My mother-in-law lives with us. At 90, she is slightly (she would say) hard of hearing, and so generally one can hear what she has on the television. Today, it was "Stagecoach," the classic John Ford Western. And while I of course recognized the music (a compilation of Western melodies and generic period orchestral accompaniment) , it was suddenly the orchestration itself that struck me. I realized it sounded just like the music in a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Carl Stalling, the man behind the music in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, was a true genius recently appreciated with a collection of his work. As the booklet in the disc set explains, "Stalling's propensity for flat-out quotations of Warners-owned pop songs and public domain folk tunes is evident from the very first." Indeed, as the publication explains, a key part of Stalling's work was his encyclopedic memory of songs available in the Warner's catalog -- music the studio already owned the rights to and could use without cost or limit.
Now, this meant a lot more when the cartoons were made in the 40s, because these songs were not only owned by the studio, they were well known tunes from feature films, and also pop hits. So when Stalling chose "We're in the Money" for Daffy's celebration of greed in "Ali Baba Bunny," it wasn't just a pleasant piece of music to fill out the audio track.
But what struck me today was the realization that there was a secondary undercurrent in that backmessage. The orchestration itself -- perhaps accidentally, because that's how movie music was done then, perhaps with intent -- also sends its own message. The music coming out of my mother-in-law's room, without the visuals allowing me to pigeonhole it as feature or cartoon, sounded just like the cartoon music.
So the cartoon, given a fraction of the time a feature gets, was able to concentrate its message with a range of cultural references, tune choices ... and they way those tunes were played.
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