Disney A to G(#) — Part Two
Stalling
When people discuss the life and career of Carl Stalling, they generally skim past the decade he was intertwined with Walt Disney and move on to his lengthy and influential career with the Warner Brothers animation studio, with some good reason; Stalling’s work reached its fullest expression working on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. Likewise, when discussing the early Disney shorts, Stalling’s role is often relegated to that of “the guy who was manipulated to try and bring down Walt.” At best he gets a nod as the person who came up with the idea for the Silly Symphonies, but with a caveat that his weren’t the best ones.
Carl Stalling’s impact on the Disney Brothers’ studio was far deeper than these brief mentions reflect. He bailed Walt out, financially, several times. He was Mickey Mouse’s first speaking voice: The Karnival Kid (1929). He wrote the song that is still Mickey Mouse’s theme, Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo. He worked with Walt, Bert Lewis, and Wilfred Jackson to expand and refine the “bar sheets” which combined animation guides and musical notation onto a single page (useful later to Stalling when he started at Warner Brothers and discovered that they had adopted the invention as well). And he invented the “click track” to keep orchestras in sync with what they were reading on the bar sheets: an audible, in-ear, beat signal still in use in almost all professional recording today.
Oh, and yeah, he DID come up with the Silly Symphonies.
Let’s back up…
The Prelude — The Pre-Mickey Carl Stalling
Having started classical piano training at an extremely early age, Carl Stalling was a movie theater pianist in 1904, at the age of twelve. He played for six years in Lexington, Missouri, then moved to a larger theater in Independence and, finally, by his early twenties, ends up as organist and conductor at the massive Isis Theater in Kansas City, MO.
Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram studio had opened by 1922 just down the block from the Isis and Disney premiered many of his earliest animated shorts there. Stalling and Disney became friends, with the musician often strolling down the alley to visit Walt’s modest animation studio during the day.
In 1923, Stalling helps Walt Disney negotiate a contract for Disney’s financially collapsing Laugh-O-Grams studio to produce a new series of “Song-O-Reels” which would involve an audience sing-along to a song issued by a local sheet music publisher. The film, Martha — A Sweet Old-Fashioned Name, now lost, was a failure.
Interestingly, some ex-employees of Walt’s would, after Disney’s migration to California but before they all moved out to join him, work with Stalling again to try and produce a similar sing-along to be shown at the Isis. For this short, Stalling invented a rudimentary sound-synching mechanism that pre-figures the Disney studios’ bar sheets which become the industry standard later. Stalling would listen to the song sung as an unexposed piece of film ran through the projector and at the end of every lyric word he would press a pencil hard onto the film. This way the animators could tell how many frames passed, roughly, for each word and could animate that many to match.
Those animators, by the way, were Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising — the fortunately named “Harmon/Ising” animation team. They would work with Disney again in California and then leave to start the Warner Brothers animation studio and then the MGM cartoon studio where they would produce the first Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerry films. Ising would also direct the first non-Disney film to win an Academy Award for best animated short, The Milky Way (1940).
Carl Stalling, in late 1923, loans Walt Disney $275 to finish the Alice Comedies shorts, he has just signed a contract for in Hollywood. The Alice shorts would run until 1927, which is just about where we want to pick up this story…
The First Movement — Three Busy Months in 1928
In the previous part of Disney A to G(#), the recording of the soundtrack for Steamboat Willie (1928), was covered in some detail, but a piece relevant to this discussion was omitted, Walt’s side trip to Kansas City.
In early September of 1928 on the train trip to New York where he would record the audio for the short that was to make or break him, Walt stopped in Kansas City to visit his old friend Carl Stalling and to woo the maestro to come work for him. He pitched the possibilities of animation combined with sound and seemingly sold Stalling right there and then. It is a testament to Disney’s confidence that he was carrying with him film copies of the silent shorts The Gallopin’ Gaucho (1929) and Plane Crazy (1929), both shot before Steamboat Willie, but silent and, as yet, unsold to a distributor. He handed the film canisters over to Stalling and asked him to score them and then follow to New York to have them recorded. (At this time much of the film industry was still split between the two coasts and there were no available studios equipped to record sound onto film outside of New York City.)
