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Stalling, Carl
STALLING, CarlComposer. Nationality: American. Career: 1920s—accompanist for silent films; 1928—musical director at Walt Disney's studios; 1931–36—employed by Ub Iwerks's studio; 1936–57—musical director for Warner Bros. cartoons. Died: 29 November 1972. Films as Musical Director:
PublicationsBy STALLING: article—Velvet Light Trap (Madison, Wisconsin), no. 15, Fall 1975. On STALLING: articles—Funnyworld, no. 13, Spring 1971. Soundtrack! (Hollywood), March 1991. Filmfax, no. 34, August-September 1992. Film Comment, vol. 28, September-October 1992. Animatrix (Los Angeles), no. 7, 1993. Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), May 1995. * * * "I love music," said Warners' animator Friz Freleng. "Music inspires my visual thinking. I time my cartoons to music . . . everything is done rhythmically." Musical director Carl Stalling was one of the unsung "back-room boys" of the Golden Age of the Hollywood cartoon from around 1930–60, working in a medium where even the directors and animators (and Stalling, especially at Warner Bros., worked with the best) have only recently begun to receive the acclaim their brilliant creations deserve. Stalling broke into the movie business in the 1920s in time-honoured fashion accompanying silent movies and conducting theatre orchestras, principally in Kansas City. It was here that he met Walt Disney, who hired him as musical director in 1928 as the age of sound was about to dawn. The importance of Carl Stalling's musical contribution to the success of the Mickey Mouse cartoons and other early Disney work should not be underestimated. Animation and music fused in these cartoons, the visual rhythm of movement and the punchlines of gags dancing to the beats of the soundtrack. Without music, reaction to the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons (Plane Crazy and Gallopin' Gaucho) had been disappointing but the introduction of Stalling's music to the third cartoon, Steamboat Willie, transformed the situation. It was Stalling, also, who proposed the idea for the 1929 classic Skeleton Dance and launched the "Silly Symphonies" series for Disney. A period in the early 1930s working for animator Ub Iwerks (who poached Stalling from Disney when he left to form his own studio) produced little opportunity for Stalling to shine (Iwerks' own cartoons were not outstanding) but this changed when Stalling joined Warners in 1936 after the failure of Iwerks' studio. At Warner Bros., Stalling not only had brilliant cartoons to work on but also, thanks to the studio's ownership of several music publishers, access to a catalogue of hundreds of popular tunes. His grounding in the work of the masters of the clever tune/apt lyric brigade gave his arrangements an incredible diversity—light, graceful and witty—which complemented the on-screen action without ever distracting from it. He was helped considerably by an incredible recall which allowed him to select titles suited to the action or image, a facility which Chuck Jones referred to as "his computer." This helped Stalling in keeping up with the pace of work imposed at Warners where, as the principal person scoring for each of the cartoon "teams," he would often have to come up with an entire six-minute cartoon score every week. Along with the sound-effects of Treg Brown, Stalling's scores became an integral part of the output. The reflex selection of music according to a title related to what was on-screen did, however, run the risk of descending into cliché. "Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't," said Jones, before adding that "it didn't mean anything because nobody knew the damn songs even then." This is only partly true, since even if Warner Bros. fans didn't know the titles, Stalling's method meant they came to recognize the tunes! The swingtime of "Powerhouse" became the hallmark for any mechanical activity, "California, Here I Come" accompanied trains going anywhere, and all games became jazzed up contests played out to "Freddie the Freshman." Stalling had a particular soft spot for the catchy, energetic work of Raymond Scott (who wrote "Powerhouse," as well as such cartoony titles as "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner" and "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals") though he would latch onto anything with a crazy title, clearing the rights to songs such as "They Gotta Quit Kickin' My Dog Around," "Honey Bunny Boo," "Huckleberry Duck," "The Girl-Friend of the Whirling Dervish" and "Go Get the Ax." The logic Stalling applied in his selection of music often, in fact, mirrored the remorseless extensions of logic which underlay the cartoon mayhem on screen which would take things and stretch them or put them in an oddball context. Stalling's efforts even earned the praise of the