How Looney Tunes influenced a generation of composers

Who would you say was the most influential composer of the 20th century? Maybe Stravinsky? Schoenberg? John Cage? What about this guy? If you flick through the textbooks of 20th century classical music, one name you won't find mentioned very often is Carl Stahling. And yes, that's Stahling as in... Stahling was one of the main composers behind the Looney Tunes cartoon series, which features characters like Road Runner, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. And I think the sound world Stahling created for those animations and the techniques he used had an incalculable influence on 20th and 21st century classical music. So much so that music of many major 20th century composers is unimaginable without him. Before we go any further, let's just tune into a recording session with Stahling himself at the podium. Just appreciate some of his music for itself. So what are the features that makes his style so influential? When he joined Warner Brothers in 1936, he was encouraged to use their extensive Bach catalogue, which led to one of the main features of his style, a collage-like use of quotation. So Looney Tunes cartoons are just filled with references to famous classical tunes, as well as folk songs and popular pieces from the Warner Brothers catalogue. In some fascinating recent research on the use of classical music in Stahling's work, Paul Miller notes that particular lack of deference Stahling shows towards classical music, using even a sacred piece like the Implematus from Rossini's Stab at Martyr at a fairly utilitarian point in the story, or happily extending or cutting the original classical piece to fit the action, for example extending an original Beethoven fragment to become this. Stahling's method of writing was to follow the action of the cartoon beat to beat, a style which later somewhat derisively became known as Mickey Mousing, writing music for every footstep, door slam, every new turn of the head. This led to a kind of gestural music full of pops, bangs, runs and glissandi. Of course, most of these cartoons were essentially slapstick in nature so the musical gestures were usually humorous ones. Finally, everything always happens at a breakneck speed, so the music exudes this kind of fast-paced hyperactive, schizophrenic nature which is probably the most influential of all Stahling's approaches. Experimental composer, performer and producer John Zorn was one of the first to take Stahling's style seriously. As Zorn said in following the visual logic of the screen action rather than the traditional rules of musical form, development, theme, variation, etc. Stahling created a radical compositional arc unprecedented in the history of music. All the basic musical elements are there, but they're broken into shards, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of styles, forms, melodies, quotations. You can hear Stahling's influence very clearly in many of Zorn's pieces, for example here in For Your Eyes Only. For Zorn, the fast-paced style suited his sensibility. I've got an incredibly short attention span, he says. My music is jam-packed with information that's changing very fast. Here's another of Zorn's pieces, this one's even called Road Runner, written for solo accordion. Even in the way it appears on the page you can see it's literally a collage of ideas, some specific notated ideas, some simply instructions to quote a tango, some pure gestures. To call Stahling's style unprecedented is perhaps a slight exaggeration. Another composer, John Adams, was busy in his office one day studying Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony when he apparently heard his seven-year-old son in the adjacent room watching cartoons. The hyperactive, insistently aggressive, and acrobatic scores for the cartoons mixed in my head with the Schoenberg music, itself hyperactive, acrobatic, and not a little aggressive, and I realised suddenly how much these two traditions had in common. It's easy to grasp what Adams was talking about. There's more than a passing resemblance between the quick-fire antics of the cartoon world and Schoenberg's style, at least in this piece. So it's fair to say that Stahling's style in this regard wasn't totally unprecedented, but he certainly pushed that rapid-fire disjointedness to a far greater degree than had ever been heard before. And John Adams went on to write his own fast-paced Chamber Symphony, citing the dual influences of Schoenberg and Looney Tunes. So gesture, as I mentioned earlier, is an important feature of Stahling's music, and along with the rapid-fire texture changes, is a way of writing music that went on to become a key feature of late 20th century music. I distinctly remember gesture and gestural music being buzzwords when I was at college. What I would define as a gesture would be a musical event which is memorable more for the trajectory or the impact of the sounds rather than the specific notes or melodies. Any cartoon music mimicking the on-screen action is inevitably full of the sounds of plunging rapidly to earth, crashing into a wall, explosions, and tiptoe effects. As an example of the impact this kind of gestural music has had, let's look at another composer, again one of the giants of 20th century composition. Gheorghe Ligeti's opera La Grande Macabre is full of these gestural effects and it seems at times incredibly Stahling-esque. The direct influence of Looney Tunes on Ligeti's opera is further confirmed by the various references to famous classical tunes which form what Daniel Goldmark calls the cartoon canon. Tunes which through being used regularly in the cartoon world take on a certain resonance, something Ligeti was clearly consciously playing with. In La Grande Macabre these include references to Schumann's The Happy Farmer, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, or as in this example Offenbach's famous Can-Can. Other madcap slapstick humorists in this tradition include Gerald Barry, But I hate the cake! Andrew Norman, H.K. Gruber, none of whom are really imaginable without Stahling's precedent. Humour aside, if we combine the sense of gesture with the rapid fire changes of pace, it's remarkable how many late 20th century composers fit the description, from the absurdist theatricality of Heiner Goebbels, to the dark gestures of Gubaidulina, to the wide-ranging leaps and bounds in James Macmillan's music. Of course, it's impossible to say to what extent any of these composers bear the direct impact of Stahling's influence, but what we can say is that Stahling was using these kind of approaches to music making a good 20 or 30 years before most classical composers started thinking about them, and his music was probably on those composers' televisions as they were growing up. The same is true of Stahling's use of quotations. If you ask a music student today for examples of composers who have used quotation prominently in their music, they'd probably mention Charles Ives, the famous third movement of Vario's Sinfonia, or Alfred Schnitker. But although Ives wrote many of his most radical, quotation-filled works in the first two decades of the 20th century, he didn't become widely known until 50 years later, when his approach started to chime much more with the zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s. So to this extent, Stahling's use of quotation and collage as a compositional method throughout the 40s and 50s really was ahead of its time. And again, its ubiquitousness on TV screens for much of the latter half of the 20th century must surely have had an impact on young, future composers' minds. Of course, in many ways, the importance of Stahling's use of quotation lay in the fact that it introduced a generation of youngsters to the hits of the classical canon. How many of today's composers first heard of the William Tell Overture or the Barber of Seville through a Stahling soundtrack? Contemporary classical music does occasionally have a tendency to take itself a bit too seriously, so it's fascinating to see that one of the most influential, if under-acknowledged figures in contemporary composition spent his life writing cartoon music. I, for one, think it's a life and a body of music that we should spend more time celebrating. Thank you so much for watching. What do you think of Stahling's music? Are there any other composers that I didn't mention who have been influenced by him? Do let me know in the comments. Thanks so much to my patrons who've supported me over on Patreon. You can join us there for some behind-the-scenes footage, a regular mini-blog, and a chance to interact and maybe even talk about your own compositions. If you enjoyed the video, do please like and subscribe and share with your friends, and I'll see you next time.