In a way, the idea for this piece is the confluence of two of my greatest life-long passions: music and baseball. Baseball played a significant role in my upbringing (my dad brags that the first sentence I ever spoke was “The Mets are pond scum.”), particularly in the form of a road trip I embarked upon with my dad, brother, and uncle in the summer of 1996. For two weeks, we lived out of our van and saw games in 10 different stadiums. Not only did this reinforce my admiration for the game, it piqued my interest in the grandeur, nuance, and often history that went into the architecture of each stadium.

However, this piece is not just a love letter to baseball stadiums: it is a reflection on their increasingly disposable nature and what that says about society. The title of the piece comes from a quote by an unknown source, and though I don’t remember who said it, its poignancy has stuck with me for years. We create these overwhelming, expensive structures and then convince ourselves that they need to be torn down and rebuilt every twenty years or so. Not only is this incredibly wasteful, it deprives future generations of lasting cultural legacies. Stadiums are not only intended to hold games and fans; they also absorb the events, memories, and history that unfolded within them. And we are destroying that.

Each of the nine movements in this piece depicts a different stadium that has been demolished. There are certain themes and motives that unite several movements as well as specific allusions to baseball (for example, the number “9” is central to several movements), but the music for each movement was crafted specifically to embody its corresponding stadium.

This album is a live recording of the debut performance of We Tear Down Our Coliseums on April 1, 2017 at Elmhurst College’s Mill Theater, and it includes other pieces performed at the concert.