'Baseball Music Project' goes on the road
By Rick Peterson
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2007
“I think there are only three things America
will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the
Constitution, jazz music, and baseball.”
— Gerald Early, American author
Long before Fred Sturm ’73 (pictured) became a maestro, he wanted to
be a major leaguer.
From his Little League days through his high school playing career, dreams
of being a professional baseball player filled his young head. Playing hooky
from school for a day each April to attend the Chicago Cubs home opener with
his dad was a de rigueur rite of spring.
His love of the game was no mere passing fancy. The “landscaping” for
one of his homes included a baseball diamond in the back yard for his kids.
And, thanks to WGN’s powerful
signal, he still makes a point of catching several dozen broadcasts of his
beloved Cubs each summer, proof of his loyalty, if not his high pain threshold.
However, his parents instilled more than just an early passion for baseball
in their son. Sturm’s father, a rabid Chicago Cubs fan who, as a kid
himself, practically lived at venerable Wrigley Field, also enjoyed a long
career as a cellist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His mother, always
a willing participant in the neighborhood kids’ softball games, was a
much sought-after radio/television studio singer. Together, they fueled his
interest in music as well as baseball, complete with a “no pop/rock music
allowed” house rule. Instead, he was raised on the sounds his parents
played at home.
“Baseball and music have intertwined throughout my life,” says
Sturm, the Kimberly Clark Professor of Music and director of jazz studies and
improvisational music at Lawrence.
“I remember my dad bringing home a test pressing of the now historic
Chicago Symphony recording of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” around
the time baseball first captivated me. Before long, I was imagining myself
hitting game-winning home runs for the Cubs with Respighi’s heroic finale
as my soundtrack.”
To Sturm’s disappointment, an ESPN SportsCenter-leading clip of him hitting
a game-winning homer never happened — at Wrigley, or any other major-
league stadium. But, in the ensuing years, he still managed to figuratively
knock more than his fair share “out of the park” in the recording
studio and on the performance stage. And this summer, as the cry of “PLAY
BALL” rings out in stadiums from coast to coast, his prowess will be
on full display as the Baseball Music Project (BMP) — a celebration of
America’s national pastime — barnstorms its way across America.
Part symphony concert, part musical American history lesson, part traveling
exhibition, and all labor of love, the BMP is the collaborative handiwork of
a handful of talented musicians whose collective unbridled enthusiasm for baseball
matches their virtuosity.
Featuring some of the greatest — and arguably obscure — music ever
written about baseball and a few of its defining heroes, the concert is being
performed by major symphony orchestras around the country. It incorporates
nostalgic, smile-inducing music with narration by Hall of Fame member Dave
Winfield and video about America’s game. The program includes a montage
tribute to the National Baseball
Hall of Fame, featuring images of all 278
inductees.
“Baseball is like church. Many attend
but few understand.”
— Leo Durocher, long-time baseball manager
The BMP endured an extended gestation, tracing its genesis to 1994, when Sturm,
then on the faculty at the Eastman School of Music, received a commission to
write a piece for a chamber group that was giving a guest performance with
the Rochester Philharmonic.
“We chose Fred because he’s such a gifted composer, be it jazz
or classical, and he has a
remarkable sense of timbre and lyricism in his writing,” says Robert
Thompson, then a member of the group Rhythm & Brass and an acquaintance
of Sturm’s. “And, like me, Fred’s also a huge baseball fan.”
The result was a nine-movement, baseball-themed opus titled “A Place
Where It Would Always Be Spring,” which featured narration by Wisconsin
native and former New York Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek. Sturm drew his
inspiration for the piece from prose and poetry compiled by a Lawrence classmate,
Paul Kitzke ’73, who researched writings about the places where baseball
is played. Much like a film composer addresses the score for a movie, Sturm
set Kitzke’s assemblage of words to music.
The work turned out to be a smash hit and wound up being performed around the
country. Thompson says he thought that was the end of it. Flash forward to
2003.
In the midst of a Google search one day, Thompson stumbled across a collection
of sheet music that the baseball Hall of Fame had acquired. It contained more
than 300 songs written about baseball.
