The musical year 2024 will begin with a happy initiative from the FILMharmonique Orchestra: a Bugs Bunny film concert presented in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto! The concept, the result of the joint effort of chef George Daugherty, David Ka Lik Wong and Warner Bros., is about to celebrate its 35th anniversary.
How many years have we waited for this Bugs Bunny at the Symphony Orchestra which tours all over the world. All of this is much more than entertainment and nostalgia: it is a symbol of a magnificent era when the miracle of passive exposure to music, a precious commodity that has now disappeared, still existed.
George Daugherty, conductor and kingpin of the concert, was right to open an article in the magazine Playbill Arts in 2015 by recalling a dialogue from the episode “The Opera” of season 4 of the series Seinfeld. To Jerry Seinfeld, humming a tune, his friend Elaine replies: “It’s quite a shame, all your culture comes from Bugs Bunny cartoons. »
Damage ? What luck on the contrary! This is what passive exposure is all about. We come to see a cartoon and, without expecting it, we find ourselves feeling the emotion and magic of the music.
Heritage
At the firmament of the genre and this heritage of Warner’s Looney Tunes, we find What’s Opera, Doc? (Chuck Jones, 1957), parody including themes from eight Wagner operas in 6 minutes and 49 seconds. Unforgettable: Elmer, disguised as Siegfried, waving his spear in a hole while singing “ Kill the wabbit! ” on the theme of The Ride of the Valkyries . Bugs Bunny will then appear disguised as Brunhilde.
It is not a fad to think that we are in the register of masterpieces and beneficial cultural heritage. The Library of Congress in Washington said in 1992 What’s Opera, Doc? “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” work, recommending its preservation in the National Film Registry, a cinema hall of fame. At the time, it was the first animated short to receive such an honor.
When you ask George Daugherty who was at Warner Bros., the mastermind behind this instillation of classical music found throughout time in cartoons such as A Corny Concerto (1943), which draws on the music of Johann Strauss, The Rabbit of Seville (1950), parody of Barber from the same city, and Baton Bunny (1959), where Bugs Bunny conductor conducts Morning, noon and evening at Vienna by Franz von Suppé, Daugherty has a name on his lips: Carl Stalling. He also mentions Milt Franklyn.
For Daugherty, “Stalling and Franklyn composed with an irresistible touch for audiences in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. They created a distinctive ‘Looney Tunes sound.’ » In the eyes of the conductor, their contribution, in this specific art, “is as decisive at the time as that of the great exiles, Steiner, Korngold, Rózsa or Herrmann, dressing Hollywood feature films with their music”.
Born in 1891 in Lexington, Missouri, Carl Stalling, a piano prodigy, was a pianist in his town’s cinema at the age of 12, improvising accompaniments for silent films. As an adult, he extended his expertise to the orchestra, working at the Isis Theater in Kansas City. In this city, he met Walt Disney with whom he moved to Los Angeles, composing music for Steamboat Willie(1928), one of Disney’s first cartoons, before joining the Warner Bros. studio. where he spent his entire career. Milt Franklyn, Stalling’s arranger and orchestrator at Warner, succeeded him in 1958.
Listen to the plot of What’s Opera, Doc?is to discover a jubilant jewel, designed with a knowledge of Wagnerian orchestration and, in addition to the presence of leitmotifs from the four operas of Ringmusical elements of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin , The ghost shipAnd Rienzi .
Synchronization
The project Bugs Bunny at the Orchestra symphonicdesigned in 2010 and in 2013 follows a concept “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” (1990) by George Daugherty and David Ka Lik Wong. In the spirit of what we mentioned in our article on The dictator, by Charlie Chaplin, the salt is based on a perfect match of all the effects, which is difficult to achieve live, with an orchestra accompanying the film on screen. In The dictator the scene of the barber shaving a client on a Hungarian dance by Brahms was a virtuoso moment in every sense of the word.
The same will go for this Bugs Bunny at the Symphony Orchestra, as George Daugherty admits: “A cinematic concert requires exact precision in the synchronization of all elements. » In the case of the cartoon, this includes live music, recorded images and dialogues, but also sound effects. “The risk of accuracy is even greater in animated films, particularly Looney Tunes, where everything is fast and furious, and there is absolutely no room for error,” says George Daugherty. .
To ensure better cohesion, musicians can rely on techniques used in Warner Bros. studios. when these cartoons were created in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. “The same problems arose: making sure the music was recorded completely in sync. Carl Stalling had invented an astonishing and revolutionary technology at the time: the click track ! THE click track is like a metronome that only the conductor and musicians hear. It gives starts and stops, as well as tempos. ” Thanks to click track, the public will see during the concert what happened when orchestras recorded the soundtracks of these cartoons 70 years ago.
Stalling and Franklyn built some cartoons around classical music. They also wrote their own music set with quotes from great composers. So in Bugs Bunny Rides Again (1948), one of the chases is set to the music of Guillaume Tell by Rossini.
Angry gesture
This first-rate musical team worked with exceptional and visionary animators such as Tex Avery, attached to Warner between 1936 and 1942, and Chuck Jones. Bastien Cheval, in his thesis The movie theater animation and the questioning of reality (Montpellier, 2014), rightly treats these two creators as “iconoclastic directors” driven by an “angry gesture”: “Cutting short any logic of Disney escape, the cartoonsof Warner aim to give the medium its own autonomy by overexpressive amplification of the lines of action and the structure of the film as a material object. So, Tex Avery […] was the one who pushed the logic of animation to the end, diffusing its effects beyond the frame: play on the credit cards, expulsion of a character outside the closure of the iris, silhouette of spectators interfering in the story, without forgetting the famous gag of the hair on the film that a character carelessly pulls out before resuming the action. »
Finally, we will pay particular attention to sound effects. In Music and sound experiments in the animated film, Élias Cheyroux tells us that we owe this other source of jubilation to Tregoweth Edmond, responsible for sound effects and audio editing at Warner and close collaborator of Stalling. Élias Cheyroux notes that in contrast to the Disney aesthetic, Tregoweth Edmond manipulated concrete sounds at Warner, bringing reality into the imagination with the aim of “surprising the spectator and supporting the comedy of the scene”.
For this, Tregoweth Edmond mainly used sounds from the industrial world targeting “in the viewer’s unconscious references from his daily life, such as the car journey he takes to go to work on which he hears a cacophony of horns, or the incessant noise of works on the road. In practice, the sound effects match the animation style: “The contribution of the offbeat sound aesthetic imposed by Tregoweth Edmond in the Chuck Jones cartoons largely supports the comic aspect in the sequence, maintained by exaggeration, caricature and the absurd,” concludes Cheyroux.
There can be a lot of science, invention, innovation in these entertainments which are not trivial and which will come to life during an experience that we have waited a long time for.