Being a Cartoon Musician

Is there any doubt that Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf was the most popular song written for a cartoon short in the 1930s?

It was composed by Frank Churchill with Ann Ronell. Churchill went on to write “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho,” “Whistle While You Work” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”

It would seem there would be no better person to talk about cartoon music to Tempo magazine than Churchill. This feature story is in the January 1938 issue.

Cartoon Comedy Scores
How They are Written And Synchronized
by Frank Churchill
(As told to Charles Gant)
THE music for a cartoon comedy is planned when the story is prepared and written, before the cartoons are drawn. I start by getting together with the writers—“story men,” we call them—in a conference in which we sit around and discuss the plot and its characters. The music must suit the characters emphasized in each scene or sequence and the next step is to lay out a “break-down” in which the sequences are separated into footage-shots. The secret of synchronization, one of the most important items in our type of work, where the characters usually perform in rhythm with the music, is merely a mathematical problem. We know how many frames of film fall to the bar of music and write the music accordingly. Of course, this method has its difficulties, but nothing that can’t be overcome with knowledge and experience. It is a matter of timing the tempos and rhythms to correspond with the proper number of frames of films.
It is possible to use any kind of time 4-4, 2-4, 6-8, even 5-4, providing the fundamental beat is kept in synchronization with the proper number of frames. When this is done it is a relatively simple matter for the animators (those who make the series of drawings that give movement to the figures) to keep their characters in time with the music. For example, a horse is to gallop with his hoofs moving in time with the music. The animator contrives that the horse’s movements coincide with the required number of frames and there’s no chance for error.
Recording

The music may be recorded without even seeing the picture, though we often make piano soundtracks to use with the rough tests just to check up. In recording, the conductor, and many of the musicians wear earphones, through which they get a beat supplied from a mechanical device which supplies a beat adjusted to fit with the film when it is run. The rhythm section always wears earphones.
Composing
When I joined the Disney company, about a year after the advent of sound-pictures, it was customary to use excerpts from familiar—often too familiar—sources. I was engaged to adapt music of this kind and discovered very soon that it was impossible to avoid hackneyed themes of the well known “spring song” and “flower dance” type. It was sometimes difficult to synchronize these themes with the action, so I started composing original scores. Since that time I have batted out some 75 complete scores, not to mention countless sequences discarded because of changes in the picture during production, which necessitated turning out new music to go with the new sequence. For me, writing has become easier as the time went by, each score seeming to supply ideas which could developed rapidly for the next one. After a number of years of this kind of work it gets to be just another routine job to the writer who spends so many hours a day at it, but I believe I find the work as interesting as that of any of the studio music writers. However, when I’m through with the day at work I rarely feel like attending a concert or listening to the radio. I’d rather sit down to a game of poker or go to a prize fight.
Songwriting
For the score of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I did, in addition to most of the background music 10 songs (lyrics by Larry Morey), two of which were cut out of the picture but which will be published along with the others. Some of these I wrote as much as three years ago when we first started work on Snow White. Tune writing has always been easy for me. It’s just a knack, I guess, that some people have and others don’t.
One of the best known studio composers, who has turned out some outstanding scores, can’t write a tune to save his life. I have some tunes among the Snow White songs that I think arc pretty fair melodies. One of the best I wrote in five minutes. If some of the Snow White songs go over as well as I hope, I may devote more time to songwriting in the future.
Recording Musicians
The musicians we use for recording dates have to be thoroughly schooled men, all-round performers who can “cut” anything at sight, and in addition they have to be handy at putting in the odd effects we use in cartoon music, and doing them in the right way. The cartoon comedy music calls for the same high degree of ability necessary for any studio musician and often a little more. Many of the odd effects you hear in cartoon comedy music sound as though they had been produced by novelty instruments, and while we do use “jug bands” and other novelty instruments at times, many of the effects are just standard instruments playing the “trick stuff” we write for them. A knowledge of how to write these effects into the music, and an ability on the part of the musicians to play them, are important features in this kind of work.

