Tunes for 'Toons': Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (review)

"In brief, fellow composers, Forward March! The world is your oyster, the sky is the limit, and the once lowly and despised slapstick cartoon will be your liberator." So wrote longtime MGM cartoon composer Scott Bradley in a 1941 manifesto entitled "Cartoon Music of the Future" (p. 168). That document, reprinted as an appendix in Daniel Goldmark's book on music and Hollywood animation, is but one of several important and relatively unknown interviews, essays, and cartoons brought to light in this pioneering work. The cartoon Zukunftmusiker Bradley, most famous for his work on Tom and Jerry cartoons, knew a thing or two about music history, and he had high hopes that his music, and the genre for which he wrote (animation), would someday assume a more prestigious place within that history. Bradley was not alone in thinking animation might offer expanded possibilities for composers: in 1946, Kurt Weill observed that the animated film, together with the documentary and the film musical, offered composers great potential for creating original music and experimenting with progressive music/image fusions ("Music in the Movies," Harpers Bazaar 79 [September 1946]: 400). By the 1960s, however, Bradley was saddened by what he and others perceived as the declining state of music being composed for cartoons; a golden age for both cartoons and cartoon music seems to have risen and waned during the middle of the twentieth century. I can only imagine that Goldmark's careful scrutiny of this under-researched repertoire would have pleased Bradley; those of us in musicology and film & media studies also have much to celebrate in this important volume.

While cartoon music has occasionally been acknowledged within the film music literature—e.g., Kurt London's study, Film Music (London: Faber, 1936), mentions it, as does Roy M. Prendergast's Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), and there also are a number of essays in various places—there has never before been a sustained attempt to account for the ways music gets composed, employed, and received within Hollywood animation. After a brief introduction, Goldmark presents a chapter each on the two composers he considers "the most influential composers of music for theatrical cartoons" (p. 7): Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley. In the three remaining chapters, he moves on to a series of case studies examining the representation of jazz and classical music in cartoons. These categories (jazz, classical) provided rich inspiration for animators and composers alike, and Goldmark's analysis constantly guides us towards a series of cultural observations that, if not surprising (e.g., that concert hall music has outrageous pretenses, or that Hollywood frequently churned out racist images) are nonetheless made even clearer by the evidence he provides.

The chapters on Stalling and Bradley each open with biographical and career background information before launching into summaries of their musical styles. Stalling's early professional involvement with live film accompanying (he played piano and organ in theaters in Missouri) provided him with a model for his later cartoon work, particularly in learning how to summarize the mood of a scene in a musical way that would be quickly and clearly understood by the audience. Goldmark goes to the early film music accompanying tutorials and finds that cartoons were appropriately to be treated as comedies. Stalling's greatest fame came during his years at Warner Brothers (1936–58), where, early on at least, the studio had a deal with the cartoon division dictating that every cartoon would use music from Warner Brothers's large sheet music holdings, a way of plugging several of their products at once. Stalling evidently reveled in the luxury of being able to quote from so many contemporary songs, especially after his earlier experience with Walt Disney—who had not wanted to spend much money on music—forced him to turn to earlier (and non-copyrighted and thus cheaper) repertoires like songs by Stephen Foster...