Professor Timothy Johnson (Department of Music Theory, History, and Composition) has published "Music and Baseball Talks at Cooperstown" in Oxford Handbooks Online. This article also will appear in print as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, ed. J. Daniel Jenkins, in summer of 2022.
Timothy Johnson Publishes Baseball-Music Article
By Timothy Johnson, November 16, 2021
Professor Johnson at Wrigley Field in Chicago
This chapter summarizes Prof. Johnson's seven public music theory presentations at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Topics include Charles Ives’s sketches and completed music about baseball and ballplayers, the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a seminar that he taught in the Washington Program at IC on historical and contemporary baseball music, Casey at the Bat for band and narrator (which he narrated with the Concert Band at IC), major league walk-up and entrance music, and branding ball clubs through music. Johnson describes ways to draw musical meaning from music analysis as an example of a fulfilling way for music theorists to connect their work with public audiences through engagement with music from specific social and cultural contexts. These approaches involve both concert music and contemporary popular music and include music that illustrates or celebrates baseball situations as well as music heard at ballparks.