For most people who grew up enjoying the music in Warner Brothers cartoons on television in the 1960s and 1970s, what stood out were the classical music parodies such as What's Opera, Doc's reduction of the Ring Cycle, and the magnificent Rabbit of Seville. But there have always been oddballs who got a kick out of the ordinary pop music swinging, sliding, and sparking along under the action.

I was one of those as a kid. Watching the cartoons week after week, I started wondering, for example, "What is that little song that always plays when somebody falls into a lot of money?" My father, a natural song encyclopedia, told me that it was the Twenties hit "Lucky Day." I went down to the Philadelphia Free Library to xerox the sheet music, the beginning of a lifetime's delight in, first, vintage pop, and second, the marvelous work of the man who put the Looney Tunes scores together, Carl Stalling. Stalling's musical accompaniment is as deft as Max Steiner's or Ennio Morricone's, and is aural ambrosia besides.

Daniel Goldmark's Tunes for 'Toons is a book-length treatment of Hollywood cartoon musical scoring, and naturally gives Stalling pride of place. Yet Goldmark's take on cartoon music is the rare one that finds fault with Stalling's approach. He enjoys Stalling as much as anyone but considers his reliance on pop tunes a lazy fallback. For Goldmark, Stalling remained always the silent film pianist, endlessly mining the dingdong joke of linking each screen event to a pop tune whose title corresponded to the action.

Goldmark considers the joke not only overused but underpowered. Many of the tunes Stalling used were not timeless standards but merely ephemeral top-forties bonbons or even third-string ditties that never made any major mark, now recognizable only by the elderly or hard-core vintage pop buffs. And even when the cartoons were new, audiences still likely missed the jokes as often as they caught them.

Goldmark's general perspective in the book hinges on the question of how music can be rendered to highlight film narrative. For Goldmark, MGM's Scott Bradley was more artistically advanced than Stalling in this vein. Because MGM owned fewer songs than Warner Brothers, Bradley had to compose more original music for Tom and Jerry and Tex Avery cartoons. Moreover, Bradley, who wrote some concert pieces when on breaks from scoring cat-and-mouse chases, was given to wishing that he were allowed to compose scores that cartoons were built upon rather than the other way around.

Bradley, then, aspired to what was then called "program music," in which classical music was intended to tell a tale along the lines of Gershwin's An American in Paris. Compared to this, we could see Stalling's stringing together of pop tunes as unambitious. Stalling, indeed, wrote no concert pieces and, in an interview near the end of his life, displayed none of Bradley's academic aspiration.

Goldmark's research is impeccable, based on examining Stalling's written scores. He is one of those rare people who can identify even the most arcane of the songs Stalling used, and he documents the roots of Stalling's technique in the books silent film pianists relied on, which gave suggestions as to effective accompaniment. Cartoon music is vastly undercovered, given the effort and the art that have often gone into it, and Goldmark's book is therefore especially welcome.

Yet in the end, my sense from a lifetime of gorging on both Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons is that in terms of making music tell a story, Goldmark undervalues Stalling's achievement and overvalues Bradley's. Stalling did not simply play tunes under the action but reconceived them—and more richly than just "stretching and squeezing" them, as Stalling fans often put it.

For example, in Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944), Stalling scores a chase sequence between Bugs Bunny and the Big Bad Wolf with "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," a novelty tune from the year before in which a woman bemoans the fact that World War II has rendered age-appropriate men unavailable. This is indeed one of Stalling's jokes, in that the other character in the cartoon is a squawky adolescent girl. Likely few viewers caught the joke even at the time—and today, forget it. But even when I myself was a squawky teen and not yet hip to obscuriana such as the name of this song, I always loved the music under the scene just because Stalling scored it so well.

As Bugs and the Wolf go up and down stairs, Stalling has a xylophone figure ascending and descending against the tune to track Bugs' steps while a bassoon does similarly for the Wolf. When the sequence pauses as the Wolf rips away a door and makes himself look doorlike in order to catch Bugs as he goes through, Stalling bides time with two-bar figures from the song's extended coda. As the Wolf slowly raises his paw to whop Bugs, Stalling stretches out the final half-dozen notes of the chorus in a creamy legato voicing of the winds alone, as if to say "Watch ou-u-t…!!"—and then extends the last note to five quick staccato plonks for each boink on the head that Bugs delivers to the Wolf instead.

