Unsung Giants of Modern Music (III): Carl Stalling

Growing up, like most children of my generation, I was crazy for Saturday morning cartoons. Whether it was The Snorks, Monchichi, or Laugh-a-lympics, I was obsessed. For what reasons, I can’t say, the greater majority of cartoons from the era were garbage. But, the saving grace of the cartoons at this time (and I knew they were better then), despite the fact that they were fifty years old, were the Warner Bros. cartoons, the Looney Tunes. The animation was basic and understandable, the characters were fun (even if I couldn’t get the extent of their references), and the kinetic action was more violent than other cartoons of the time. The part of these shorts, however, though I wouldn’t come to understand until much later though, that sets these apart from anything produced before or since is the music, written and conducted by Carl Stalling, a maverick and forward-looking artist who has rarely, if ever, been matched in style or tone.

Stalling began his career in the early 1920s as an organist and small orchestra conductor at a local theater in Kansas City accompanying silent film. This would clearly have a great influence on him and, in the mid-‘20s, he got together with a young Walt Disney to write music for Disney’s early sound cartoons. Stalling developed the Silly Symphonies series with Disney but, in 1936, was wooed away to Warner Brothers, which was beginning to include cartoons before their films and he became their number one full-time animation composer. For Warner Bros, Stalling produced scores for more than 600 cartoons over both the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes monikers between 1936 and his retirement in 1958. This averages over 27 scores per year over his entire career, which makes him one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century.

He wrote his compositions at the same frenetic pace as both the tempo of the music and the action on screen and, in fact, the cartoons were contrived with what were called “click tracks,” that is, physical marks made on the film to act as a kind of metronome that indicated where changes would occur in the music. Stalling has been (dubiously) credited with the invention of the click track, though this is likely not the case. Still, the changes in the music happen at a rate that foreshadowed the tape and computer music that would become popular in avant-garde circles in the 1950s and 60s as well as some of the extreme jazz that has arisen in recent years.

Stalling has been in the public eye (or ear) consistently on television for 40 years, if innocuously behind the scenes, giving three generations of cartoon fans an education in jazz, classical, and folk music that they never asked for. How many people hear and recognize Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood,” or the traditional “Little Brown Jug” even if they’ve never been told what the song is? The recognition is instant and, moreover, the recognition is directly tied to an image. “Powerhouse” represents industrial action, “Morning Music” (obviously) represents waking up and stretching, and “Little Brown Jug” represents drunks. These songs, and a mind-boggling number of others, are referenced throughout the catalogue by what Stalling called “musical puns,” in which he would insert snippets of songs both classic and modern into his original music. For him and his original audience, these references would have been more instantly recognized for what they were than they are now, but it would be the same if a film composer added a few notes from “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” for no reason other than the association that it would bring and the comment it would add to the action onscreen. This was unprecedented at the time but, more than that, has never been repeated in mainstream soundtracks or popular music. The technique is occasionally used by John Zorn in his “Naked City” and “Spillane” projects, and by Mike Patton in his work with Fantomas, but this usage is a direct reference by artists who site Stalling as a huge influence. DJ’s, of course, use the method consistently, though it’s hard to say whether there is any direct correlation or a happy coincidence that always helped me greatly in accessing the style. Often unmentioned is his ability, beyond the borrowings, to write masterful and timeless themes for the onscreen characters that are worthy of any film composer at any time. His method in this has its roots in opera, where each principle character would have his or her own key and melody and where changes in key in relation to the action would indicate changes in the character.

All of this gels into one of the most unique composers of the 20th century. Unfortunately, bare recordings of most of his scores are non-existent. The sum of his work on CD encompasses a grand total of two releases. TWO!!!!! Only one of these contains any full scores, the other being mostly montages, medleys, and studio footage (interesting, but not very telling of the greatness of the final product). I had hoped for years that more volumes of The Carl Stalling Project would be released, but have since given up. It’s an interesting experiment, on this note, to try and both watch the cartoons without the sound and the music without the visuals. In the former, the cartoons are decidedly less funny and sometimes unwatchable. In the latter, the music becomes wackier, more frenetic and, in many ways, much more profound as, like many great film compositions, the expressions present in the music allows the mind to build images that cannot exist when given direct visual reference.