Last Saturday, my wife and I saw “One of America’s Boldest Orchestras” perform Haydn’s The Creation.
It was a deeply moving experience which, on its surface, doesn’t really relate to basketball, but please bear with me here—I’ve already borrowed from Carly Simon and Sly and the Family Stone, so let’s spend some time with Papa Haydn as well.
I want to take a deep dive into the first part of the first movement of The Creation, and relate it to the Celtics’ season, and to what I hope the playoffs develop
into.
The Creation starts off with a section called “Depiction of Chaos,” but it’s not really chaos. It’s chaos as framed by an 18th Century composer who was deeply embedded in the classical movement.
What you are treated to is about five and a half minutes of various orchestral groups each doing their own thing—but never quite out of step with the other groups. A pair of triplets by one of the bassoons is followed by a similar run from the violas in one spot. At another point, all the instruments combine for a sextuplet of sixteenth notes.
That there is a deeper order is evident by the fact that we hear this section as a unified whole. It is not as disordered as the sound of an orchestra warming up, when there truly is no connection between any segment of the orchestra or even, often, among players of the same instruments.
For the Celtics, the 2025/26 season started off chaotically. No fewer than five key pieces of the previous season’s team were lost to injury (Tatum), trades (Porzingis, Holiday), or free agency (Kornet, Horford). Certainly, there was just cause to look at the C’s depleted roster coming into the season as Brad Stevens’ own “Depiction of Chaos.” Yet, like Haydn’s chaos, there was a deeper order in place. With seemingly everyone outside the team talking about a ‘gap year,’ the team itself was determined to succeed. The coaching staff was prepared to do what it took to win, regardless of how crazy such a notion seemed at the time.
In the same way that this first part of The Creation has the feel of a great composer pushing the boundaries of what he, near the end of a long and prolific career, had come to know, much of this season has had the feel of exploration, as the Celtics have plumbed the depth of their bench and Joe Mazzulla has given a variety of young and inexperienced players opportunities to shine and to demonstrate how they fit within the organization. Like Haydn, Mazzulla has been largely successful in his efforts.
Yet there has definitely been a superficial feeling of chaos as well, as players have gone from significant minutes to the end of the rotation and back. Ron Harper Jr. played 33 minutes against the Spurs, then twelve minutes against Oklahoma City in the next game, and by the third game, he was down to just a minute and a half—and this game was against Washington. Paradoxically, the game against the Wizards is the one where you’d expect an end-of-the-bench guy to log the most minutes.
For the players themselves, this must have been, in some ways, deeply disorienting. You can lose your way in the chaos of The Creation. There are few signposts that let you know where you’re at and where you’ve come from, and there are few clues about where you’re going.
The strings are dominant in The Creation, but this is typical for much of what is known as the Common Practice Period—call them the orchestra’s ‘starting lineup.’
Outside the strings are a wide variety of instruments that take varying roles of prominence at different points of time during the composition, and this, indeed, is typical of many composers.
An instrument may play a prominent role in one movement, or in part of one movement, only to fade into the background in the next movement. The Creation calls for a third flute for just a few minutes in a piece that can run close to two hours in length.
In orchestral works, some instruments have stereotypically limited or simple roles to play. One does not, for example, find many melodies written for contrabasses.
But these instrument players understand that even though their parts may be relatively small or out of the limelight, they are essential to the success of the whole.
Joe Mazzulla has managed to instill a similar mindset in the Celtics’ bench. Every player on the team has something to contribute, and at the right moment, they are ready to contribute.
The notion of “Stay Ready” fits with orchestra players who have to mind lengthy rests between parts. As small as their upcoming part may be, these performers know that it is essential that they come in right on time with the right notes, at the right tempo and at the right volume. They, too, have to “Stay Ready.”
In the chaos section of The Creation Haydn is making a new kind of music. He was striving to create a different sound and was anticipating developments that would take the better part of a century to fully realize. So, too, the Celtics are experimenting with a new way of building a team. Now that the punitive second apron and tax regimes have made it impossible to hold together a championship team constructed the way Boston’s 2023-24 team was, new methods need to be explored. In this new era, teams may need to spend more time developing young players, something the Celtics have excelled at, and they may need to depend more on their bench.
But eventually the experimentation with chaos in The Creation ends.
A recitative part sung by the bass soloist goes over the first few verses of Genesis, and everything pauses as God says “Let there be light”—here a little pizzicato ‘plink’ comes from the assembled strings. Presently the chorus starts to softly sing “and there was…”
Then the magic happens. The wandering orchestra that had gone in several different directions during the ‘Representation of Chaos’ section comes together on the word “light” in a fortissimo (i.e. “very loud”) C-major chord that is partitioned out among every instrument available, including the timpani which pound a thundering bass that underpins a moment that should send shivers up the spine of anyone with a pulse.
This is that moment for the Celtics. The games coming up are a time for the team to come together and make a statement in fortissimo, to put an unforgettable coda onto a season that began in chaos.