“My jaw dropped,” says Thompson, a former music professor and CEO
of the world-renowned Universal Edition publishing company based in New York
and Vienna. “I thought there was only one song written about baseball: ‘Take
Me Out to the Ballgame.’”
He began investigating further, including a trip to the Library of Congress,
and to his amazement, he uncovered an unknown treasure trove of more than 1,000
songs written about baseball dating as far back as 1858.
“That was the light-bulb moment,” Thompson says. “I thought
to myself, ‘How did America miss this?’ The fact is that, next
to love, more songs have been written about baseball than any other subject.
Besides, when was the last time you heard a good golf song?”
He immediately shared his good fortune with Sturm, “the only person I
knew whose jaw would drop as well.” The two soon began brainstorming,
eventually bringing on board an old friend of Sturm’s, Maury Laws, a
New York and London-based film composer and orchestral arranger who retired
to Appleton in the 1980s. Using Sturm’s original concept of an orchestral
work with a narrator, the project began to take shape.
Early in the collaboration, Sturm suggested adding Rob Hudson ’87, an
archivist at Carnegie Hall, to the creative team. Thompson and Hudson quickly
established rapport with the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., securing
access to the Hall’s famed Steele Music Collection, the world’s
largest repository of baseball-related music.
Donning curators’ white gloves, Sturm, Thompson, and Hudson giddily found
themselves rummaging through baseball’s musical version of nirvana. They
pored over the entire collection of manuscripts, sheet music, and old scores,
searching for works that would be of both historical and musical interest.
“Bob scanned the titles and lyrics looking for unique subject matter,
while Rob and I studied the melodies and harmonies,” says Sturm. “Most
of the selections from the late 1800s sounded like bad Stephen Foster and much
of the early 20th-century stuff sounded like bad Gilbert and Sullivan, but
we found our share of hidden gems.
“It was fascinating to study the evolution of the song subjects, the
lyrics, and the cover art, especially the late 19th-century examples,” Sturm
adds. “Many of the tunes lionized specific teams and players with larger-than-life
attributes. The most remarkable thing we came across was the original
manuscript for ‘The Baseball Polka,’ which was composed three years
before the Civil War.”
Along the way, the trio of music hunters found the original manuscripts for
two of Mrs. Lou Gehrig’s compositions, one of which was titled “I
Can’t Get to First Base With You.” (Lou Gehrig was the legendary “ironman” first
baseman of the New York Yankees.) They also discovered John Phillip Sousa’s “National
Game” march and dozens of tunes composed in honor of Babe Ruth.
”We desperately hoped we’d be able to find a worthy musical tribute
to the Bambino for the show, but we never unearthed one,” says a wistful
Sturm.
During the investigative phase, they listened to hundreds of recordings, from
orchestral tone poems to ragtime, jazz, country, and pop.
“I was thrilled to find some fine jazz renditions, including Count Basie’s
recording of ‘Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?’ and Les
Brown’s ‘Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,’” says Sturm.
“We
came across an hilarious Broadway-like tune called ‘Let’s Keep
the Dodgers in Brooklyn.’ I knocked the dust off of one of my old
favorites by jazz composer Dave Frishberg, a tune called ‘Van Lingle
Mungo’ that uses the names of obscure baseball players exclusively for
its lyrics.”
“All I remember about my wedding day in
1967 is that the Cubs lost a double-header.”
— George Will, Washington Post columnist
From the thousands of choices, Sturm and Thompson culled 14 pieces for what
would become the concert program. Forrest “Woody” Mankowski, a
noted commercial singer who spent six years teaching saxophone in the Lawrence
Conservatory of Music, was hired as the program’s male soloist. Misty
Castleberry, a graduate of the Eastman School, who happens to be Sturm’s
daughter-in-law, won an open audition in New York City as the program’s
female lead.
The program opens appropriately enough with “Star Spangled Banner,” one
of seven pieces in the program Laws updated with a new arrangement.
“I had to decide how ‘period’ I wanted the music to sound,” says
Laws, perhaps best known as the musical director of the animated television
Christmas classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” “To present
it as originally performed could be boring and a big waste of the beautiful
orchestras we would be using, but we also didn’t want to update it to
the point where we lost the historical value of the music. My intent was
to make the songs interesting for the audience as well as the singers, while
retaining some of the flavor and spirit of the times when they were composed.