The “Studio Briefs” item referred to in the photo reads:

Reorganization of the music department for Universal’s Walter Lantz productions (Oswald Rabbit Cartoons) brought in Nat Shilkret as musical director, Frank Churchill (see Page 6) as composer, Frank Marsales as arranger and sound technician. Lantz office said purpose of new set-up was to give productions musical background of the highest possible character. It is also rumored that Shilkret has contract for music on an ambitious series of commercial cartoon pictures to be sponsored by a toothpaste company.

Lantz seems to have decided to cough up a good deal of money around this time, also hiring Burt Gillett to direct and Willy Pogany to paint backgrounds.

Why Churchill left for Lantz after Snow White may be told in some Disney history book, but Lantz began to have money troubles and Churchill returned to write for Dumbo and Bambi. The stress of work, perhaps coupled with alcohol, got to him. ”My nerves have completely left me,” he wrote in his suicide note to his wife. He died May 14, 1942, age 40. Neal Gabler’s book on Disney says:

Always sorrowful and sensitive, he had no doubt been further depressed by Walt’s ongoing dissatisfaction with his work on Bambi. (Churchill had written a great score for the “musical circle of Hollywood,” Walt griped, but one that was monotonous and did not provide the excitement the movie needed.)
Churchill’s last request was that “Love Is a Song,” which he had written for Bambi, be dedicated to his wife, Carolyn, who had been Walt’s personal secretary from June 1930 to January 1934, when she married Churchill. But even that was denied since the song had already gone to the publisher.

The incomparable theatrical cartoon movie expert Daniel Goldmark deserves thanks for this post, alerting me that a number of old music publications are available on-line, albeit behind a paywall.

I don’t want to end this post with a suicide, so here’s a low-resolution photo from Tempo of July 1934. This may be the only shot of Carl Stalling with Art Turkisher. It shows they worked together on films at Iwerks.


The copy accompanying the photo reads:

ARTHUR TURKISHER
Born in New York City, Turkisher is the youngest musical director in any motion picture studio. Prior to his coming to Hollywood he was employed in the New York Paramount Studio, where he assisted in the scoring of pictures when sound was first adopted in the studios.
He has appeared with the Columbia Broadcasting Company and secured an assignment at Fleischers to assist in the technical direction and synchronizing and scoring of animated cartoons. He has acted as musical director on more than 130 pictures.
For the past fourteen months, he has been employed by UB Iwerks as musical director for scoring and arranging, and directed many Flip the Frog,” “Willie Whopper and “ComiColor” cartoons.
Turkisher is a concert cellist.

CARL STALLING
Born in Lexington, Mo., Carl Stalling had his own orchestra in Kansas City for ten years, during which time he specialized in the pipe organ which he played in conjunction with his orchestra work in Kansas City, Chicago and other cities in the Middle West.
Stalling joined UB Iwerk’s [sic] animated Pictures Corporation studio in Beverly Hills about three years ago and has created innumerable scores for animated cartoons, many of which have been played over national radio networks, this with particular reference to his original musical creation of “The Little Red Hen” which was played over the Pacific Coast network on an average of twelve times a day for a period of three weeks when the picture was released.

Turkisher never got screen credit on Jungle Jitters (released July 28, 1934). He seems to have had the same relationship with Stalling that Milt Franklyn did when Stalling replaced Norman Spencer at the Schlesinger studio.

Turkisher was back in New York by 1938 as he was on the executive of AFM Local 802. You can read more about him in this post. One thing not included is a piece from the Santa Barbara Morning Press of July 3, 1934:

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Morley Fletcher of Los Angeles are the guests of Charles Hinman Graves for a few days. Mr. Fletcher, well known for his color prints done in the Japanese manner, but essentially a portrait painter, has just refinished a life-size canvas of James Culhane, prominent moving picture director, and Mrs. Culhane. His portrait of the young Hungarian ‘cellist, Arthur Turkisher, given its first public showing in Los Angeles recently, was enthusiastically received by critics in the southern city.

Culhane and Turkisher worked together at Iwerks.