During this stop, Stalling, showing a stunning amount of foresight, particularly while holding two completely animated films which he would be composing scores for, suggests that Walt try something different, that he allow Stalling to put the music front and center and bring normally inanimate objects — skeletons, trees, flowers — to life to dance with the songs. Disney considers this idea — it will ultimately develop its most complete expression many years later in Fantasia (1940). As a subject for the first trial, Stalling suggests a spooky graveyard scene with dancing skeletons would form the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance (1929).
And this was before he’d written a note.
Stalling spent time writing scores for The Gallopin’ Gaucho and Plane Crazy and then took a train to New York to meet Walt in late October. They spent the first day and that night after his arrival making final preparations to get the scores recorded only to be rewarded for their efforts by receiving word the following morning of a devastating rejection by Universal Studios who had chosen not to be the distributor of the Mickey Mouse shorts. Walt, having been in New York for months at this point trying to both get the score for Steamboat Willie recorded as well as find a distributor for the films was out of money and out of options.
I met Walt in New York to record that music and we shared the same hotel room; we both washed out our socks in the same bathroom sink. — Michael Barrier interview with Carl Stalling, http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm
Three days later a print for the fourth Mickey short, The Barn Dance (1929) arrived in New York, and Walt Disney, being Walt Disney, decided that he would barrel ahead. Walt and his brother Roy took out mortgages on their homes and sold what they could sell, and Stalling, sharing a small room with Walt, started writing the score for the fourth film. Even with there being much less precision in the synced score than had been in Steamboat Willie and considerable re-use of the same public domain songs in all three of Stalling’s scores to be recorded that day, the fact that he had The Barn Dance ready to record within a few days of receiving the print shows him already working at an impressive pace. On October 26th they returned to the Cinephone recording studio and, likely using the same orchestra and “effects men” as had worked on Steamboat Willie — probably used here and definitely used again for The Opry House ( 1929) and The Skeleton Dance (1929) shortly after — they recorded Carl Stalling’s first cartoon scores: The Gallopin’ Gaucho, Plane Crazy, and The Barn Dance.
This was the beginning of a career that would occupy Carl Stalling for the next forty years and for over 600 cartoon shorts, by far the most influential and prodigious composer that the form has ever seen. But coming out of the studio that late October in 1928, they had yet to sell a single Mickey.
So there they were moving into winter in New York in 1928, completely out of money and seemingly having run out of paths to distribution. Walt was still schlepping Steamboat Willie all over town, willing to show it to any producer who would open their screening room door, when the manager of The Colony Theater on Broadway convinced Walt to do something he had, to this point, refused to do: show Steamboat Willie in a theater without having a distribution deal. On November 18th, 1928, Walt Disney and Carl Stalling sat nervously at the back of The Colony Theater watching an audience laugh at their first-ever encounter with a mouse named Mickey.
I was with Walt when Steamboat Willie was previewed at the Colony Theater, down on Broadway, and we got the audience reaction. The reaction was very good. We sat on almost the last row and heard laughs and snickers all around us. — Michael Barrier interview with Carl Stalling, http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm
Walt Disney got his films distributed and the name Mickey Mouse began to spread across the country like wildfire. And the careers of two of the most important figures in the history of animation, Walt Disney and Carl Stalling — ironically, both not animators — were launched.
In the course of three months, Carl Stalling had been coaxed into a new career, conceived of the Silly Symphonies, moved to New York, scored and recorded three films, and sat in the theater with Walt Disney to watch one of the most significant premieres in film history.
After that, they returned to California where they would really get to work.