“Occasionally I felt as though I was back in time a hundred or more
years,” Laws says. “Following the game of baseball through history
was interesting and, at times, a lot of fun.”
The tour de force of the concert, insists Thompson, is Sturm’s “Forever
Spring,” a 16-minute revised version of his original “A Place Where
It Would Always Be Spring.” For the BMP, Sturm deleted old sections,
composed new ones, and completely re-orchestrated it.
“The piece is so visceral, so powerful, and evokes such reverence and
emotion for the sport, you simply have to hear it,” said Thompson, who
serves as musical director of the BMP.
“Audiences love it, and truth
be told, it’s a great piece of music. It will be in the orchestral
repertoire for many years. Someone will write their Ph.D. dissertation on the
piece someday.”
Extending the original film metaphor of “Forever Spring,” Sturm’s
daughter, Madeline, creative director for Boom Design Group in Brooklyn and
a former high school softball standout in her own right, compiled and designed
all of the visual imagery shown during the BMP concerts.
“I got choked up when I saw Maddy’s artistic work in conjunction
with “Forever Spring” for the first time. She so perfectly captured
what I had imagined while composing it,” says Sturm. “There’s
one scene in which she transforms the baseball diamond in an old black-and-white
photo to a lush green and brown. It takes your breath away.”
The “game plan” was to launch the BMP in April 2005 at Washington,
D.C.’s Kennedy Center, complete with self-proclaimed baseball fan George
W. Bush and NBC newsman Tim Russert serving as narrators. But, only weeks before
its debut, Congressional hearings on the use of steroids in baseball cast a
dark cloud over the game and several of its highest-profile stars. The scandal
sent sponsors scurrying, the White House got cold feet, and the program’s
plug was pulled.
“I got stuck with a $13,000 hotel bill from the Watergate because we
had booked the rooms,” says Thompson, who once received two crisp $100
bills from George Steinbrenner for playing trumpet at the Yankees owner’s
daughter’s wedding. “Up until that time, if someone mentioned ‘Watergate
Hotel,’ I’d
immediately think Nixon. Now whenever I hear ‘Watergate Hotel,’ I
think about baseball and steroids.”
The cancellation allowed Sturm and Thompson to fine-tune the project, which
eventually made its debut last March with a trial run in Bakersfield, Calif.
In July 2006, it made a splash with Thompson conducting three performances
of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, followed shortly by a performance by the
Houston Symphony.
Coinciding with the start of the 2007 baseball season, Thompson conducted spring
concert performances in Phoenix, Indianapolis, Detroit, and Miami. The program
visits Chicago for a July 29 engagement with the famed Ravinia Festival Orchestra
and is scheduled to come to the Peforming Arts Center in Appleton in May 2008.
(For up-to-date scheduling of all BMP performances, visit www.baseballmusicproject.com.)
“Fred was born to compose and arrange the music for this project,” Thompson
says. “He brought about this one-of-a-kind synthesis of all things musical
and all things baseball. It would never have the essence that it does
without Fred.”
“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve
tried all the major religions
and most of the minor ones. And
the only church that truly feeds the soul,
day-in day-out, is the Church of Baseball.”
— Susan Sarandon as Annie Savoy in Bull Durham
John Philip Sousa once declared that the way to witness American democracy
at its finest was with a trip to the ballpark.
“Of what avail is distinguished ancestry, pre-Adamite origin, cerulean
blood, or stainless escutcheon when one is at the bat and strikes out!,” Sousa
wrote. “Intellectual superiority, physical perfection, social status,
wealth, or poverty count for nothing, if you fail to bring in the winning run.”
Baseball, as Thompson sees it, is uniquely literary and musical. “It
allows for time, cadence, and nuance, which are inherent in both art forms.
And it is an emotional connection that we Americans have to this sport that
no other sport, be it soccer, basketball, or football, can match. It
is our ‘national pastime.’ It defines who we are as a country,
and there is something inherently beautiful and lyrical in that.”
