Carl Stalling – Powerhouse
Much has been made of the fact that, in the 20th century, art turned largely away from a public audience. Modern art was something that needed to be studied to be appreciated and not something that could just be viscerally enjoyed. I once heard it described as the loss of tension, that, previously, the artist had two sources of tension to keep balanced, tension with the medium, and tension with the audience. How to get the most out of technique and material is an ongoing struggle for any artist in any field. And, then, how to use those techniques to communicate with a larger audience is another source of tension. You could be the greatest technician in the world, displaying full mastery over your medium, but if nobody wanted to see/read/listen to your work, you weren’t much of an artist. Well, in the “modern” age (sigh), that no longer seemed to be true. Artists wrestled with their medium – whatever it was – to the seemingly sole satisfaction of themselves and other artists working on the same problems. Representation fell out of favor. There has often been a gulf between what’s popular and what has true artistic merit, but in the past hundred years or so, that gulf has turned into a chasm – to the point that the “artist” often seems downright hostile to the public, who eagerly return the attitude. In fact, it sometimes seems that an artist’s stock rises in direct proportion to his or her inscrutability. If Faulkner was good because he was difficult to read, then Joyce must be greater for writing full-on nonsense.
In no field is this more true than in music. It is well documented that “serious” music in the modern age has become almost entirely unlistenable. What started with Debussy as an exploration of different colors to add to the musical spectrum and the thoughtful relaxing of certain “rules” of composition soon turned into serialism and the grotesque perversion of the composition to a purely academic entity. And this is true in jazz as well as classical, by the way. The Beboppers took music out of the hands of the people and stuck it in the conservatory, where only an advanced and highly specialized education prepared you for being able to appreciate it (actual enjoyment is irrelevant).
There is, however, one great exception. There was one composer who abandoned virtually every rule of composition and yet kept an enraptured audience. There was one man who created some of the most frenetic, difficult to follow, rhythmically complex music with the most extreme tempo, meter, and dynamics shifts imaginable and still fostered an eager audience of millions who hung on his every note. And what’s more, he did it without even drawing attention to himself, slipping some of the most avant garde music imaginable into a seat at the family breakfast table, stealthily opening up Dick and Jane’s ears to a whole world of extreme sonic possibilities. Who is this hero of musical esoterica? Why, none other than Carl Stalling, house composer for the Warner Brothers cartoons for over 20 years. Although the animators get (and deserve) much of the credit for making such wonderful cartoons, the inspired lunacy of the so-called golden age at Warner Brothers is due to a whole collaborative team. Cartoons are pictures, true, but they are pictures with sound, and Carl Stalling – along with “man of a thousand voices” Mel Blanc and sound effects genius Treg Brown – raised the quality of those cartoons immeasurably by their work.
Stalling took the technique that became known as “mickey mousing” – scoring directly to the picture so the music almost becomes another character – and turned it into an art form. And he’s got the perfect credentials to do so, as he was picked out of a silent movie theatre in Kansas City, where he often extemporized to the action on his piano, and invited to score some cartoons by old Walt himself, including Steamboat Mickey, the early sound cartoon that established Walt’s – and Mickey’s – reputation. A few years knocking around Los Angeles led him to the Warner’s lot where he and his fellow oddballs made animation history.
There are great stories about that core of artists who worked at what they affectionately called Termite Terrace. One of my favorites involves their business manager, Ray Katz who, according to animator Chuck Jones, was slightly less intelligent and charismatic than Sphagnum moss. According to Jones (in his entertaining autobiography, Chuck Amuck), Katz had a profound lack of knowledge of the animation process and of the people who performed that process. It’s quite common for animators to do “pencil tests” to see how their ideas looks and to get a sense of the action before they commit it to ink. Sometimes they’ll shoot drawings on film and develop and project them for study, but more often in those days, they’d make a quick flip book. Drawing continuing action on many successive pages, the animators would share these books with each other, and it was a common sight to see a group of guys huddled next to each other, fanning through a flip book and then making comments. Well, as the apocryphal story goes, one day Katz came into the studio and looked around at everybody working. He wandered over to the piano where Stalling had left a score he was working on. He picked it up, flipped through the pages like a flip book, watching the blur of notes go by, nodded his head, and said “good work, boys, keep it up,” before wandering back to the front office to the sounds of choked laughter and pants being wet.
What a maroon.