The Second Movement — Stalling in Film History
Technology comes with it’s own way of seeing. — Martin Heidegger
When we look at the influence of Carl Stalling we often consider it far too narrowly. What critics and fans normally discuss is how his work influenced, and indeed dominated, the development of what we think that cartoon shorts sound like. This is, of course, true, and hearing a few seconds from a Stalling soundtrack immediately ushers up visions of falling anvils and singing rabbits. This does Stalling a disservice, however. Given his place in the timeline of movie evolution and his bold, and early, willingness to experiment, Carl Stalling becomes a pivotal figure in the development of not just animation but in cinematic music overall.
Consider the state of sound in film by the time Carl Stalling had composed his first soundtracks for Walt Disney: The Gallopin’ Gaucho (1928)and Plane Crazy (1929). We often hear the story as if the world was silent until Al Jolson appeared in The Jazz Singer and immediately after that came Mickey Mouse. Prior to The Jazz Singer’s release, however, were a handful of films where the role of the theater organist or orchestra was replaced with musical arrangements recorded onto the film itself. Even recorded musical numbers with live singing had popped up from time to time; here’s Eddie Cantor in 1923:
Jolson himself did a singing short in 1926 using the same Vitaphone recording process that The Jazz Singer would use a year later; it didn’t change the world. Prior to Steamboat Willie, there were cartoons with synchronized sound; The Fleischer Brothers, Disney’s top competitor in the twenties and thirties, had beat Walt to it:
But something about these two films in particular turned them into landmarks. What was it?
Some of the success of The Jazz Singer and Steamboat Willie had to do with simply having plenty of theaters equipped to show the films, a luxury early experimenters like the Fleischer’s didn’t have. Technical innovations, both within the film studios and with the sound production systems themselves also certainly helped, but there was more to it than that. Famously, in sequences intended to show Jolson doing straightforward musical performances — a showcase of sound technology featuring one of the most famous performers in the world at the time — he does something startling; between numbers, he improvises. He talks to his band. He, charmingly, teases his mother. He uses sound to show a world around the set piece he’s performing. What the film wants to show us in Al Jolson’s “act.” Joley gives us that, and then, with a simple improvisation that must have seemed almost vertiginous to an audience who were barely used to hearing voices come off the screen at all, shows us the world BEHIND the act. The Jazz Singer’s revolution was not technical, it was a shift in perspective.
So where then does this put Steamboat Willie and Disney’s early sound cartoons in this evolution? Unlike the early Fleischer “Song Car-Toons” (from which Walt borrowed the “bouncing ball” and used it for his earliest sound synchronization), the early Mickey Mouse cartoons were not “performances.” They weren’t novelty acts being disseminated to a wider audience. They weren’t invitations for an audience sing-along. The music an audience heard defined Mickey’s world; it was of musical substance and Mickey’s movement through it organized sound into song. Some of this may seem overwrought to an audience today, who grew up knowing how cartoons work. It may seem like overstating the obvious, but in 1928 the rules had yet to be written. Walt and his team made the world of cartoons musical and then pulled in a man who was not only uniquely equipped to carry the song duties but was also going to add another layer of meaning to the sound mix.
Carl Stalling took the musical world of animation and was not content with the music and images being a single message; Stalling turned the experience into a dialogue and the dialogue itself became the message.
Consider The Opry House (1929), likely the fourth Mickey cartoon to be scored by Stalling and recorded at the same session as the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance (1929). Up until this point, the schtick was that Mickey Mouse moved through some sort of adversarial situation which ended in his creating music by manipulating, and in some cases demolishing, the world around him. The Opry House isn’t notably different until something strange happens as the stage band begins to play, a few minutes in. Without any visible indication from the animation itself, the band is terribly out of tune.