The passage by itself is as much of a joy to hear as a good big-band arrangement. Stalling's achievement is especially obvious in comparison to his less gifted equivalents, such as the clattering saxophony sludge that Phillip Scheib cranked out under Terrytoons (e.g., Mighty Mouse), or even the journeyman work of men like Winston Sharples for the Popeye and Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons. Stalling elevated a silent film accompanist's trick into magic.

And then, Goldmark overstates the contrast between Stalling's and Bradley's reliance on pop. Bradley was hardly as chary of it as Goldmark tends to imply. A Tom and Jerry cartoon often includes about as many pop tunes as a Looney Tune; where Stalling always played "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You" for an eating sequence, Bradley just as dependably used "Sing Before Breakfast" from MGM's Broadway Melody of 1936, and so on. But even granting that there is a bit more original music in Bradley's work, Stalling wrote plenty of original tunes, too—and was actually the larger artist in this respect than Bradley.

Goldmark, for instance, is especially taken with Bradley's use of a Schoenbergian twelve-tone sequence to accompany Jerry the mouse walking around covered by a fake dog head in Puttin' on the Dog. Point taken, but in the cartoon, this goes by very quickly and is but a whisper amidst the score in its entirety. In this and his other cartoons, the overall impression of Bradley's original music was a considered yet busy shrillness. In the early 1990s, two CDs of Stalling's work were released, and they are still available in stores today. But a CD of Bradley scores, despite being written for cult-fave Tex Avery cartoons, was only available briefly and sank like a stone. The Bradley CD is monotonous and unsatisfying without the pictures. Stalling's music, even by itself, is immediately identifiable as very special.

My favorite example of original Stalling music is for a scene in Putty Tat Trouble, in which Tweety encounters one of those wooden birds placed on the rim of a glass that on its own tips forward into the water and back again. Stalling could have simply played a bit of something or other for this sequence, such as the "Drinking Song" from The Student Prince. Instead, he underscores the bird with a solo cello line that sweetly parallels the bird's tipping forward, bouncing gently on the water a few times, bouncing back a few times, and then coming forward again to repeat the sequence. Tweety, thinking the bird is alive, gamely starts miming it—upon which Stalling adds a solo flute line in elaborate counterpoint to the solo cello.

Of course, to give Bradley his maximal due, he worked at a studio where cartoons were notoriously frenetic and violent—Tom and Jerry beating each other up and Tex Avery's frantic pursuits full of split-second surprises. Rarely did these cartoons pause for ruminative sequences like the dipping bird in Putty Tat Trouble. But in 1941, Bradley got an opportunity to show what he was made of in his ballet Dance of the Weed, for which he composed the score before the cartoon was constructed. And the result demonstrates the limits inherent to music as an independent medium of communication.

The question is, after all, how specifically music can delineate narrative by itself. Music can depict horses galloping in a mimetic rhythmic sense, as Rossini's William Tell overture is now heard because of its recruitment as the theme to The Lone Ranger on the radio and beyond. But how could music depict someone telling us that his mother had it rough but did her best? Dance of the Weed is hemmed in by that kind of limitation—a twee, post-Victorian confection no one cherishes from seeing it on television as a kid.

Goldmark's insights on other topics are useful but reflect certain bugbears of today's ivory tower. For example, we learn that jazz in old cartoons was sometimes intended to signify the primitive essence of black people. True enough, but I am one black American cartoon fan who is unoffended by the jazz entries. The insult is too ancient, broad, and brief to sting, and meanwhile the jazz and the hep goings-on it illustrates are so much fun that it seems more useful to save protestations of racial grievance for more urgent issues. Warner Brothers' Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarves—big surprise—is not a respectful portrait of black American people. But, especially given that no Looney Tune respects anything, we can admit that Coal Black is also one of the most exquisitely vibrant seven minutes in film history.

At the end of the day, for me Stalling will always be the man who—with the assistance of his undersung orchestrator Milt Franklyn—could make a quick chorus of "Camptown Races" under the credits of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon sound like a little story in itself. Maybe announcing the farm setting of the cartoon with a hick tune was an easy "joke," but fifteen seconds like those go a lot further in making life worth living than a ballet of dancing weeds.

John H. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author most recently of Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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