Looney Tunes as a Music Teacher

The guys of Termite Terrace (Warner Bros ... Termite Terrace) who wrote and animated all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons also managed to keep a full time orchestra busy as well.  I heard some of my first classical pieces watching these cartoons.  One examples is What's Opera, Doc, which was my introduction to Richard Wagner.  Not a fan of opera (I can't understand most of the time because of the Italian lyrics), nonetheless, this cartoon (snippet here:  Partial "What's Opera, Doc") was based largely on Wagner's opera and included the Ride of the Valkyries renamed in the cartoon as "Kill the Wabbit".

Another classic, The Rabbit of Seville, takes on Mozart with a spin on the Barber of Seville.  They also manage to squeeze the Marriage of Figaro into this 7-minute wacky feature.

Bugs was also known to play the great Leopold Stokowski as he puts his snobby neighbor and professional baritone through the loops on stage until it comes crashing down in Long Haired Hare.

You can tell my classical upbringing was largely spurred by passive intake of information from various radio and tv sources.  In my next blog, we will venture into the real reason that I got interested in all of this ...

Classical Music and NBC News

When I was much younger - in my middle teens, the NBC nightly news (Chet Huntley and David Brinkley) always signed off with a piece of classical music.  It was very powerful at the end of the news (remembering that there were only three news outlets in the late 60's and early 70's).  I asked a neighbor who was particularly musically talented if they knew the name of the piece.  No luck.  I stumbled onto the piece in my first year at college ....  Beethoven's 9th symphony, movement number two ( Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Mvmt 2 ).  This piece also played prominently in Stanly Kubrik's movie "A Clockwork Orange"

Sir Neville Marriner

I have always had some deep interest in classical music.  I can't really say why - maybe it is the intricate mathematics of the overlay of sound from a variety of instruments, maybe it is the physics of music, maybe it is the immense talent it takes to write something for so many instruments.

Now, I am not a classical music expert.  However, if I have a chance, I will take the Neville Marriner version of a classical piece over any one else.  Marriner spent much of his career leading "The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields".

It was Marriner's version of Handel's Messiah ( Worthy Is the Lamb & Amen ) that I heard on WHRO radio (Norfolk, VA, USA) in the 80's that got me hooked on that classical masterpiece.  Marriner was also the music director of the movie Ammadeus and insisted that all of the Mozart pieces be done as intended, not pieced together to meet the demand of some movie schedule.  So, I bought the soundtrack ... it is fabulous.  One piece, near the end of the movie, Mass for the Dead, was set to show the composition process that Mozart and Salieri used to write such moving music.  The scene then cuts to Mozart's death while the entire score is played ( confutatis ).  The depth of sound was amazing. 

I borrowed another version of Mozart's mass from the library.  It was some eastern European symphony (Prague or Budapest, or something like that).  While it was quite nice, it just did not have the richness and power of Marriner's version.

In a Marriner-directed piece, trumpets bark, kettle drums roll like thunder, strings glide together and almost sing, woodwinds breathe.