Why is this interesting? Up until this point the animation had milked the music out of the film. If a cat’s tail was pulled, it sounded like a screeching cat singing a note. If a hippo’s tooth was hit with a mallet, it made the noise that seemed intuitively right: a xylophone. The Disney animators, mostly Ub Iwerks, indicated the sound with their drawings and the score and effects were built to support that. But this was different. This was a conversation where the music was informing what we are supposed to think about the animation and the meaning of what we’re seeing is altered in response. This band is bad. We learn this entirely through the music. In the following shot the goat fiddle player, seemingly ecstatic about his own performance, is surprised when his fiddle breaks in half and pulls his own chin whiskers taut to continue playing, and the notes are still sour. So now we have learned something about this character which was entirely prompted by Carl Stalling’s score. He’s a bad fiddle player and doesn’t know it.
Rarely do the soundtracks for Stalling’s Disney shorts go this far outside the lines and give the composer so much narrative authority — usually more of a partnership between drawn art and music was in play — but from here on, especially considering the Silly Symphonies, the animator and the composer will share authority pretty evenly. As his time at the Disney studios rolled on the interplay between the animation and the music became more and more intricate until a new sort of filmic language developed which could not exist without both elements in harmony. This did not, however, keep Stalling from occasionally trying to quietly pull one over on the directors of the shorts in a way that would become a sort of trademark for him later in his career and which would both delight and vex the animators that he worked with.
Wild Waves (1930) is the last Mickey short, as well as the last Disney short, that Stalling would work on at the studios. (The Silly Symphony Autumn (1930) was the last one released which would feature a score by him, but the departures of Ub Iwerks and Stalling caused post-production on that short to be lengthier than usual.) In it, Minnie is dragged into the ocean by the unruly tide but is saved by Mickey. She is traumatized and Mickey tries to cheer her up with one of his, by now far too common, musical numbers featuring all the available animal life nearby. The song? An uptempo version of the classic hymn Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep: a song about resigning oneself to death by drowning! Thus Stalling steals the joke out from under the animation via the audiences pre-existing awareness of the song he put in play.
Along similar lines, Mickey’s Choo-Choo (1929) featured Dvořák’s Humoresques #7 which had a parallel life for those who traveled on Amtrak trains around that period when novelty lyrics about the train lavatories were matched up with the tune. Stalling had traveled extensively on such trains and must have laughed himself silly including the tune in the soundtrack of Mickey’s first train film. Give it a listen:
What Carl Stalling was developing here was a push and pull, a tension, between what the audience saw and what they heard in the film, and even what they intellectually knew about the song. Later, in his career-defining work at Warner Brothers, this interplay would become even more vital and precise. Music will alter physics and defy gravity; imagine a coyote having run a few too many steps off of a cliff with a few slowing pizzicato plunks from a violin seeming to be the only thing holding him aloft. Stalling will come to use the music from tail to snout; he will use the tactile sound of the instruments as well as the mood presented within the music’s melody and timbre and, almost as a sort of Easter Egg, he will squeeze extra meaning from the audience’s familiarity about the identity of the song itself. about Other films might use music to support or enhance the action; Stalling’s scores often exist as scene, character, motive force, and subtext all at the same time.
It is hard to imagine something like this without the groundwork that Carl Stalling had laid, using a pre-existing ballet piece to tie the comic pacing together:
Or, of course, this, a nostalgic musical piece tied to contrary images forming something entirely unique:
The interplay here is devilish:
Carl Stalling was the progenitor of a philosophy of film scores that has continued to grow in relevancy since he first began scoring cartoons, but how did this musical dialogue with the images work? What tools did he have at his disposal? What was Carl Stalling’s style?
When discussed, a lot is said about Stalling being an early adopter of sampling, or about couching his work in the modernist ideals of musique concrète, but neither of these are exactly accurate. Both of these forms use a source recording itself — or at least something emulating the sound coming off of a physical recording media — to plug in as a layer of another piece of music. In both cases, the re-use of the original sound’s recording medium is a factor. Stalling not only didn’t do that, but, in 1928, he hardly would’ve had the ability to.