famous writer and critic James Agee for his pastiche of Lizst in the 1946 cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit: "A good musician must have worked on this . . . I have never seen anything done from so deep inside the ham." If Stalling's musical eclecticism (ragtime, swing, the classics and just about any kind of popular ditty) let him down, it was only with faster jazz of the late 1940s and 1950s, when occasionally directors would bring in an outsider for a soundtrack (e.g. in Mouse Mazurka (1949) Friz Freleng turned to jazzman Shorty Rogers for music). The pressure under which he had to work may have dictated his reliance on borrowing and playing with the work of others—as did the desire to pastiche everything which hung in the air on the Warners' cartoon lot—but Stalling was also a consummate musician, well able to compose his own themes or songs when the opportunity arose. Bugs' theme song, "What's Up, Doc?," was composed by Stalling in 1944 and saw the light of day to marvelous effect in the great rabbit's 1950 spoof bio-pic of the same name. Footage of this number, with Bugs doing terrible things to a deadpan Elmer, later appeared in Peter Bogdanovich's 1972 feature film What's Up, Doc?. If Stalling's contribution in his 20 years at Warners' was a backdrop to the on-screen pyrotechnics it was an important one. An actor needs a platform to act upon and Stalling's music provided part of that platform. He was brilliant at adapting a staggering range of musical material to back up the cartoons' comic pace, mimicking the referential gifts of the animators with his own musical one. Chuck Jones has called Stalling "probably the most inventive musician who ever worked in animation," but perhaps he was only obeying the rarely heeded advice of producer Leon Schlesinger: "Hit 'em with the fast music." —Norman Miller |
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Cite this article
"Stalling, Carl." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. 30 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Stalling, Carl." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (May 30, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406802610.html "Stalling, Carl." International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. 2001. Retrieved May 30, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406802610.html |
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Stalling, Carl
Carl StallingComposer, musical director, keyboardist Carl Stalling was a composer best known for his work on animated films for Disney and Warner Brothers studios during what is now known as the Golden Age of the cartoon. He was responsible for scoring some of the earliest cartoons at Disney, and is credited with numerous innovations he made in the field throughout his career. Between 1936 and 1958 alone, he was responsible for scoring an estimated 600 cartoons for Warner's Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies. August Kleinzahler, writing in Slate in 2003, called him "an authentic American genius, an original … as important, in his way, as Ives, Copland, Cage, Partch, and Ellington." Stalling attributed his great love for film from having seen the film The Great Train Robbery when he was five years old. "It made such an impression on me," he said in an interview reprinted in the Cartoon Music Book, "that from then on I had only one desire in life: to be connected with the movies in some way." His first instrument was a battered toy piano that his father, a carpenter, had repaired. He took his first piano lessons at the age of six and was playing church organs by the age of eight. By age 13 Stalling was playing piano between reels at the local movie house. Stalling's musical career in the 1920s was spent as an accompanist and director in silent movie houses in the Kansas City area. Sound had not yet become a part of film. Each theater typically had its own orchestra that performed live for each showing of a movie. Scores were improvised from books containing thematic musical material or ideas categorized by mood, rather than set pieces. The skills learned in this setting served Stalling well throughout his career. Walt Disney saw him directing an orchestra and playing organ at the Isis Theatre during this time. The two initiated a correspondence when Disney left for Hollywood, and Disney later hired Stalling as musical director for his new film studio in 1928—just as sound was poised to become an integral part of film. The earliest cartoons had no music, but Stalling would change that. He was asked to provide a score for shorts featuring a new cartoon character, that of Mickey Mouse. "Animation and music fused in these cartoons, the visual rhythm of movement and the punchlines of gags dancing to the beats of the soundtrack," according to the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. "It