November 10 - Carl Stalling

On this day, in 1891, Carl W. Stalling was born in Lexington, Missouri. Carl began playing the piano at the age of six and, by the time he was 12, was the main organist at his local movie theater. By his early 20's, he was conducting his own orchestra in Kansas City. He still played the organ in movie theaters there, but he wasn't just playing the sheet music that studios sent along with each picture, he was improvising new music during the shows. As chance would have it, in the early 1920s, during one of those improvised shows, Carl left a big impression on one of the audience members, who decided he just had to meet the organist. That audience member was a local businessman who made animated shorts, Walt Disney.

Carl and Walt kept up a friendly correspondence even after Walt moved to California. When Walt was on a long train trip to New York City to record the soundtrack for his first cartoon with sound, Steamboat Willie, he looked Carl up during a layover in Kansas City. During their visit, Walt asked Carl to write scores for the two Mickey shorts that had been produced before Steamboat and now needed sound, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho. Walt was so pleased with the results that he offered Carl a position as his studio's first Music Director. Even though it meant relocating, Carl jumped at the opportunity.

One of Carl's talents was the ability to take a piece of existing music, adapt it for the short he was working on and add his own improvisations to make a harmonious whole. It was the norm for someone listening to one of his scores to suddenly hear a recognizable snippet of Beethoven or Mozart (or any other composer really). Carl also pioneered several new techniques for the scoring of animation. One was a precursor to the click track that is widely used today. Another was the use of "bar sheets" which showed what music was going to be playing alongside a shorts storyboards.

Carl's biggest contribution to Disney lore, however, was encouraging Walt to make a new style of shorts. The two friends had a running discussion for a while about what should come first, the animation or the music. Carl convinced Walt that his animators should try creating pictures to go along with an existing piece of music and the Silly Symphonies were born. Carl is credited with composing and arranging the music used in the first Symphony, 1929's The Skeleton Dance. Following the success of Dance, composers at Disney no longer had to try to match their compositions to the action of a short; the matching job fell to the animators instead.

Carl worked for the Walt Disney Studio for about two years, scoring about 20 different shorts, before he left and became a freelancer for a while. In the summer of 1936, he was hired by Leon Schlesinger to be the music director for his studio over at Warner Brothers. That studio had two cartoon series that had started a few years earlier, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. From the moment he was hired, Carl was the composer for almost every single animated short that Warner Brothers put out for the next 22 years. And that included the distinctive electric guitar slide that opened each short and the theme songs. With over 600 shorts to his credit in that part of his career, it works out to a complete score finished every 13 days. Carl's last cartoon with Warner Brothers was 1958's To Itch His Own. He passed away on November 29, 1972 as probably the most famous unknown American composer. He was 81.