Neither is it true that Stalling wrote very little music himself and relied entirely on patching together pieces of other songs. He wrote prodigious amounts of music, much of which did link other pieces, but many hundreds of hours that carried large sections of a film by itself.
Notably, in The Skeleton Dance:
It was mostly original; that was forty years ago, and I can’t remember if I used anything else or not… When we were working out a story, usually for the Silly Symphonies, I would sometimes use a musical number as a pattern, suggesting a certain style or mood. I would play it on the piano for the director, and then write something similar, but original, for recording. — Michael Barrier interview with Carl Stalling, http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm
What Carl Stalling had in his toolbox were an almost encyclopedic knowledge of classical music from his early piano training and of popular music from his years as a movie theater conductor and organist, and an ability to improvise a musical match to what was going on on the screen; all of which allowed him the ability to quickly compose scores based around musical quotes which became sharper, faster and more fragmented as his career developed. What started as one or two themes in a Disney short in 1928 became a regular twelve to fourteen recognizable pieces of music later for each film at Warner Brothers.
Perhaps the best way to describe what makes up Carl Stalling’s style is to think about it in two ways: without images and with them. Without images, he is a man composing variations on themes, popular and obscure, in a brash sort of way that seems uniquely American. For better or for worse he seems to evidence no reservations about grabbing a piece of music and forcefully shaping it to his needs. In a way, this gestures less towards later modern avant-garde composition than it does towards early twentieth-century populist composers like Aaron Copeland. Consider Copeland’s Appalachian Spring which manages to take variations on an old Shaker hymn Simple Gifts and first extract the nostalgia from it and then turn it into something striking, scary, and modern sounding. Or his El Salón México which takes four Mexican folk songs and transforms them into an aural narrative trip through an elaborate dance hall in Mexico. It is the use of pre-existing themes as a launching pad for a variety of, occasionally contradictory, emotional or narrative scenes, which can both evoke a familiarity or nostalgia as well as a comment on that same nostalgia, that seems to place Carl Stalling in the same camp as composers like Copeland.
And if we consider the music, as I suspect Stalling himself would, as inseparable from the image? Then he forged a style of scoring that modern film composer, particularly those with a little playfulness, will never stop building on. Ornamental or purely supporting scores have little in common with Stalling, but any time we hear a soundtrack that is as much a part of the story as the image — that is, in fact, in dialogue with it — we can see Carl Stalling’s influence in it.
The Third Movement — Gosh What a Racket Like an Ol’ Buzz Saw!
In an otherwise unremarkable early Mickey Mouse short, Mickey’s Follies (1929), a duck emerges from between the makeshift stage curtains with a sign that reads “Mickey’s Theme Song.” A brisk little vaudevillian-style show tune, the song, Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo, is an unlikely candidate for a franchise-defining number, but here it is still being played on Main Street U.S.A. in Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom today, almost a century later.
Walt Disney was still angry about what he saw as the theft of his character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and he was determined not to make the same mistake of yoking the entirety of his company’s fortunes behind a single property. This was a Walt Disney who had learned the hard way that he needed to diversify and by 1929 he was making moves to do so in three distinct arenas.
First, he would take Stalling’s idea for a music-centric series of mood pieces without a central character, the Silly Symphonies, and use that to hedge his animation business — as well as to begin the process of wedging himself loose from Pat Powers — just in case he lost control of Mickey. Second, he recognized a need for a sound recording studio in California, where the industry was shifting and proceeded to build one; Carl Stalling loaned — or invested depending on who told the story — $2000 to support the project. Finally, Disney was about to dip his toe into the lucrative business of music publishing and sheet music sales. And for that, he would need Stalling’s help yet again.
Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo is credited to Carl Stalling and Walt Disney — the only piece of music for which Walt was ever listed as a composer — and Disney seemed determined to force it in front of an audience every chance he got. Not only was it the opening theme music for Mickey shorts for the five years that followed its introduction, but it also became the theme of the original Mickey Mouse Clubs. No, not the iconic Jimmy Dodd/Annette Funicello/Jiminy Cricket show of the 1950s, but something else entirely.
