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August 29, 2008
Brian Langsbard
“If you think about it, baseball is the only major sport that really has its own theme song,” points out LA-based composer Brian Langsbard, who provided the music for the opening ceremony of the 79th Annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which aired July 15 on Fox. Langsbard, 36, is, of course, referring to the early-20th century Tin Pan Alley song, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” a song that has made its way into the history books as the unofficial anthem of baseball.
Musically speaking, baseball has come a long way since that vaudevillian Tin Pan Alley crowd pleaser and Langsbard is one of the pioneering forces behind establishing baseball’s 21st century sound.
Using an orchestral palette, Langsbard produces pre-generated cues written specifically for the game on his Mac Pro and then uses the cues to score the on-field events in real time.
“There’s a lot of pressure for me to write music that’s going to give the entire stadium goose bumps as they see these Hall-of-Famers out on the field. In a really nice way, MLB pushes my limits to write the best music I can,” concedes Langsbard, adding that he draws on the great American music of Aaron Copeland and Samuel Barber as inspiration.
Langsbard, who scored the Emmy-winning Cal Ripken documentary The Season, landed the gig scoring MLB events when independent editor Michael Mandt introduced him to MLB executive producer David Gavant.
“[Gavant] liked what I was doing, so I did some television production for them and then, for the 2005 World Series, they were producing an on-field event, “ recalls Langsbard. “They thought it would be cool to do some original music for that. And that, pardon the pun, was a whole new ball game.”
A graduate of The Eastman School of Music, in Rochester New York, Langsbard likens scoring these live events to that of film. “One of the nice things about scoring these pre-game ceremonies is they are really designed to be full of fanfare and the music almost does take center stage.”
Langsbard also co-scores Oxygen Network's crime documentary series Snapped. Other credits include assistant to composer Joel McNeely on Air Force One along with The Avengers, The Espy Awards, Batman, The Animated Series and video game “The Simpsons Virtual Springfield.”
As for the future, Langsbard says he’d like to re-enter the world of video game scoring. “I exited just before the major consoles came out. And now the video games are so advanced and, artistically, the composers are given such freedom to write really cool inspiring and artistic music.”
Written by Ada Guerin
In this story: Brian Langsbard
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