SABR 35 - Charles Ives's Musical Depictions of Johnny Evers, Mike Donlin, and Wee Willie Keeler (Research Presentation)
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| By The SABR Office |
Charles Ives's Musical Depictions of Johnny Evers, Mike Donlin, and Wee Willie Keeler
Timothy A. Johnson
King II
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the distinctive American composer, Charles Ives, wrote several musical sketches that feature major league baseball players. Ives, who is widely viewed as the “father of American music,” was an avid ballplayer in his youth. Shortly after arriving in New York as a young businessman, Ives began to attend major league baseball games with friends, and he recorded his observations about certain ballplayers in a series of unfinished musical compositions. The presentation will describe how the music reflects the textual descriptions Ives provided next to his musical notation (between staves and in the margins), tied to profiles of the major leaguers Ives immortalized through his music. Photographs and facsimiles of the original manuscripts will illustrate this presentation. The presentation will provide a unique view into the interests of a baseball fan from a century ago—the sort of ballplayers and the aspects of the game that captured this baseball fan’s interest. Few, if any, accounts of baseball fans survive from this era, or perhaps were even written down. But Ives offers the musical equivalent of “notes on the back of an envelope” regarding his experiences as a spectator at the Polo Grounds and Hilltop Park.
TIMOTHY A. JOHNSON is Associate Professor of Music at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and in 2005-2006 he will serve as Visiting Frederick and Alice Slee Professor of Music Theory at the University at Buffalo (the oldest endowed chair in the field of music theory). His most recent book, Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground (Scarecrow Press), won this year’s Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award.
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| | Created On: 2005-07-12 |
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Page Link: http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,1333,17,0
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