Ty Cobb's classical, scientific approach to baseball both collided and cohabited with his irrational, almost transcendent abandon in the game.
These opposing forces in him gave me the key to composing the score: composition as collision.
This is most clearly heard in the ‘Variations on an Old Baptist Hymn’, where the earthy and crude Gospel vocals contrast with the contained eloquence of classical musicianship, and in the ‘Georgia Peach Rag’, where sunny moderato ragtime piano seems to be swallowed up by orchestral anarchy.