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  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score by Walt Disney
  • Daniel Batchelder
Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Master Score. Music by Frank E. Churchill, lyrics by Larry Morey, and additional underscore by Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith. Limited edition digital replica. (Disney Music Legacy Libraries.) Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015. [Prologue, p. 4–5; score, p. 6–205; epilogue, p. 206–7; acknowledgements, p. 207. ISBN 978-14950-0872-6. $300.]

Conventional musicological wisdom regards a score—say, that of a Beethoven symphony—as a blueprint of performable musical events. Scholars may subject these texts to stylistic analysis with an eye toward uncovering aspects of the composer’s musical thought process: why this chord, this rhythm, this instrument? Though certainly not without value, it is precisely this monolithic and quintessentially romantic approach that Ben Winters decries in a 2007 article on film-music scholarship (“Catching Dreams: Editing Film Scores for Publication,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 1 [2007]: 115–40). While the availability of published film scores has dramatically increased in recent years, Winters asserts that the auteurcentric methodology such documents enable distorts the emphasis on the composer’s creative autonomy by failing to account for the fact that scoring a film is a highly collaborative and fluid process. A film composer’s musical decisions are tempered by innumerable exigencies, from storyboard and sound-mixing concerns to editorial decisions that can leave feet of scored footage on the cutting room floor. This unavoidable indeterminacy, writes Winters (p. 120), “leaves us with a dilemma: how can we present a film score editorially in a way that both is useful for musicologists and yet acknowledges the often pluralistic, Text-like [in the Barthesian sense] complexities of the score?”

An appealing solution to this dilemma has arrived in a surprising form. In late summer of 2015, the Walt Disney Company produced a beautifully bound, glossy facsimile of the manuscript “master score” to its 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While it cannot claim to be the first published film score—or even the first publicly available animated film score, given Ries & Erler’s edition of Wolfgang Zeller’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed from 1926 (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed: Musik zum Lotte Reiniger-Stummfilm, für kleines Orchester bearbeitet von Jens Schubbe, 5 vols. [Berlin: Ries & Erler, 2008])—this document is the first of its kind in many ways. Published by Hal Leonard and limited to a print run of 400 numbered copies, the edition was compiled and produced by a Disney-owned internal organization known as the Disney Music [End Page 157] Legacy Libraries (hereinafter, MLL). According to an explanatory two-page epilogue printed in the edition’s final pages, the MLL is an archival project dedicated to providing “a comprehensive and elegant resource solution for documenting and retrieving all phases of the [Disney studio’s] music scoring, contracting, and recording process” (p. 206). Since 2014, the MLL’s formidable parent company has exploited the project’s commercial potential with the Disney Music Emporium’s Legacy Collection, offering lavishly produced soundtrack recordings on compact disc and vinyl, complete with deleted songs and extensive liner notes (Walt Disney Records, “Disney Music Emporium: The Legacy Collection,” http://www.disneymusicemporium.com/the-legacy-collection [accessed 18 May 2016]). This score, however, signals the collection’s first foray into printed music.

The publication’s use of the phrase “master score” compels some explanation. Though creating the score for a live-action film requires, as noted above, close and consistent collaboration between composers, editors, screenwriters, sound engineers, and the like, this process is magnified tenfold in the case of an animated film: every sound, utterance, and gesture must be carefully planned and organized in advance in order to ensure proper audiovisual synchronization. Though modern technology has streamlined and simplified this process, in the mid-1930s the creation of an eighty-three-minute animated film represented a gargantuan undertaking. By this time, however, the Disney studio had been at the forefront of the animation industry for nearly a decade, due in part to its constant experimenting with and implementation of new equipment...

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