30-second time-out

While football is winning the war for the hearts and minds of American fans, the pigskin doesn’t seem to elicit the same lyrical fanaticism (“Super Bowl Shuffle” notwithstanding) that baseball does. Composers of all stripes have spilled tons of ink expressing their devotion to America’s pastime. Robert Thompson, founder and conductor of the Baseball Music Project has been barnstorming through the country and stops off at Ravinia Sunday 29. He’s sifted through more than 1,000 songs (dating back to J.R. Blodgett’s 1858 hit, “The Baseball Polka”) to bring concertgoers a two-hour multimedia presentation featuring 16 of the choicest cuts paired with 2,000 images of the game’s great players projected onto a giant screen.

Was it laborious to sort through all that music?
The whole thing took about three years, but it really was a labor of love. There was a group of us in the music industry who just had this love of baseball and love of music. There’s a lot of music written. Unfortunately, 99 percent of it is not that great. There’s a lot of fan-inspired compositions about baseball, but there are some real, real gems. Like in 1889 there was a song called “Slide, Kelly, Slide” about Michael “King” Kelly, and it was the number-one hit in 1889.

Is there much in the way of contemporary music featured?
Yeah, actually there’s a work by a composer from Wisconsin, Fred Stern, called “Forever Spring,” which is a contemporary orchestral composition that was commissioned by the Rochester Philharmonic. It’s a nine-movement work, and each movement is based on a particular text of writing of a particular author. It’s an inspiring ode to the ideals of baseball, a 20-minute tour de force that starts the second half [of the concert]. There’s been some newer compositions, but I don’t know if the Chicago Symphony is going to be commissioning composers to write works about baseball—but, well, they should.

How was the idea hatched?
I had baseball and music in my childhood, and I was always looking for a way to combine the two. About four years ago, I was listening to a radio broadcast of a ball game and I heard this announcer say, “The pitcher’s giving a little ‘chin music.’?” I didn’t know what chin music [when a pitcher hurls one close to the batter’s face in an attempt to intimidate the hitter]  was. I Googled that and I came across a link to the Baseball Hall of Fame’s website, which said that they had acquired this collection of sheet music about baseball. I knew nothing about this, and I’m thinking, Wait a minute, how did I miss this? I started researching and went to the Library of Congress, I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and I just uncovered this sort of never-ending treasure trove of music about our national game. I thought, This is just too good to let this stuff pass. Most of it had never been performed. I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to bring all this to fruition? So I got a group of arrangers together and got to work with the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it’s just been a wonderful experience. But it took a long, long time to finally get it off the ground.

Any special gems for Chicago’s baseball fans?
We’ve got quite a bit of Chicago-specific imagery in the show, but one of the things fans might be interested in is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” because it’s really Harry Caray who brought that to prominence. The reason [that song] is sung in ballparks goes back to Bill Veeck and Harry Caray. It wasn’t until Harry Caray came along and started singing the song that [it became popular]. It’s become the third most sung song in America behind “Happy Birthday” and the national anthem. It’s really a Chicago story thanks to Harry Caray singing it at Sox and Cubs games. The guys that wrote it, Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, had never been to a game. Most people don’t know that the song is actually about a girl. There’s a verse to the song which nobody knows, but we do teach everybody at the concert, and it’s the story about a girl named Katie Casey. She doesn’t want her beau to take her to fine restaurants or symphony orchestra concerts, she wants him to take her out to a ball game.—Tim McCormick

The Baseball Music Project strings for the fences Sunday 29.