwise (luck or chance plays a huge role in everyone’s success or lack thereof; consider a fertilized human embryo, it is the result of the random singular mating of one each of 400+/- eggs with 100 million +/- spermatozoa, which makes the odds of any of the masters of the universe out there existing about 1 in 40 billion! Which when you think about it applies to Ohtani or Mozart or me or you.)
The other idea that Stulberg plays with is the concept of “self-determination theory,” the idea that the pursuit and achievement of mastery–the positive energy we all feel when we make progress at something through practice–is one of the essential human needs, not exactly up there with food, shelter etc., but nonetheless critical to our intellectual well-being. Here is where the practice of singing in a choir comes into play. Choir is essentially a team sport, take you pick which one. Ohtani’s achievement did not happen in a vacuum, he and all the players around him practiced alone and together for untold amounts of time to achieve the team mastery that allowed Ohtani the opportunity to achieve his ultimate potential.
What is most interesting about the concept of “self-determination” is that beyond our natural gravitation towards those who possess mastery, there is a connection between our work towards mastery and our connection with others, which is to say, when we are mastering something in a group, say in The Bagaduce Chorale, we are participating in something larger than ourselves, we are in communion with the music director, with the singers around us, and even with the singers and composers who have come before us who created the foundational structure of what choral singing is and what it can be.
Ah, but back to those devilish details! In my last blog I spoke about our Music Director’s awareness of and appreciation for “The Gap”, that distance between what we as a singer and a choir sound like and what we imagine we could or should sound like. Hard work, both as individuals and as a group, slowly moves us across the yawning crevasse of learning. Curiously, going down some dusty rabbit holes a while ago, I stumbled across more thoughts on “The Gap” by Ira Glass which captured some of the struggles we go through trying to reach the other side of the crevasse. He talks about how our “good taste”, that is our appreciation for things of great beauty, leaves us always so disappointed in our own efforts at excellence. This seemingly unclosable gap between the art we produce and that which we imagine we could produce (our cursed “good taste”!) can be frustrating, even stifling, if we allow it to be so.
But, this writer at least, finds solace in the mathematical conception of infinite regression, the idea that you can never actually get to the point of zero by fractions, that you can never get back to the beginning of the universe, that, perhaps, we humans can never achieve ultimate perfection. But we can come darn close! Ohtani did, Mozart did, dare I say Morten Lauridsen did!
They say the more you put into love, the more you get out of it. Singing in a choir is exactly the same and as we reach the point in our rehearsals where we all begin to smell the possibility of mastery like hounds in hot pursuit, we are pulled collectively with thrilling steps across that icy crevasse, that gap between practice and mastery, toward the glittering icy castle of sublime sound echoing on the dazzling sun-illuminated glacier above us.
Oh, and by the way, case you were wondering, the Dodgers masterfully mastered the Yankees 4 games to 1 in October. Bummer!
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