john zorn painted bird
The atypical advantage of growing up in the 1950s was actuality able to watch Looney Toons on television. But the accouchement of today charge no best feel culturally deprived. Now, with the absolution of The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a alternative of archetypal Looney Tunes, kiddies everywhere, by alone acute a button, may accretion access into a actual Age of Pericles—cartoonwise, that is.
But it's not aloof the activity of the cartoons that's so good. It's the man who composed their music. You apparently accept never heard of him, and if you go attractive for his name in the compendia of music—whether jazz, classical, popular—you'll be absurd to acquisition him. He is, however, an accurate American genius, an original; if you were to apprehend alike a few confined of any of his agreeable compositions you would admit the antecedent immediately.
"Putty Tat Trouble" His name is Carl Stalling. And from 1936, back he absorbed up with Warner Bros., until his retirement in 1958, he wrote the agreeable array for 600 cartoons. As the musicmaker of Merrie Melodies and Looney Toons, Stalling is as important, in his way, as Ives, Copland, Cage, Partch, and Ellington; his best notable compositions accommodate "Putty Tat Trouble," "Porky's Poultry Plant," "Speedy Gonzales Meets Two Crows From Tacos," "To Itch His Own," and hundreds more.
Walt Disney apparent Stalling in the aboriginal '20s at Kansas City's Isis Theater, area Stalling was administering his own orchestra and improvising on the agency to bashful movies. Stalling would accept been in his aboriginal 30s then. Born in Lexington, Mo., he saw The Great Train Robbery projected in a covering back he was 5. From that point on, he was absorbed on motion pictures. By the time he was 13, he had become citizen pianist at the archaic bounded cine abode area he played during reel changes.
"Dough for the Dodo" Disney had Stalling account two activated shorts for a new appearance called Mickey Mouse. Back Disney set up his flat in Hollywood, he brought Stalling alternating with him. Stalling invented action scoring, which included a "tick" system, whereby alone associates of the orchestra were provided with earphones through which they heard a abiding exhausted and, on one occasion, the articulation of Mickey, and which accustomed them to accord the music added absolutely to the action.
Stalling's detractors sometimes alarm what he invented "musical mickey-mousing"—that is, alone a description of beheld events. But he had abounding admirers, not atomic the appalling avant-gardist John Zorn:
In afterward the beheld argumentation of awning activity rather than the acceptable rules of agreeable anatomy (development, theme, variation, etc.), Stalling created a abolitionist compositional arc aberrant in the history of music. … All the basal agreeable elements are there—but they are burst into shards, a consistently alteration kaleidoscope of styles, forms, melodies, quotations. …
"My Bunny Lies Over the Sea" In a sense, then, Carl Stalling was, amid the aboriginal of the postmodernists—if not the first. His compositions are berserk disjunctive, accumulation bounce shifts, alloyed genres (folk motifs, classical, jazz, nursery rhymes), complete effects, acceleration of transition. He artlessly moves from a stormy, anomalous area to a canal solo, maybe throwing in a citation from a applesauce accepted or Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee." He was actual addicted (some ability say too fond) of commendation from bandleader, pianist, and artisan Raymond Scott, who recorded some notable change pieces with a flat quintet amid 1936 and 1938—tunes like "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," a Stalling favorite. But Stalling was annihilation if not avid and autonomous in his appropriation back it ill-fitted the action. For instance, Mendelsohn's "Fingal's Cave" fabricated a acceptable bout with the Mynah Bird's airing in Chuck Jones' "Inki" cartoons.
"Speedy Gonzalez" Alike with all the quotations from Scott, classical music, and so forth, some 80 percent to 90 percent of the actual was original; it had to be accurately akin to the action. Stalling had a 60-piece orchestra to assignment with at Warner Bros., and by all accounts the musicians looked advanced to the sessions, abnormally amid Bette Davis and Bogart melodramas. Stalling would address the piano genitalia of the score—the skeleton—and accommodate the cues he capital and appropriate notations with attention to instrumentation. He was adored with a ablaze arranger in Milt Franklin and an appropriately ablaze sound-effects man in Treg Brown, article of a banana ability in his own right—excellent with breaking glass, etc.
When Stalling died in 1974, at the age of 86, the buzz had continued gone out of American activity with the televised cartoon. Stalling attributed it to the advantage of chat over music. But the conventions of the average had accustomed while at the aforementioned time the artefact had become added diluted. The market, not the artist, bent what was produced. That addiction has not abated. But every average or brand has its heyday, be it the agreeable comedy, dance, the abhorrence movie, or corrective still life. These moments depend on cultural and bread-and-butter forces, accident, a accidental affiliation of geniuses—like thatwhen Disney aboriginal begin Stalling at the Isis Theater. In abbreviate order, Mickey Mouse was the baron of cartoons, Disney Hollywood royalty, and Stalling, who had best out tunes on a burst toy piano as a child, was accouterment the wackiest soundtrack any adolescent or developed dared imagine. The lid was off American activity and would break off for a acceptable continued while.
![Painted Bird - John Zorn (CD) [Digipak] (2016) - imusic.dk](https://www.imusic.dk/gfx/item/image/229/0702397834229/john-zorn-2016-painted-bird-compact-disc.jpg "Painted Bird - John Zorn (CD) [Digipak] (2016) - imusic.dk")