Sturm and Thompson are counting on the BMP living a long life. Purposely designed
to be largely timeless — with room to incorporate aspects of Hollywood’s
next great baseball movie — they envision bringing both baseball heroes
and the program’s music to every American community that supports both
a professional baseball team and a symphony orchestra.
“Musicians joke about wives dragging reluctant husbands to symphony concerts,
but at our BMP concerts, we see a lot of guys who don’t fit the typical
male concertgoer stereotype,” says Sturm. “It’s the jocks
and sports enthusiasts who don’t budge from their seats at intermission
when we show the photographs of all
278 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. These
are the guys who tear up when they hear the music from Field
of Dreams and
remember playing catch with their fathers when they were kids. It’s
that constituency that we hope to reach in every community hosting the BMP.”
“The ultimate goal of this project is to build a sense of community between
the sports and the arts, to bring Cooperstown to the concert hall and to leave
a town in better spirits then when we arrived,” adds Thompson.
In 2008, arguably baseball’s most iconic song, “Take Me Out to
the Ballgame” — written, ironically, by a man who had never seen
a baseball game — turns 100 years old. Expect the Baseball Music Project
to foster celebration of that popular American classic all over the country.
SIDEBARS
A Son’s Tribute
When Fred Sturm’s father passed away in 1995, Fred and his brother made
a pilgrimage to Chicago’s Wrigley Field, one of their dad’s favorite
places as a kid. The Cubs were playing out of town that day, and the stadium
was closed. The two brothers walked quietly around the ballpark’s
perimeter and discovered a gate to the right-field entrance unlocked.
“There were two groundskeepers on the premises, and we told them that
we were there as a tribute to our father,” Sturm says. “They welcomed
us onto the playing field, handed us two new baseballs, and invited us to play
catch out in center field. I sat in the dugout on the Cubs’ bench
and kicked the water cooler. Unforgettable.”
The next day, while sorting through his father’s belongings, Sturm came
across a copy of the score of his composition “Forever Spring.”
“It was on my father’s desk, right next to the old umpire’s
counter he used at my Little League games. Now, whenever I hear the piece in
concert, I picture the two of us in an endless game of catch. It’s dedicated
to my dad.”
A Towering Teddy Bear
At six-foot-five, Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield casts an imposing figure
as the Baseball Music Project’s narrator, but according to music director
Bob Thompson, he’s really just 77 inches of teddy bear.
“Dave is one of the most gracious, humble, and sincere people I’ve
ever met, says Thompson. “Few people realize he’s one of the game’s
princes, one of the first in baseball to start a charity, one of the heroes
who has used his stature and fame to help those less fortunate.”
Just before the BMP’s debut performance last March in Bakersfield, Calif.,
Winfield confessed to a touch of nervousness.
“I looked at him and said, ‘you’re the guy who got the clutch
double to win the 1992 World
Series for Toronto that millions of people watched live on television and now
you’re nervous about standing in front of an orchestra?”
“He replied, ‘Yeah, but in baseball, if you strike out, you go
back to the dugout. If I strike out on stage, I’ve got to stand
there in the batter’s box in front of everybody for the next two hours!’”
A Yankee Legend Lends a Helping Hand
The Baseball Music Project is rife with Appleton/Lawrence connections in addition
to Fred Sturm, Maury Laws, and Woody Mankowski. The first narrator of Sturm’s
original “A Place Where It Would Always Be Spring” (revised for
the BMP as “Forever Spring”) was Tony Kubek, the 1957 American
League Rookie of the Year, shortstop for the 1961 World Series champion New
York Yankees, and long-time NBC “Game of the Week” sportscaster. Kubek
has been an Appleton resident for many years, and three of his children attended
Lawrence.
Kubek helped open several important doors for the BMP, including introducing
Sturm’s recording to Jeff Idelson, the vice president of communications
and education for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Before the BMP came about, Kubek
once drove to Milwaukee just to play “A Place Where It Would Always Be
Spring “ for Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig. In 1995,
just weeks before Yankee legend Mickey Mantle died, Kubek paid a visit to his
hospital room, where he played the recording for “the Mick.”
Kubek’s son, Tony ’85, who lives in Appleton and is an avid music
fan, is currently producing
a film about the 1961 Yankees infield. Sturm is assisting him with the
film’s musical score.