For people of a certain age, often their first exposure to either jazz or classical music was the incidental background music in Warner Brothers cartoons. These seven or eight minute shorts were created to be shown in theaters as part of a program of short films that preceded the main feature film. In no particular order, movie-goers arriving for the full program would see a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial chapter, a musical short (often a sing-along), trailers and/or other bits as well. Depending on the year (or desperation of the theater) there might be a raffle held live in the theater or a charity appeal. After all that, the feature film (often 70 minutes long) would begin. By the mid-1950's television had seriously cut into the movie industry's cash flow and it responded by competing with spectacles it knew television couldn't provide. Wider screens, brighter colors, longer features and so forth was what studios invested money in and theaters who wanted to show the best of what was available needed cash for up to date equipment. They couldn't to that by scheduling fewer screenings of longer movies, soooo... bye-bye shorts. While newsreels and trailers mouldered until they could be repurposed as kitsch, cartoons and serials were more easily packaged for television. By the time one generation of children had seen twenty years worth of a studio's back catalog several times, a whole new batch of children would become old enough to discover them. Everyday after school throughout the 1970's there was always one channel or another that aired an hour or two of theatrical shorts with what I didn't know were seriously outdated pop culture references. I can quote many of them to this day.
On a good day you could be lucky enough to watch Fleischer Studios stuff, although you never saw Superman or Betty Boop except on PBS. Popeye was often what made it into syndication packages. If you were unlucky it was the Popeye cartoons from the early 1960's and you got a little more fresh air that day. MGM's "Tom and Jerry" and anything by Tex Avery made life worth living, but the Warner's stuff for some reason always had the best music. They even came out under imprints called "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes". The secret was Carl Stalling. After Walt Disney completed "Steamboat Willie", the first synchronized sound cartoon, he hired Stalling (who played music live in theaters over silent movies) to retrofit music onto two earlier silent cartoons. The two went on to launch a line of "Silly Symphonies" cartoons. Shortly after that he joined Ub Iwerks when Iwerks formed his own studio (although Disney was a major client of theirs). But when Iwerks' studio was absorbed by Leon Schlesinger (in 1936), Stalling began a run of an estimated 1000 cartoon scores over the next two decades.
Stalling had an amazing talent for writing scores that he could mentally synchronize to an animation script. That's not completely impossible; unlike live action films, animation scripts are plotted out to the second in order to estimate the total number of frames and therefore man-hours to draw and shoot them. Since Stalling would conduct the recording sessions he could certain that the music would be played at the tempo he intended. So, not impossible, just inhumanly difficult. To produce score at this pace, Stalling drew on his experience playing live and spontaneously over silent movies. His 'compositions' were often patchworks of quotes from classical works both well-known and rarely heard elsewhere, mixed with hooks from popular songs of the day. His own original writing linked one to the next creating the illusion of these unrelated parts being conceived as a whole work. A real godsend for Stalling was the emergence of Raymond Scott in 1937. Scott had been the pianist in his brother's band but the lively evocative pieces he wrote, while popular with audiences, were murder on musicians accustomed to improvisation and looser arrangements. They required precision. So, Scott formed a "quintette" (not counting himself) and rehearsed them relentlessly. The results were regular radio appearances and numerous records. He spent most of World War II as the music director for the CBS Radio Network and by the time he left for Broadway he had gotten enough of his compositions on the air to provide Stalling with the quotes and cues for over 100 Warner Bros. cartoons.
The music on this CD is played by The Beau Hunks Sextette, a Dutch ensemble originally formed to reconstruct and perform the lost scores to Hal Roach films (their name comes from a Laurel & Hardy film). They went on to record them and when they decided to remain a performing entity in their own right, the first composer they tackled outside the original project was Raymond Scott. Their first album of Scott music was "Celebration On The Planet Mars", released after Scott's death in 1994. For some reason, on the original Dutch release the band is identified as The Wooden Indians, but when this album, "Manhattan Minuet", came out in 1996 on the Basta label, it also reissued the 1994 with the Beau Hunks name. According to the liner notes, the recording was done with the cooperation of the Preservation Committee of the Raymond Scott Archives, whose advisory board includes several musical luminaries: Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), David Harrington (Kronos Quartet), Dick Hyman, Robert Moog, Andy Partridge (XTC), Henry Rollins and Hal Willner.
Sharp eyed comics fans have already recognized the artist responsible for the distinctive art on these scans, the primary reason for including this CD on the post. I'll quote the last two paragraphs of the booklet.
