Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Music for Animation: The Golden Years

Mary Ann Skweres looks back over the rich history of music-writing for classic cartoons.

As a child, Daniel Goldmark experienced an earworm -- a tune that sticks in your head. He eventually identified the memorable piece as Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major. As a music major in his early twenties, he had a similar experience with Schubert's Die Erlkonig. Around that time he came to the realization that his familiarity with these musical compositions came from hearing them in numerous cartoons, and that cartoons in fact had given him an eclectic introduction to various styles of music -- "classical, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood film musicals, folk songs from America and around the world, Viennese opera and nineteenth-century American parlor songs, particularly the work of Stephen Foster." This epiphany set Goldmark, currently an Assistant Professor of Music History at Case Western Reserve University, on the path to write Tunes for 'Toons, a book that examines the music written for the Golden Age of Hollywood cartoons -- the period from the 1930s through the 1950s.

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