Sporting Sounds: Relationships between Sport and Music edited by bateman, anthony and john bale

Bateman, Anthony and JohnBale, eds. Sporting Sounds: Relationships between Sport and Music. New York: Routledge, 2009, 247 pp., $49.95 paper.

This collection of fourteen essays explores the many relationships between sport and music. It is more about music in sport than about sport in music. It should interest anyone who recently became absorbed by the controversial use of the vuvuzela in the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa or by the spectacular ceremony that opened the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. It should also interest anyone engaged in the daily routines and rhythms of the treadmill. As the main title suggests, the essays are about the sounds or noises produced in the arena of sports: cheering, chanting, clapping, shouting, and shrieking. But, as the subtitle qualifies, the essays are much more about how from antiquity to today, music as an art has been used to motivate, pacify, and accompany those who participate in the organized events of football, cricket, golf, rugby, tennis, swimming, figure skating, and yoga. The main topic is the controlled use of music in the controlled arena of sport, despite recognition that without uncontrolled sounds of tension emanating from both players and spectators, the organized events would not be nearly so exciting. In the collection, the sports event means the total event, comprising the preparation and practice, the contest or activity, the award ceremony and celebration. Music has its part to play at every stage.

To focus on the common discipline of music and sport means that the essays inform us about the relation of sport to mass art, mass consumption, the politics of the spectacle, and participatory democracy. Some essays attend to what one might describe as the sports event in the age of technological reproducibility. But more focus on what has counted in the various different sports as suitable or fitting music. Should the music in figure skating competitions be secular, sacred, with or without words, and, if with words, then with words that are intelligible or familiar to the spectators? Should all genres be admitted: opera, movie sound tracks, symphonies, folk, pop, and punk? Should all modes, rhythms, beats, and dynamic ranges be admitted? When and by whom should national anthems be sung? Should athletes be allowed to carry personal playing devices? Do they enhance or distract players from their tasks? Questions like these cannot help but remind us of Plato's censorious considerations in the Republic and Laws and, then, of the highly complex codes of ritual and behavior that defined the Olympic Games from the beginning.

In sum, this collection addresses the connections between music and sport that pertain to social orders that aim to improve humanity by means of regulating both mind and soul. Accordingly, music's role in sport sometimes assumes an urgency of assessment comparable to that which results in the strict regulation of chemical stimulants. Music, like dope, enhances performance; what means of enhancement (ergogenic aids) are therefore admissible?

The essays comprising the collection are not written by philosophers, yet produce ample food, or, better, sport for thought. To relate sport to culinary issues returns us to Plato's Gorgias, where we find reasons for understanding why both food and sport have long been ostracized from civilizing, philosophical inquiry. The authors are aware that bringing sport into contact with music is one way to overcome the academic ostracizing of sport. To regard sport not as extracurricular but also as a suitable subject of the curriculum says as much about scholarly inquiry as about sport. Hence, the essays aim not only to be about their subject matter, but also to legitimate their inquiry as serious. However, there are complications involved therein bearing on the democratizing or expansion of the academy. Does bringing the Three Tenors into the World Cup give respectability to the sport event, or vice versa? On the whole, the authors are more concerned with the former part of the question than with the vice versa.

The authors range in expertise from psychology and psychophysics to sociology and cultural sports studies, from history to medicine, from musicology to literary studies. Although the essays are highly stimulating and extremely informative, there are pertinent issues that are not treated. For example, the essays do not consider issues of notation, as the editors say themselves, though there is a passing mention of Arnold Schoenberg's symbol system for his favorite sport, tennis. Nor do the essays consider music as itself sometimes a sport with contest or competition at its center. Nor is music treated as a performance art or as a medium that connects the corporeal dimension of sport so closely to the art of dance. Nor, finally, are the organized sports brought into theoretical relation to recent philosophical thinking about games, risk, fairness, luck, or chance, or to recent musicological thinking about improvisation and spontaneity. Again, the focus of the essays is much more on matters of discipline and control.

The opening three essays explore the testable or empirically verifiable psychophysical impact of music when it comes to stimulating, sedating, motivating, and pacifying performers before, during, and after the contest. The results of the testing are neither surprising nor unexpected, but, as the authors insist, they are at least reliable in ways that the results of previous testing have not been. To so test music is a relatively young science, we are told, and one that clearly contributes to the resurgence of positivistic, empirical aesthetic inquiry in the academy.

