‘Pastime Variations’ was commissioned by a chamber orchestra called the Haydn and Mozart Orchestra. They had a concert hall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which they wanted me to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the destruction of Ebbets field. For people in Brooklyn this was a monument: where the Brooklyn Dodgers played, where Jackie Robinson first played in the white major leagues here, where Babe Ruth played and also coached. This was the most amazing neighborhood stadium, like Wrigley Field in Chicago. Somewhere around twenty-five years ago they sold the Dodgers to California, to L.A., and the people in Brooklyn were left high and dry with no stadium. If you go there today you’ll see an awful apartment complex for the poor and there’s a sign on the front lawn that says, “No ball-playing on the grass.” It all seemed so devastating to me that I wanted to write this elegy called ‘Pastime Variations’, which was a backwards variation based on ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ until the very end. It starts as a twelve-tone treatment and you have no idea what you’re hearing until it slowly morphs itself into the tune that we all sing every seventh inning across America.