Chuck Jones, who died on February 22, 2002, will be best remembered as the masterful director
and creative force behind hundreds of now classic cartoons produced by
Warner Brothers during the 1940s and 1950s. From vitaphone and theatrical releases,
through weekend television broadcasts, and now in almost continuous repetition
on cable stations, fully three generations of viewers have chuckled
to the timeless slapstick antics of characters such as Bugs Bunny, Elmer
Fudd and Daffy Duck.
But whether they recognized it or not, the fans of these programs were getting much more than just entertaining cartoons; they were getting an aural education. After all, the musical wit and sonic montage of these gems was no less virtuosic than their visual and verbal play, thanks to Carl Stalling (the veteran silent-film organist who served as musical director for the bulk of Jones' efforts), Milt Franklyn (Stalling's orchestrator and successor), and Raymond Scott (author of many of the jazz cues heard in these cartoons). While we watched the images at play before our eyes, our ears were also learning about aural relationships, how to recognize the underlying sound patterns and instrumental timbres, and when to expect the unexpected. Indeed, over the course of five decades, Chuck Jones and Carl Stalling taught us how to listen.
Why did Jones and Stalling regard classical music as the best and most appropriate music for animated cartoons? First and foremost, such music made up the core of the repertory of accompaniments or "cues" to the silent films from their formative years. Stalling himself, like Fats Waller and Dmitri Shostakovich, worked as a pianist for various movie halls. In these halls, sentimental parlor songs, 19th-century social dances, wedding marches, storm pieces, and the warhorses of the classical repertory were all ready grist for the film accompanist's mill. Constantly replayed for successive films, this musical repertory became its own coded language that could be used to set a scene, underscore movements, or conjure moods in ways that a cartoon director would find useful. But beyond these early associations, I also suspect that Jones saw a larger parallel between classical composers' use of rhythm, melody, or harmony to engage a listener's sense of expectation, and his own aesthetic, which uses visual effects in similar ways to play upon a viewer's sense of what is coming next.
Consider, for instance, The Rabbit of Seville (1950), in which the
overture to Rossini's Barber provides the scaffolding for an
unforgettable contest in which musical ideas — lyrical melodies, sudden
orchestral syncopations, towering Rossinian crescendo — are translated
into snipping scissors, flying vegetables, spinning barber chairs, and a
burlesque arms race. Familiar music and familiar characters here join in sublime
moments of comedic pantomime. In the world of cartoon music, the sounds are
normally written to accompany gestures. Indeed, such aural miming practice had
become so predictable that even in the early days of the cartoon sound track it
was denigrated as "Mickey Mousing." But in The Rabbit of Seville, as in
the parodic dance of the hippopotamus ballerina and her crocodile suitors from
Disney's Fantasia, the process works in reverse: Jones discovers Bugs and
Elmer, complete with their characteristic gestures, as already present in
Rossini's music.
(For opera buffs there are still more jokes. After a hasty wedding between Bugs and Elmer — with the obligatory Mendelssohn Wedding March cue from Stalling — the bride is summarily taken backstage and dumped into a huge wedding cake emblazoned Marriage of Figaro. The visual gag reminds of the literary connection between Rossini's Barber and Mozart's Figaro: each is based on the famous trio of satirical dramas by the revolutionary playwright Beaumarchais.)
If The Rabbit of Seville reveals the comedic possibilities of
Rossini's overture as pantomime, What's Opera, Doc? (1957) takes us still
more deeply into the world of parody. Here Jones and arranger Milt Franklyn
offer a grandiose skewering of Wagnerian themes and conceits. With his cries of
"kill the wabbit" unforgettably grafted onto the characteristic dotted rhythm of
the "Ride of the Walküres" from Wagner's Ring, Elmer's pursuit of Bugs is
raised to a maniacal pitch. Whereas Stalling's score for the Rossini project
confined itself almost exclusively to a single overture, Franklyn juggles a
pastiche of favorite themes, not only from the Ring, but also from
Flying Dutchman and Tannhaüser . The famous Venusberg ballet
from the first act of the latter opera becomes a ridiculous parody of a
Wagnerian love duet, complete with an overstuffed horse and its gigantic
backside.
What should we make of all of this energetic recycling of operatic favorites? As a historian I cannot help but consider them in the broader context of related efforts. The Jones/Stalling/Franklyn collaborations take their place in a long parade of parodies written for the popular stage of the 19th century, from Johann Nestroy's biting Viennese satires of Wagner and Meyerbeer, through Jacques Offenbach's comedic allusions to Gluck, and beyond. Each national theater, it seems, has taken time to deflate the overwrought seriousness of its high art forms, often by exaggerating their signal traits and juxtaposing them with trivial forms.
We have also come to realize that even as Stalling's cartoon scores look back toward a long tradition of cinema and parody, they also take their place in the audacious mixture of idioms and styles that appealed to the avant-garde over the course of the last century. Packed into these imaginary cartoon worlds are fragments of familiar tunes that race past our ears. We are assaulted with a lexicon of timbres suddenly freed from the customary requirements of cohesion and climax: percussive outbursts, lightning glissandi, momentary dissonance, frenzied scales, and a host of other musical figures that verge on the avant-garde.
Viewed today, it is not hard to see the analogies between Stalling's approach and the techniques of collage and citation heard in music by European composers such as Satie, Stockhausen, Kagel, Berio, Zimmermann, as well as Americans from Ives to Rochberg. The New York composer John Zorn has even heralded Stalling as an avatar of the post-modern in music, in which multiple rather than single idioms prevail. These musicians share with Stalling an aesthetic that favors discontinuity and simultaneity over the sort of continuous development heard in most orchestral music of the 19th century.
In terms of the technical demands they place on orchestral musicians, Stalling's scores (in Franklyn's arrangements) are often as tricky as any new music written for the concert stage during the last 50 years. (By some incredible good fortune, Warner Brothers put at Stalling's disposal the same expert orchestral players who also performed film scores by Hollywood masters such as Tiomkin, Korngold, and Waxman.) But in addition to the musicians, Stalling's music also had the potential to challenge listeners, even if few of us were ready to acknowledge it at the time. For the musically curious, cartoon sound tracks served as a point of entry into distant musical and timbral worlds that young viewers might never have otherwise encountered, much less understood. And even if some will lament the transformation of operatic and symphonic standards into slapstick entertainment, we must concede that decoding the layered meanings of these cartoons actually requires remarkable imagination and insight. Listening today to the sounds of these decidedly silly cartoons, we can nevertheless marvel at the artistry and wisdom that foolishness can sometimes inspire.
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