TUNES FOR 'TOONS'
MUSIC AND THE HOLLYWOOD CARTOON
Introduction
WHY CARTOON MUSIC?
Around age five, I had my first encounter with what Germans call an
ohrwurm, or earworm: I had a tune stuck in my head. I had no idea
where or when I had heard it. With the help of a piano teacher, my mother
and I finally identified the piece as Mozart's piano sonata in C major,
K. 545. The tune I was stuck on was the opening melody (see music example
1). I took piano lessons for four years, and during that time I
learned to play the piece. My interest in the piano faded and I moved
on to other instruments, although the Mozart stayed with me as something
of an idee fixe. In my early twenties, I got stuck on another tune
during a class on Romantic music: Schubert's "Die Erlkönig," with which
I felt a strange familiarity-particularly the opening melody in the piano's
lower register. Not long after that class, I realized that I had learned
both the Schubert and the Mozart from a cartoon, or, more accurately,
from many cartoons.
Mozart's C major sonata, the so-called facile sonata (presumably because
of its relative technical simplicity and simple melody), appears in
more ... read full excerpt from Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon ebook