What the empirical essays show us a little, but the sociological and historical essays even more, is how far the emotions associated with musically enhanced sports are not the sustained, calm or quiet emotions that are traditionally recommended as a basis for sound aesthetic production or judgment. They tend to be more volatile, either priming or pacifying, associated as they are with events that are defined by the rewards and pride of victory, the aggression and drive of competitiveness, the shame of loss, and anxieties about competence. If the emotions are different by either degree or kind (“stronger, higher, faster”), so too are the judgments. Though sometimes attendant to beauty and form, they are more often focused on matters of fairness and appropriateness, according to the rules of the game, and on the excellence or lack thereof of the performance. To be a good sport and to be a good sportsperson, to excel without transgressing, to exert oneself to the utmost—all this defines the normative scope and the basis thereby to assess music's fit.

One may profitably read the essays as an enhancement of what Richard Shusterman has developed under the rubric of “somaesthetics,” where, however, the enhancement has everything to do with victory and defeat in competitive societies. Yet one must recognize also the moments when competitiveness is taken out of the sport to suit the emotional, cognitive, social, and metaphysical demands of, say, meditation.

Some of the essays address the interest composers and artists have had, since Homer, in putting music and sport together. A key essay for the collection, by Jeffrey Segrave, outlines the history of the Olympic Games with a focus given to the “Olympism” of the Enlightenment. “O Sport, You are Progress,” Coubertin wrote in his “Ode to Sport.” His essay also explains why Pietro Metastasio's text L’Olimpiade was set to music no fewer than fifty times over the course of a century. Other essays discuss or mention the many composers (Meyerbeer, Debussy, Sibelius, Satie, Honneger, Lambert, and Ives, to name but a few) who produced shorter and longer episodic, theatrical, and programmatic pieces about tennis, skating, gymnastics, golf, and football. Their motivations were many: to respond to the “clamor” of modern life, to help promote national identity and pride, to bring music into contact with the “popular” interests of the people, and to bring the people into the world of “high” modernism. Similarly, we are told about the many musicians who, with folk or popular songs, encouraged teams and fans to take the songs on as their own. Of course, the teams and fans also appropriated songs that had nothing to do with sports as such, but which suited the aims of the sport. These were songs sometimes associated with political protest or the inspirations of nation and religion: “Swing low, sweet chariot,”“Abide with me.” Over time, surfers acquired their own music, as cricketers their own calypso, as fans and hooligans their own “supporter rock.”

In addition to all this, we learn about the balls, bells, and whistles (the sports equipment) that have been used in modern musical works as “racket instruments,” so one might call them, to expand the domain of musical sound. The metaphorical interplay between music and sport is unlimited. We speak of breaking records in one arena and making records in another. Both have everything to do with timing: making time, keeping time, being in time. One essay titled “Anyone for tennis?” tells us that early concert halls were often erected out of earlier tennis halls or ballrooms. In general, despite the use of “sportif music” to serve modernist interests of a Gebrauchs, or community, music, the history goes back to, say, medieval tennis tournaments or renaissance canal races, where community identity and pride and the ceremonies of song were central to the enterprise.

The essays clearly raise all kinds of questions of relevance to philosophers of art: why do we speak of arenas and stadiums of sport but of institutions and worlds of art? Do the sports promote globalization in ways similar to the arts? Are they both subject to the same social modes of standardization? What is the impact on performance and spectatorship of watching sports events, as opera productions, on‐screen, in a cinema, or at home? What is gained or lost in matters of political or social deliberation if performers are separated from spectators, and spectators from each other? How much could a philosophy or aesthetic of sport tell us about leisure and entertainment? Though there are a few suggestive mentions of sport films, such as Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), one could take the inquiry much further to explore connections between music and sport, such as are exhibited in the “day at the races” in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964).

Gender is not a primary theme in the collection, although the question of masculinity is taken up by Malcolm Maclean in his essay on rugby union broadcasts in New Zealand. Jeffrey Hill's essay on the (British) sport event as commemoration and memorial explains why certain sports occupied so central a place in societies in the aftermath of the First World War. Henning Eichberg's Kierkegaard‐ and Bloch‐inspired essay explains why notions of aura, energy, and mood (Stimmung) defined the popular sports in Denmark. Although many essays focus on music's motivational power for producing national identity among the populace, they tend to shy away from explicit social critique. They could have explored further how sport and music share in channeling aggression or about the “suspect” political or social use to which both have been put in legitimating tyrannies of one sort or another. There is hardly a mention of the role of musically enhanced sports in the former Soviet Bloc (why Soviet athletes won so many gold medals) or the role of such in Nazism, as seen in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). However, in many of the essays, we are reminded how deeply political and national myths are founded on and in the arenas of both music and sport. As Segrave argues, music and sport are mass media and mediators of our contemporary myths as they were, without arguably the masses, in antiquity.

What this edited collection aims to do, it does well in form and content. But there is more to do: there is sport for more philosophical thought. The essays are well written. A useful extra bibliography is provided at the end; a concise introduction to the themes and a stimulating summary of the constituent essays are provided by the editors at the beginning.