LPH 018 - The Complete Road Runner Scores 1949-1958

[Infinity in Sound, 2008 / Lucky Psychic Hut, 2011; #018]


Music and sound effects from the classic Warner Bros. cartoons directed by Chuck Jones.


tracklist:

01. Fast and Furry-ous (1949)
02. Beep, Beep (1952)
03. Going! Going! Gosh! (1952)
04. Zipping Along (1953)
05. Stop! Look! and Hasten! (1954)
06. Ready, Set, Zoom! (1955)
07. Guided Muscle (1955)
08. Gee Whiz-z-z-z (1956)
09. There They Go-Go-Go (1956)
10. Scrambled Aches (1957) - late start
11. Zoom and Bored (1957)
12. Whoa, Be-Gone! (1958)

total time: 79'14


Music composed by Carl W. Stalling, exc.
8 + 12 by Milt Franklyn,
10 + 11 by Carl W. Stalling + Milt Franklyn.
Orchestra conducted by Carl W. Stalling.
Sound effects by Tregoweth "Treg" Brown.
Coyote voice by Mel Blanc, 'Road Runner' archive sound by Paul Julian.


Jetted + ripped from the cartoons by Lucky.
Dedicated to John Zorn, Hal Willner and David Shea.

Stalling's "[...] working process was fascinating, showing the careful attention to music with which each cartoon was drawn. Before animation, he met with a cartoon's director in order to set the time signatures to which the short was to be drawn. Instead of counting the beats per measure or beats per minute, cartoon animators counted in frames per beat. After animation, Stalling received either the animator's exposure sheets or bar sheets, which broke the animation, dialogue, and sound effects into musical bars for Stalling to score from. For his compositions, Stalling employed musical puns by using popular songs whose titles fit on-screen gags, sometimes for no more than four seconds. This came naturally to Stalling who, as John Zorn puts it, 'had an Ivesian sense of quotation'.

Often, themes from Warner Bros. live-action films would be played for under four seconds before mutating into an original Stalling piece. The average cue (the unedited period between the commencement and end of a single musical take) was at most two minutes, and at the lower end of the spectrum, two seconds. Most of Stalling's scores were a weight 500 measures comprised of ten sections, all performed by the Warner Bros. fifty-piece orchestra, who were challenged and taxed far more than they were when they performed undemanding scores for some of Warner Bros. feature live-action films. [...]

Stalling's work called to mind composers who had a cartoon sensibility and composed with visual images in mind - from Claude Debussy to jazz stylists like Zez Confrey, Red Norvo, Spike Jones, John Kirby, and, especially, Raymond Scott. Stalling relied so heavily on the 1930s music of Scott, particularly the fast and wacky 'Powerhouse' theme that accompanied so many conveyor-belt and chase scenes, that Scott is often considered a cartoon composer himself, although he never intended his highly visual and idiosyncratic swing-based pieces to be used as such. [...]

Milt Franklyn replaced Stalling when he retired in 1958, having already worked as Stalling's arranger for years. He was followed by William Lava in the early 1960s. Though Lava's scores were not as polished as Stalling's, he did add other musical influences, such as world music, to the cartoons. Serving as musical copyist and occasional orchestrator during and after the Stalling years was Eugene Poddany, who later directed the music for a number of Ted Geisel (or Dr. Seuss) classics, which were directed by Chuck Jones. Treg Brown was in charge of the sound effects for the cartoons under all of these composers. Sound effects people like Brown became, in many ways, an adjunct to the cartoon compositions process, though there were often battles for whether onscreen action would be accompanied by a musical or sound-effect cue. Like Stalling, Brown was an innovator, often using a sound that was entirely incongruous with the on-screen image, forcing the eye and the ear to send comically contradictory information to the brain. [...]"

(Neil Strauss, from 'Tunes for Toons: A Cartoon Music Primer', issued in "The Cartoon Music Book", edited by Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor; A Cappella Books, Chicago, IL, 2002)