In the summer of 1929 a movie theater manager in Ocean Park, California began hosting what he called “Mickey Mouse Clubs” where kids could be dropped off for a few hours, take a sort of Mickey Mouse oath, and watch a bunch of Mickey cartoons. Walt Disney was invited to see one of the club events and was delighted to find a thousand children taking the “Mickey Mouse Pledge” and generally enjoying themselves. Seeing that this was a golden advertising opportunity as well as a way to hawk new merchandise directly to an audience of kids, Walt and the theater manager, Harry Woodin, began licensing the Mickey Mouse Clubs across the country: at its peak reaching 800 movie theaters and near a million children. Walt made sure that, with this captive audience, the kids across the country would have a theme song, that he owned, with which to open the “meetings.”
Once a week anywhere up to a million children would be singing Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo.
Carl Stalling had known, befriended, shared rooms with, loaned money to, and collaborated with Walt Disney for close to a decade and, in January of 1930, he suddenly walked out. We know that there were a lot of circumstances that led to this abrupt move; the Great Depression having started months before left a lot of people nervous about their financial stability and Stalling seeing Ub Iwerks leave just before left him concerned that something was foundationally wrong with the Disney Brothers’ Studio’s finances. Pat Powers, noted in the previous article in this series as having bound the Disneys to odious contractual obligations, was using other companies to steal Iwerks and Stalling away — offering them significantly higher salaries — as revenge for Walt having been able to skirt out of Powers’ reach with the Silly Symphonies. Walt, in a posture that would come back to haunt him even more later on, was also notoriously stingy with giving credit to those that did the manual labor on his films and Iwerks and Stalling both had begun to complain about it.
And then there was the Yoo-Hoo.
When Stalling left the company the Disney Brothers were in process of sending out song sheets with altered lyrics to Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo to all of the Mickey Mouse Clubs and, as you can see from the above picture taken at the Walt Disney Family Museum, Carl Stalling’s name appears nowhere on the document. The potentially lucrative sale of the sheet music to Mickey’s theme — about to be released to music shops — found Stalling’s name not appearing on the cover of that either. (Note: it may appear on the inside of the sheet music. I was unable to find an image of anything other than the cover.) And, even today, the music is credited to both Stalling and Walt Disney, but the question of Disney’s actual involvement in its composition is questionable. Walt never wrote any other lyrics that we know of and it certainly was not uncommon in the first half of the century for producers, or even performers, to finagle themselves a songwriting credit as a sort of “gift” for their promotion of the song.
This may all sound speculative, but correspondence between Roy and Walt during the time indicates that Stalling had expressed concern specifically about the Yoo-Hoo’s marketing and residuals, as well as that Roy and Walt were, in fact, doing exactly what Stalling was accusing them of.
… it would not be a good idea for us to have him having too many strings on things — at least until he takes a one hundred percent co-operation attitude — Letter from Roy Disney to Walt Disney, January 18, 1930, Walt Disney Archives.
Stalling was smelling something he didn’t like pertaining to the rights of Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo and for this, and other reasons, he got out.
While the actual separation from the Disney company seemed to be an ugly affair, and we have no idea what the ultimate residual/licensing situation with Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo and Carl Stalling would end up being, Walt and Carl’s relationship did seem to become repaired fairly quickly with Stalling even returning, while between jobs, to the studio to arrange and play piano for a few Disney shorts, including The Three Little Pigs (1933). Walt, Roy, Ub, and Carl were in the beginnings of an industry for which they would, in significant ways, define the rules. In the throws of The Great Depression, with Walt having had his previous star character stolen from him, his extreme caution as far as rights and ownership are understandable, even if he and Roy may have pushed it too far at the time. Interestingly, Iwerks and Stalling were fully credited for the shorts they worked on by the time they left the studio; so a course correction was already in progress.
