Music for Animation: The Golden Years
As a child, Daniel Goldmark experienced an earworm -- a tune that sticks in your head. He eventually identified the memorable piece as Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major. As a music major in his early twenties, he had a similar experience with Schubert's Die Erlkonig. Around that time he came to the realization that his familiarity with these musical compositions came from hearing them in numerous cartoons, and that cartoons in fact had given him an eclectic introduction to various styles of music -- "classical, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood film musicals, folk songs from America and around the world, Viennese opera and nineteenth-century American parlor songs, particularly the work of Stephen Foster." This epiphany set Goldmark, currently an Assistant Professor of Music History at Case Western Reserve University, on the path to write Tunes for 'Toons, a book that examines the music written for the Golden Age of Hollywood cartoons -- the period from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Music for animation has evolved since its original inception during the silent film era. Although some cartoons may have been delivered to the theaters with "special scores," according to Goldmark, early cartoon music before the age of sync sound focused on the theater's organ accompaniment as a means to display the musician's wit and skill as opposed to using the music to delineate character or create mood. The 1923 periodical Motion Picture News printed a statement from the Pathe home office, which suggested: "Jazz music goes well with Aesop's Fables. That's the conclusion reached after a number of tests, and consequently hereafter Pathe, the distributor of these subjects, will furnish musical effects sheets to each distributor booking one of these cartoons."
Animation music in the 1930s was not highly regarded, as exemplified by the term "mickey-mousing." The expression is attributed to David O. Selznick, who supposedly used the term derogatively in comparing a Max Steiner score to a Mickey Mouse cartoon, with the implied meaning that the score was not only too simplistic, but also telegraphed what is happening in a scene.
The use of popular songs was pervasive in the cartoons of this period. The music included standards like My Old Kentucky Home, as well as popular songs that were owned by the studios, and songs from live-action films such as The Varsity Show, performed by Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, a 55-piece jazz orchestra.
The person with the greatest impact in the field of cartoon music who relied heavily on contemporary songs was Carl Stalling. Stalling learned to use songs as film music when he was a theater accompanist. After seeing The Great Train Robbery projected on a tent, Stalling was hooked on movies. In 1904, he began playing piano during reel changes at a local movie house in Lexington, Missouri, where he had been born in 1891. By the mid-1920s, he was the orchestra leader at the Isis Theater in Kansas City, choosing the music to accompany the features, while improvising on keyboard for the short films, including the animated series Alice in Cartoonland created by a young Kansas City area filmmaker, Walt Disney. Although Disney had moved to California in 1923, he took finished prints of two Mickey Mouse cartoons -- Plane Crazy and Gallopin' Gaucho -- back to Kansas City in 1928 for Stalling to score.
Stalling worked for several years as musical director at Disney, scoring 19 more cartoons and arranging numerous others. He had to use classical music or older19th-century songs in order to avoid high licensing fees. He learned to use "bar" sheets, which provided a new method to synchronize the music and sound effects with the visual action. Using this blueprint he could time the musical rhythms with the animation storyboards, allowing him to compose the score before the picture was done. Along with composers Max Steiner and Scott Bradley, he is credited with developing the method of cartoon scoring -- which included a "click track" system where orchestra members could hear a steady beat -- that better allowed them to synchronize the music to the action.
Stalling's greatest contributions came during his time at Warner Bros., where he worked from 1936 until his retirement in1958. Music was the driving force behind the Warner Bros. cartoons, which were thin on narrative story development. Instead of the traditional story arc, the "plots" were a steady stream of high-energy shtick, gags and verbal jokes. Stalling developed a complex building-block style of short, rapidly changing musical cues, with tempo shifts and mixed genres that were perfectly in tune with the storytelling style of the Warners cartoons.
A key component of Stalling's compositional style while he was a musical director at Warner Bros. was combining short original cues, recorded with the studio's 60-piece orchestra, with songs from that studio's vast popular music collection. Once Stalling received a story premise, the setting and the gags involved, he would search the Warners music library for songs that would support the narrative. He would sketch out the piano parts of the original music, including the cues and the instrumentation that he needed. Milt Franklin arranged the orchestrations and Treg Brown added his comic genius with sound effects, which were recorded as a "punctuation point" for the music.
By using references to popular songs and even classical pieces, Stalling liked to add an additional dimension of humor to the screen action by layering musical gags on top of the sight gags. The titles of songs often mimicked the action, becoming another joke for those familiar with the music. For instance, an establishing shot of Elmer's Cabin would be accompanied by the tune There's No Place Like Home. These musical puns became part of his signature style. He had a special fondness for certain songs, notably Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. To the consternation of some of his directors, Stalling repeatedly used many of these songs in different scores.
Printer-friendly version
Post new comment