Carl Stalling

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Carl W. Stalling (born November 10, 1891 in Lexington , Missouri , † November 29, 1972 near Los Angeles , California ) was an American film composer who had composed the score for more than 700 cartoons . Stalling wrote the music for Walt Disney's first Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies films and was responsible for the background music for Warner Bros. Looney Tunes from 1936 to 1958 .

Life

Early years

Carl Stalling grew up in Lexington, Missouri. The son of a carpenter learned to play the piano at the age of six , and later he played the church organ in his home parish. At 17, Stalling began a career as a professional pianist in a theater in Independence , Missouri, near the city of Kansas City .

The beginning of the 1920s led Carl Stalling the orchestra in cinema Isis Theater in Kansas City. He improvised on the cinema organ , but was not yet writing his own compositions. In Kansas City, Stalling first met Walt Disney, whom he helped out with the music for some of his Laugh-O-Gram films. When Disney went to Hollywood in 1923 , contact with Stalling initially broke off.

Disney

In the summer of 1928, Walt Disney made a surprise visit to Stalling in Kansas City. Disney was preparing the dubbing of the Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie and spoke to Stalling in general about the possibilities of the sound film . He left Stalling two other Mickey Mouse films, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin 'Gaucho , which were originally produced as silent films but had not yet found a distributor. Stalling wrote the score for these cartoons and followed Disney to New York in October 1928, where the soundtrack for the films was recorded.

After the great success of Steamboat Willie , Disney picked up an idea from Stalling to start a second series of cartoons in addition to the Mickey Mouse series, in which the visual implementation of musical themes should be the focus. Stalling had already proposed a cartoon with dancing skeletons at the first meeting with Walt Disney. Together with Disney and the responsible animator Ub Iwerks , the film The Skeleton Dance was developed from this idea , which was the prelude to the Silly Symphonies film series.

Stalling worked with the cartoonists at Disney to develop a system that enabled the synchronization of music and plot. In the storyboard drawings, the musical rhythm was already specified by marking the individual sheets so that the animators' specifications could be complied with musically when the films were set to music. The precise commentary of the plot through the film music established by Stalling was later referred to as Mickey Mousing .

When Ub Iwerks surprisingly announced his departure from Disney in January 1930 to open his own animation studio, Stalling also announced his departure. Stalling initially worked exclusively at Iwerks on his Flip-the-Frog films. In 1932 Stalling went self-employed and worked as a composer and arranger for various studios. In the meantime he worked again for Disney; Stalling's piano play can be heard in the Oscar- winning short film The Three Little Pigs , also the internationally most successful Silly Symphonies cartoon.

Warner bros.

In July 1936 Carl Stalling was hired by the producer Leon Schlesinger as a composer for his cartoons. Stalling's arrangements were first used in the piggy-dick film Porky's Poultry Plant . While Stalling's music initially only served as background for the cartoons, he quickly developed the sound typical of Looney Tunes , in which the action is amplified and gags are also expressed musically. Stalling's flair for timing ensured that the music could follow the tempo of the plot. Often Stalling put the music together based on the storyboard drawings.

Since Schlesinger had access to the entire Warner Brothers musical catalog, Stalling was able to achieve comic effects by briefly playing familiar melodies. He often combined the musical quotes with his own composed melodies. Stalling's music also corresponded to the style of Looney Tunes , in which a story was rarely developed and instead gags were strung together. To the chagrin of the cartoon directors, Stalling repeated himself very often, so criticized Chuck Jones that he alluded to Allie Wrubel's The Lady in Red every time a female character appeared in a film.

Stalling not only used pop songs for his background music, but also liked to use motifs from classical music . Beginning with the Fantasia parody A Corny Concerto in 1943, several cartoons were made in which operatic motifs were implemented, such as the Bugs Bunny film Rabbit of Seville as a parody of Rossini's Barber of Seville .

For many years, Carl Stalling was the sole composer responsible for the background music for Warner Bros. cartoons. That meant Stalling appeared in more than 50 films each year. The arranger was Milt Franklyn , who rose to the rank of second composer in the early 1950s and eventually succeeded Stalling as musical director of the animation department at Warner Bros.

Carl Stalling's last work was the cartoon To Itch His Own produced by Chuck Jones in 1958 . At this point he had written the score for more than 700 films. Only one film, the Jack Benny comedy The Angel with the Trumpet from 1945, was a feature film.

Carl Stalling spent the last years of his life in Hollywood Hills, where he died on November 29, 1972 at the age of 81. Interest in Stalling as a composer was only reawakened two decades after his death when two CDs of Stalling's music, compiled by Hal Willner , were released.

Music recordings

  • Hal Willner: The Carl Stalling Project: Music From Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1936-1958 . Warner Bros., 1990
  • Hal Willner: The Carl Stalling Project Volume 2: More Music From Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1939–1957 . Warner Bros., 1995

literature

  • Daniel Goldmark: Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon . University of California Press, Berkeley 2005, ISBN 0-520-23617-3 .
  • Michael Barrier: Hollywood Cartoons. American Animation in its Golden Age . Oxford University Press, New York 2003, ISBN 978-0-19-516729-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Barrier: Hollywood Cartoons , p. 57.
  2. ^ Robin Beauchamp: Designing Sound for Animation . Focal, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 0-240-80733-2 , p. 44.
  3. ↑ Michael Barrier: Hollywood Cartoons , p. 101.
  4. ^ Daniel Goldmark: Tunes for 'Toons , p. 20.
  5. ↑ Michael Barrier: Hollywood Cartoons , p. 339.
  6. ^ Daniel Goldmark: Tunes for 'Toons , p. 17.
  7. ↑ Joe Adamson: Chuck Jones Interviewed . In: The American Animated Cartoon . EP Dutton, New York 1980, p. 135.
personal data
SURNAME Stalling, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stalling, Carl W .; Stallings, Carl W .; Stallings, Carl; Stawwing, Cawl W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Lexington , Missouri, United States
DATE OF DEATH November 29, 1972
Place of death near Los Angeles , California, United States