The aims of this research project are to 1) historicize the Classical Hollywood orchestra, and 2) interrogate the cultural significations of the orchestral sound that Hollywood both deployed and helped to form.

This is the first and only book-length musicological treatment of cartoon music.  In the chapter "Classical Music and Cartoons" Goldmark argues that the pieces of classical music that are used in cartoons are characterisized by "gestural immediacy," which makes them suitable for illustration.  Goldmark credits Freleng with mastering the techniques of fitting classical music to cartoons.  Goldmark discusses the construction of high art vs. folk/popular music in bugs bunny shorts, and these cartoons playing out of class struggles. Goldmark observes the impossibility of taking Fantasia seriously as high art when cartoons were seen only as a form of popular entertainment.  Fantasia is excpetional in the world of animated shorts as a cartoon which seeks to glorify classical music rather than tare it down.  Goldmark outlins the contrast between the original Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, the latter reflecting radically different notions of the musical canon and the propriety of including popular celebrities.  This is a discussion I wish Goldmark had pursued more in depth for I think the comparison is a fruitful one on which further analysis and an investigation of the making of Fantasia 2000 would shed more light.  While cultural notions had changed, clearly Fantasia 2000 demonstrates some kind of commitment to classical music.

Goldmark is kind of out on a limb here with cartoon studies which has no established precedent in musicology and no body of literature to build off of or respond to.  I think he opens a productive path in both musicology and film studies - and their potential union - with this book.  At an absolute minimum, he provides a very useful bibliography.

This article is fascinating as a historical document (from 1942); it backs up a culturally specific view of the superiority of absolute music using historical and psychological evidence.  The author, Dr. Horace B. English, was a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.  He argues that a film experience which is dominantly aural does not work psychologically.  His case in point is Fantasia which was purely received by “the musically sensitive.”  English offers historical and psychological arguments for the inevitable failure of any attempt to fit visual images to music.  Historically, all aural-visual combinations, namely theater and opera, have used sound to support drama; the story always comes first.  Psychologically, the ear is specialized to receive symbolic signals, while the eye is specialized for concrete, representative signals.  The dependence of English’s argument on a cultural privileging of symphonic and chamber music – which he calls the more “noble” forms – becomes clear in his insistence that music written independently of a story generates a wide range of unique responses in listeners (agreed), while music written to fit a story does not.  English’s argument also depends on a privileging of individuality, expressed most clearly in his conclusion, “When we are really responding to music, we are creating something unique and individual; and at the moment of such creation, anyone else’s response, be it ever so beautiful, is only a distraction and an annoyance.”