Happy harmonies: Music and the Hollywood animated cartoon

Like all forms of music in media, music in cartoons enlarges the viewing experience by telling audiences what is happening and how they should feel. The brevity of animated shorts ensures a close relationship between the score and the animation, giving rise to a scoring style that can indicate emotion or action instantaneously before the story moves on to the next gag. Happy Harmonies presents four case studies of the role and lasting significance of music from cartoons produced during the Hollywood studio era, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. Two of the chapters deal specifically with issues of musical genre. Jazz and classical music each holds a particularly prominent place in the cartoon universe. Stylistic traits of both genres constitute a significant portion of the overall "sound" of cartoon scores, which typically use a combination of traditional, Romantic-era melodic idioms with jazz-inspired harmonies and driving rhythmic lines. Because animated shorts of the Hollywood studio era placed such a great emphasis on music as a plot device, aspects of the culture of the two genres also recur; storylines related to jazz's African-American stars repeatedly arise, while the culture of the concert hall offers a rich base for lampoons. The remaining two chapters focus on the craft of writing music for cartoons, detailing the very different approaches to scoring practiced by the two most influential composers in the field. Carl Stalling scores are dominated by his penchant for telling stories through the titles of known pieces of music (a practice derived from his days as a silent film accompanist), yet he could craft each song to match the mood of the cartoon and convey the proper sense of rhythm as well. Scott Bradley, who had classical training as a composer, looked at the cartoon as a site for original, innovative music, and thus he resisted the use of popular music. He adopted contemporary composing idioms to make his scores more stimulating musically and to wed them more closely to the visual action.