was Stalling, also, who proposed the idea for the 1929 classic The Skeleton Dance and launched the Silly Symphonies series for Disney." In all, he scored about 15 film shorts for the studio. He also had one line as Mickey Mouse in 1930's Wild Waves, and provided the singing voice for a walrus in that same short. While at Disney, Stalling invented a system for cartoon music scoring. At the heart of this was the so-called "tick system." Like a metronome, each earphone-wearing musician in the orchestra heard a constant beat that allowed them "to synchronize the music more precisely to the action," according to Kleinzahler. The system was first used for The Skeleton Dance. In a 1969 interview, Stalling soft-pedaled the importance of his innovation. "The 'tick' system was not really an invention, since it was not patentable," he said. "Perfect synchronization of music for cartoons was a problem, since there were so many quick changes and action that the music had to match. The thought struck me that if each member of the orchestra had a steady beat in his ear, from a telephone receiver, this would solve the problem. I had exposure sheets for the films, with the picture broken down frame by frame, sort of like a script, and twelve of the film frames went through the projector in a half second. That gave us a beat…. Each member of the orchestra had a single earphone, and listened to the clicks through that." This technique is now known as a click track, and is commonly used in studio music recording. Stalling left Disney in 1930 to work at Aesop's Fables Studio in New York, a short-lived job where he was paid three times what he had been earning, but for which he did little. In retrospect, Stalling noted that this had been a competitor's ploy to undermine Disney. He went to work for Ub Iwerks for six months in 1931 on his "Flip the Frog" series. The two had been friends while working for Disney. "We were all very good friends, Walt and Roy [Disney], Ub and I," he said. "My leaving turned out better for Walt and it turned out better for me." Stalling then worked on the Three Little Pigs and several other Disney cartoons as a freelance arranger and musician. He returned to Iwerks in 1933, and when Iwerks's studio folded in 1936 Stalling found a lasting home with Warner, where he would work for the remainder of his career. Stalling would typically be responsible for one six-minute long score a week. "I just imagined myself playing for a cartoon in the theatre, improvising, and it came easier," he said in a 1969 interview. "Stalling would write the piano parts of the score—the skeleton—and include the cues he wanted and special notations with regard to instrumentation," wrote Kleinzahler. "He was blessed with a brilliant arranger in Milt Franklyn and an equally brilliant sound-effects man in Treg Brown, something of a comic genius in his own right." The process typically took about seven or eight days to compose, about three hours to record. Stalling had a 50-piece orchestra of eager musicians at his disposal. Stalling borrowed bits and pieces from various musical sources, including classical music and popular songs. Warner owned several music publishers, making a large catalogue available for use. "The pressure under which he had to work may have dictated his reliance on borrowing and playing with the work of others," according to the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers. "But Stalling was also a consummate musician, well able to compose his own themes or songs when the opportunity arose." John Zorn, the avant garde composer-musician, noted in an interview with Philip Brophy that appeared in the Cartoon Music Book that Stalling was not the first composer to undertake composition in this manner. "Although he used elements and melodies from Scott, it's not unlike the way Charles Ives used American folk themes. Stalling's sense of time, his sense of narrative, completely revolutionized the idea of musical development. This was before the post-modern experiments. He created something completely new." Warner came to the fore as an animation studio in the 1940s. The animators he hired still remain atop the pantheon: Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson, and Frank Tashlin. They created the now-iconic characters of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, "as well as a brand of anarchic comedy far removed from Disney's gentility," observed Jason Ankeny, writing for All Music Guide. Mel Blanc, the voice-over genius, completed the team. In creating a score, Stalling would select music according to the on-screen action. For example, this included using snippets of "California, Here I Come" when trains were in the action, or "How Dry I Am" when characters were drunk, and "The Lady in Red" for Bugs Bunny in drag. In one Road Runner cartoon, for