Take the Orchestra Out to the Ballgame
for Narrator and Mixed Quintet or Orchestra

PROGRAM NOTES
In the early 2000's, I received several commissions from the Philadelphia Orchestra's education department to compose works for their "Sound All Around" series for young listeners. Led and narrated by Charlotte Blake Alston, these events featured members of the orchestra in chamber concerts, and in 2006 the selected musicians happened to be the managers of the orchestra's softball team, the Philadelphia Firebirds. (Yes, they did play against other orchestras' teams.)

For many of these pieces, I started with a familiar children's song both to tell a story and to allow variations, to introduce how music can conjure moods. With that season's players, I just had to make a story about the orchestra's softball team, so I used the familiar song for theme and variations.

The story's episodes lead the musicians through introducing the melody and then repeating it with stylized variations for xylophone, trumpet, string bass, English horn, and the whole ensemble.

Several years later, I adapted the piece for orchestra, keeping the same featured instrumental soloists as in the original version. The narrator's script is planned for any orchestra's own baseball team to play against their local team.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
To warm up the audience, the narrator may talk about "variations on a theme" as a familiar way to build a piece of music. The variations in this piece change mood a lot, and sometime distort the melody a lot, but it is always clear where the "1, 2, 3 Strikes You’re Out!" line is. This is a great tool in helping listeners follow each variation.

The narrator may precede the piece by training the audience to yell 1, 2, 3, while successively holding up 1, 2, and 3 fingers, and then training them to make the same hand signs emphatically but quietly, without saying a word. Then tell them that in the music they’re about to hear, they’ll get to silently hold up 1, 2, 3 a lot of times. While the printed script takes place around the Philadelphia Orchestra visiting the Phillies, it is easy to adapt to any other location’s orchestra and baseball team.