Ryan Leach : Music for Animation

This is part of a regular series of “Weekly Links” postings. On most Fridays I post links to stories and articles that I find interesting. Though I try to keep them mostly animation, music, or entertainment industry related I will also share the occasional link that I find useful or helpful in other ways. I hope you enjoy and please feel free to leave a comment about any of the links you’ve checked out.

My newest article for Audiotuts, The Basic Functions of Harmony, has been a smash success. No doubt I will be writing more articles on harmony and composition related topics for the site, so please keep an eye out!

Disney is looking into opening a new theme park.. in China!

“I have learned as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and false assumptions, not by my exposure to wisdom and knowledge.” Stravinsky

This is the 8th post in a series on Cartoon Theme Songs. On the occasional Thursday I examine a popular cartoon TV theme song and discuss what about it does and does not work.

The theme from Top Cat is another great example of a strong Hanna/Barbera theme song. Although it’s not as great as Yogi Bear (perhaps in part only because the character is much less popular), it still stands on it’s own as a solid theme.

The good:

• Male and female singers singing in unison/octaves. I’ve already discussed why I like it when there are multiple singers before.
• The big band is a great choice for Top Cat, with the jazziness giving him a touch of swagger and telling us something about his character.
• They really hammer in the name of the character! They say “Top Cat” 6 times in only 45 seconds, so by the end of the song there is absolutely no way you can forget who it’s about.

The bad:

• Oddly enough I actually have a problem with the mix. The vocals are a bit hard to understand with everything else going on. I think this could partly be solved by not having the horns play at the same time as the vocals, much like in Yogi Bear. They’re so loud that right now they sort of mask the lyrics.
• There’s not much of a melodic hook. Although “Top Cat” is a good rhythmic hook, being only two notes it’s not enough on it’s own to be something that gets stuck in your head. Woody Woodpecker depends on a rhythmic hook as well, but there is at least some melodic shape to it.

So far I’ve been impressed with both Hanna/Barbera themes.

This will be the first of regular “Weekly Links” postings. On most Fridays I’ll post links to stories and articles that I find interesting. I will try to keep them mostly animation, music, or entertainment industry related but I will also share the occasional link that I find useful or helpful in other ways. I hope you enjoy and please feel free to leave a comment about any of the links you’ve checked out.

Cartoon Network gambles on live action - Cartoon Network is dropping in ratings since it started airing shows that were not… cartoons. I hope someone gets fired for this.

Robert Zemeckis and Disney are teaming up to remake Yellow Submarine. I’m hesitant to think about whether this is a good or bad thing, although the possibilities of the Beatles being incorporated into Disneyland in some way are exciting.

YouTube gets CNN, Cartoon Network and WB shows – YouTube is continuing to become more of a contender against Hulu and other services that offer professionally produced content.

This is the 7th post in a series on Cartoon Theme Songs. Every other Thursday I examine a popular cartoon TV theme song and discuss what about it does and does not work.

The theme song from The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is known as “The Tra La La Song”, written by Mark Barkan and Richie Adams in 1968. I hate to say it but this has got to be the worst theme song I have listened to yet. I found it obnoxious and dated, and I am in shock that the song apparently made the Billboard Top 100 in 1969!

I understand that it was the late 60s and everybody just wanted to feel good, but the song is so upbeat and happy that I think the writers pushed too hard to make it “for kids”. What they ended up with was something that lacks substance and sounds more childish than it does “for children”. Just take a look at The Rugrats Theme for a great example of music that can be about kids but still stand on it’s own as a great theme.

The theme also suffers from way too many 60s pop/rock cliches, such as the building dominant chord bridge (think of the pyramid of “Aaah” in The Beatles’ Twist and Shout). Although they were probably trying to appeal to a modern audience, by relying on so many current and trendy musical ideas they ended up trapping their song in the era. Speed Racer suffers from this problem as well, whereas there is little about the great Felix the Cat theme that makes you think it’s a cliché of the 1950s.

Yikes. I am considering deleting this from my iTunes library so that it can never pop up on random again.

How to Analyze a Cue

As I wrote about in a recent article, I have had problems with not only the way music tends to be analyzed as merely a description of what happens, but also of how to analyze music myself in order to learn from the great composers. In this article I will break down a systematic method for discussing the various elements in a cue (yes that will at first have to include description), but I will then take it to the next level and try to explain why I think the decisions for each element were made.

The elements I’ll be first trying to extract:

• Melody – business or sparseness, steps vs. intervals, unusual intervals or non diatonic pitches
• Harmony – Chord progressions, tensions, pedal points
• Rhythm – is there a pulse or ostinato, is the time steady, loose, or jarring
• Tempo – steady vs fluctuations
• Dynamics – steady vs. changes
• Orchestration – what colors are used for what functions, but also what changes develop (eg does the melody change from the flutes to the violins)

Of course that’s all relatively easy, busy work for the most part. The challenge (which it seems most people never meet) will be to then understand how each of these elements contributes to a specific meaning. I’m going to try to begin by analyzing the simplest cues I can find to get a firm grip on using this method, before getting into more complex material. Wish me luck!