example, a chase was viewed from overhead, taking place in a cloverleaf pattern, and the score switched to "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover." "Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't," said Jones. When it worked it engendered praise, including that of James Agee, the noted critic, who said of Stalling's use of Franz Lizst in Rhapsody Rabbit, "A good musician must have worked on this…. I have never seen anything done from so deep inside the ham." In the latter days of his career, observed Will Friedwald in an essay on Stalling in the Cartoon Music Book, "Stalling could transmit a musical joke or idea with an ever-decreasing number of notes." "The modern cartoon, and especially the Hollywood cartoon from the Golden Age of Animation, relies so much on music that it is truly difficult to conceive what they might have been like without a soundtrack," wrote Daniel Goldmark in Animation World Magazine. "Carl Stalling was, without a doubt, the most skilled and clever composer of cartoon music Hollywood ever had. … He essentially created the sound that most fans of animated shorts know as, simply, 'cartoon music.'" "Having established the musical conventions for cartoons, Stalling basically had an influence on every cartoon composer since his run at Warner Bros.," stated Goldmark. "He was also a master at telling a story through music, with gestures and nuances so clear, that there is never any doubt as to his intentions. If you don't believe me, go turn on your television and watch some Looney Tunes. … I guarantee you will know exactly what is happening, and to whom. This was the comedic skill of Carl Stalling." For the Record …Born on November 10, 1891, in Lexington, MO; died on November 25, 1974, near Los Angeles, CA. Began playing piano, c. 1897; played piano between reels at local movie house, c. 1910; accompanist and orchestra leader for silent films in Kansas City area, c. 1918-28; hired as musical director at Walt Disney studios, 1928-30; hired away by Aesop's Fables Studio, 1930; worked at Ub Iwerks's studio, 1931, 1933-36; worked intermittently for Disney as arranger and musician, 1931-33; musical director for Warner Brothers cartoons, 1936-58. Stalling's last score was for 1958's To Itch His Own, after which he retired. He had been the only composer the studio had for its cartoons until his departure. Stalling died in 1974 at the age of 86. After his death, Warner released two compact discs of Stalling's music, titled The Carl Stalling Project. Selected discographyThe Carl Stalling Project, Volume 1, Warner, 1990. The Carl Stalling Project, Volume 2, Warner, 1995. That's All Folks!—Cartoon Songs from Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes, Rhino, 2001. Selected film compositionsFor DisneyThe Barn Dance, 1928. Gallopin' Gaucho, 1928. Plane Crazy, 1928. The Skeleton Dance, 1928. The Merry Dwarfs, 1929. The Op'ry House, 1929. When the Cat's Away, 1929. Springtime, 1930. Wild Waves, 1930. For Warner Bros.Porky's Poultry Plant, 1936. The Village Smithy, 1936. Picador Porky, 1937. Little Red Walking Hood, 1937. Sniffles Takes a Trip, 1940. Little Blabbermouse, 1940. Bedtime for Sniffles, 1940. Sniffles Bells the Cat, 1941. The Brave Little Bat, 1941. Rhapsody in Rivets, 1941. Inki and the Minah Bird, 1941. Little Red Riding Rabbit, 1944. What's Cookin', Doc?, 1944. Stage Door Cartoon, 1944. Odor-able Kitty, 1945. Baseball Bugs, 1946. Rhapsody Rabbit, 1946. I Taw a Putty Tat, 1948. Mouse Wreckers, 1949. Mutiny on the Bunny, 1950. What's Up, Doc?, 1950. Rabbit of Seville, 1950. Putty Tat Trouble, 1951. Beep, Beep, 1952. Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, 1953. Jumpin' Jupiter, 1955. Speedy Gonzales, 1955. Cheese It, the Cat, 1957. To Itch His Own, 1958. SourcesBooksGoldmark, Daniel, and Yuval Taylor, editors, Cartoon Music Book, Da Capo, 2002. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 4: Writers and Production Artists, St. James, 1996. Online"Carl Stalling," All Music Guide,http://www.allmusic.com (June 3, 2004). "Carl Stalling and Humor in Cartoons," Animation World Magazine,http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/goldmark2.1.html (June 3, 2004). "The Mickey Mouse Genius," Slate,http://slate.msn.com/id/2092021/ (June 3, 2004). —Linda Dailey Paulson |
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Cite this article
"Stalling, Carl." Contemporary Musicians. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. 30 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "Stalling, Carl." Contemporary Musicians. 2005. Encyclopedia.com. (May 30, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3430300063.html "Stalling, Carl." Contemporary Musicians. 2005. Retrieved May 30, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3430300063.html |
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