The Acme Novelty Library was a phenomenon of craft intersecting art in the 1990's that is unlikely to ever be equaled, certainly not in my lifetime. The first ten issues alternated size and shape so radically from one issue to the next that I pity any collector trying to track them down in their original forms. It then briefly became a series of thin paperbacks of uniform size, then hardcovers. Ware's projects have been few and far between in the past decade, peppered by occasional New Yorker covers. I don't know if that's just to keep a toe in, or to maintain name recognition or if Françoise Mouly has nude pictures of him. But when a project does surface, like 2012's "Building Stories", it turns heads and occasionally even induces hernias. I love Ware's stuff and would pick up oddball items simply because they had unique art of his. I can't know when I'll next come across some, but when I do I'll make a point of sharing some images with you.
 |
| Booklet cover. |
On a good day you could be lucky enough to watch Fleischer Studios stuff, although you never saw Superman or Betty Boop except on PBS. Popeye was often what made it into syndication packages. If you were unlucky it was the Popeye cartoons from the early 1960's and you got a little more fresh air that day. MGM's "Tom and Jerry" and anything by Tex Avery made life worth living, but the Warner's stuff for some reason always had the best music. They even came out under imprints called "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes". The secret was Carl Stalling. After Walt Disney completed "Steamboat Willie", the first synchronized sound cartoon, he hired Stalling (who played music live in theaters over silent movies) to retrofit music onto two earlier silent cartoons. The two went on to launch a line of "Silly Symphonies" cartoons. Shortly after that he joined Ub Iwerks when Iwerks formed his own studio (although Disney was a major client of theirs). But when Iwerks' studio was absorbed by Leon Schlesinger (in 1936), Stalling began a run of an estimated 1000 cartoon scores over the next two decades.
 |
| Inner side of jewel case inlay card. |
Stalling had an amazing talent for writing scores that he could mentally synchronize to an animation script. That's not completely impossible; unlike live action films, animation scripts are plotted out to the second in order to estimate the total number of frames and therefore man-hours to draw and shoot them. Since Stalling would conduct the recording sessions he could certain that the music would be played at the tempo he intended. So, not impossible, just inhumanly difficult. To produce score at this pace, Stalling drew on his experience playing live and spontaneously over silent movies. His 'compositions' were often patchworks of quotes from classical works both well-known and rarely heard elsewhere, mixed with hooks from popular songs of the day. His own original writing linked one to the next creating the illusion of these unrelated parts being conceived as a whole work. A real godsend for Stalling was the emergence of Raymond Scott in 1937. Scott had been the pianist in his brother's band but the lively evocative pieces he wrote, while popular with audiences, were murder on musicians accustomed to improvisation and looser arrangements. They required precision. So, Scott formed a "quintette" (not counting himself) and rehearsed them relentlessly. The results were regular radio appearances and numerous records. He spent most of World War II as the music director for the CBS Radio Network and by the time he left for Broadway he had gotten enough of his compositions on the air to provide Stalling with the quotes and cues for over 100 Warner Bros. cartoons.
 |
| Outer side of jewel case inlay card. |
The music on this CD is played by The Beau Hunks Sextette, a Dutch ensemble originally formed to reconstruct and perform the lost scores to Hal Roach films (their name comes from a Laurel & Hardy film). They went on to record them and when they decided to remain a performing entity in their own right, the first composer they tackled outside the original project was Raymond Scott. Their first album of Scott music was "Celebration On The Planet Mars", released after Scott's death in 1994. For some reason, on the original Dutch release the band is identified as The Wooden Indians, but when this album, "Manhattan Minuet", came out in 1996 on the Basta label, it also reissued the 1994 with the Beau Hunks name. According to the liner notes, the recording was done with the cooperation of the Preservation Committee of the Raymond Scott Archives, whose advisory board includes several musical luminaries: Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo), David Harrington (Kronos Quartet), Dick Hyman, Robert Moog, Andy Partridge (XTC), Henry Rollins and Hal Willner.
Sharp eyed comics fans have already recognized the artist responsible for the distinctive art on these scans, the primary reason for including this CD on the post. I'll quote the last two paragraphs of the booklet.
The Acme Novelty Library was a phenomenon of craft intersecting art in the 1990's that is unlikely to ever be equaled, certainly not in my lifetime. The first ten issues alternated size and shape so radically from one issue to the next that I pity any collector trying to track them down in their original forms. It then briefly became a series of thin paperbacks of uniform size, then hardcovers. Ware's projects have been few and far between in the past decade, peppered by occasional New Yorker covers. I don't know if that's just to keep a toe in, or to maintain name recognition or if Françoise Mouly has nude pictures of him. But when a project does surface, like 2012's "Building Stories", it turns heads and occasionally even induces hernias. I love Ware's stuff and would pick up oddball items simply because they had unique art of his. I can't know when I'll next come across some, but when I do I'll make a point of sharing some images with you.
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