That the Disney Studio exploited this little song in perpetuity is a matter of extensive record. It was the theme song to the Mickey shorts until 1934, a consistent theme played as area music in the theme parks, the theme song to the 1970s short compilation series The Mouse Factory as well as making numerous other appearances throughout Disney history as well as mainstream popular culture.
Here are a few of the many instances:
Nevertheless, Carl Stalling’s career as a core member of the Disney Brother’s studio was over. His methods and techniques would continue to grow more confident and complex as the years went on, but the foundation he laid over twenty-one Mickey Mouse shorts and seven Silly Symphonies would prove to be the base model for not only all animation to come but for any film composer whose work had a personality, a touch of irony, a sense of humor.
He would go on to fully embrace the collage-like aspect of his work, eventually landing at a studio with a massive music publishing business and where he was far less hindered in the elements available to him. The Disney Brothers Company would, likewise, evolve how they worked with their pictures, eventually moving deeper and deeper into original song composition and with that begin to become a major player in a popular song in just a few years.
When asked later about his memories about working for Walt and whether he had any regrets, he was gracious and sober:
…he [Walt] was always very courteous. I called him once, after Warner’s closed in 1953, for six months, and I asked him if there was any work there, and he said no, and asked me if I had any gray hairs. I said, “Yeah, what’s left.”… No, except for pleasant associations. It was all very new and exciting. My leaving turned out better for Walt and it turned out better for me. — Michael Barrier interview with Carl Stalling, http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm
Stay tuned for Part Three of Disney Music A to G(#). Coming soon!
Exit Music
On Carl Stalling’s use of song titles as textual comments on the cartoon action:
If there were a lady dressed in red, he’d always play “The Lady in Red.” If someone went into a cave, he’d play “Fingal’s Cave.” If we were doing anything about eating, he’d do “A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich, and You.” I had a bee one time, and my God if he didn’t go find a piece of music written in 1906 or something called “I’m a Busy Little Bumble Bee. — Joe Adamson, “Chuck Jones Interviewed” in The American Animated Cartoon, edited by Gerald and Danny Peary, p. 135
Both Carl Stalling and Ub Iwerks returned to work for Walt Disney later: Stalling sporadically until he got his gig at Warner’s and Iwerks permanently in a sort of fluid role as a special effects man and inventor of new technologies for film.
While it is not entirely clear who actually wrote the final filmed score for Steamboat Willie, it was probably Bert Lewis with contributions from Wilfred Jackson. Lewis was also an movie theater organist in Kansas City, MO, and was likely referred to Walt by Carl Stalling. Lewis conducted and arranged many of Stalling’s scores for Disney and took over for him as the primary composer for the Mickey and Silly Symphony shorts after Stalling quit.
It probably seems crazy that I did a whole article on Carl Stalling and barely mentioned any of the Silly Symphonies. We’ll get there.
Finally, those of us who enjoy writing about this kind of history do not do so in a vacuum. Very few people get access to the Walt Disney Company’s extensive archives, for very understandable reasons, and most of us are left to gather our information from secondary or tertiary sources which we hope to combine in interesting ways that might offer some sort of novel insight on this subject matter that has already been explored more than most.
You cannot investigate the early music of the Walt Disney Company without benefitting from the work of Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman who are truly lapping the rest of us. Their books Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney and Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series as well as Kaufman’s extensive notes on the boxed set vinyl release of the Silly Symphonies soundtracks have been and will continue to be, extraordinarily useful.
Michael Barrier’s interview with Carl Stalling on his website, http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Stalling/Stalling.htm, and his book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age have been similarly invaluable.
Danial Goldmark’s Tunes for ‘Toons is a terrific treatise on the influence of Carl Stalling and MGM’s Scott Bradley and James Bohn’s Music in Disney’s Animated Features also continually surprised me with the detail of information it contained about these early years.
There are certainly more, and I will try and keep a bibliography up as this series goes on, but please do support these wonderful authors if you have an interest in animation and music.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times