Thirties Flashback: Film Music Column Number Three

By Bruno David Ussher

Bruno David Ussher was a Los Angeles music critic (and Professor of Music Criticism at the University of Southern California) for many years for different Los Angeles newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals from at least the 1920s and into the 1950s. During the years 1938-1941, his column appearing in the Los Angeles Daily News (not connected with the current Los Angeles Daily News) regularly covered film music. The column presented here is from the forthcoming book "Music in Film," a collection of Ussher's film music columns, edited by G.D. Hamann for the Filming Today Press. For further information on the book, please contact Mr. Hamann at Filming Today Press, 2365 Scarff Street, Los Angeles, CA 90007 or by e-mail at GDHamann@Juno.Com. Filming Today Press has published over 100 books of newspaper coverage in the 1930s on film stars, character actors and film directors.

Several days ago I expressed by pleasure over a musically and visually artistic color cartoon made by the MGM cartoon department. I voiced also some surprise that name credits were absent in the title, especially when sight and sound bore such evidence of taste, skill and coordination. I grumbled about it at the studio and found that the powers that be are well aware of the thoughtful, imaginative and self critical work which the men and women with typewriters, music paper, paint brushes, cameras and sound reproduction are pooling in a remarkable spirit of veritable art-democracy.

Important as indeed the musical contribution of composer-director Scott Bradley is, his name is kept off the screen, together with those of his meritorious collaborators from the writing, painting, photographic and sound departments, because time in terms of film footage is valued infinitely. A cartoon is a story told in action. Lack of a few seconds of action can rob an otherwise cleverly thought out, well made cartoon of its "punch."

Composer-director Scott Bradley and his two story-writing, action directing colleagues, Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising, have to fill a yearly quota of 15 cartoons. Bradley has been at it five years. No doubt that length of time has given him a special skill for writing epigrammatically pictorial music. In terms of actual quantity, Bradley's fellow screen composers often have to produce more music in less than three weeks than he has to provide. (A cartoon is accompanied by nine or ten minutes of continuous music.) On the other hand, the cartoon is predominantly a thing of action. It consists, on the average, of 15,000 pictures, and while some of these differ from each other but imperceptibly, nevertheless music must fit them with almost microscopic closeness of mood and motion.

In the regular film a composer may "write against a scene." In the "acted" film the composer enjoys a good deal of liberty as a musical commentator and he may retrace the course of the film story or anticipate same.. In the animated picture or cartoon, the composer makes action aural and illustrates and emphasizes happenings and atmosphere. At least that has been the tradition of the past.

Anyone thinking that Scott Bradley has time on his hands while having to create only nine or ten minutes of music every two or three weeks is greatly mistaken. The technical process of the cartoon is painstaking in its minute demands. Making a cartoon is a process of checking and double-checking. Twenty-four individual pictures (technically known as "frames") flash across the screen every second of performance. To these 15,000 "frames" must be fitted an average of 425-450 measures of music, the difference being determined by how much show tempo music the cartoon score contains.

"As a rule, cartoons are packed with action. The music moves with the action and literally every note must convey, or at least sustain, the general meaning," Bradley told me. "We have broken away from the noisy, slam-bang-crash cartoon film. The raucous film is giving way to a cartoon type which can be no less humorous and entertaining, but which meets also the public craving for things beautiful as well as imaginative and extravagant of idea and action."

Bradley is dispensing with what might be called crude sound or actual action noise when he can obtain the same auditory effect by means of ingenious orchestration.

"As a matter of fact, good, suggestive instrumentation can produce sound of an atmospheric imagination stirring effectiveness which the plain imitation of so-called natural sound does not possess. In The Goldfish (the preview titles was Wonders of the Deep), the little creature is seen shooting the chutes (the curved arm of an octopus). Instead of resorting to the old fashioned slide whistle we used a harp glissando with string tremolo.

"The sound of the rising bubbles is made by flutes, clarinets, strings tremolando. When "Sea Biscuit" hee haws, violins play intervals of minor seconds instead of getting the actual sound of a horse neighing. In other words, I am evolving sound effects out of the music by means of harmonization and orchestration."

Some day I shall induce Scott Bradley to share a few more secrets of his super realism. His method does make cartoons lovelier and musically more fascinating. Of course, it means more work, more ingenuity on his part. He is now getting ready for a Christmas cartoon with a real, deep antiwar message. Another production will be a cartoon fantasy on Grey's "Elegy." And the Bradley-Harmon-Ising triumvirate is also hatching plans for a full length cartoon feature to be started next year.

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com