Why I Love Fantasia

I know, it's a big surprise that the guy who

love

s movies and music likes movies about music, but there's something really cool about Fantasia that I want to talk about now. It's important to understand that Fantasia wasn't the first time someone put in animation. set to the music of most of the early cartoons, the Silly Symphonies Merrie Melodies, the taker's choice of looney tunes actually synchronized the action on the screen with what was happening on the soundtrack, this became known as Mickey Mouse sing because it's what Mickey Mouse used to do now Mickey Mouse and he gets a bad reputation nowadays it's considered amateurish in the world of film scoring and most of the time it's only used for comedic purposes, but I think it's because By synchronizing the action on screen with what's happening on the soundtrack, the music can start to feel like sound effects instead of music to someone who's watching a cartoon instead of listening to the actual soundtrack, but I've already talked about how technically the sound effects are actually music in another video so I'm not going to go into that here but there's some really cool stuff and the challenges that Fantasia had to face and visually describe the music they were using as opposed to someone who could use music to emphasize their own original story and they kind of described this whole idea at the beginning of the movie, now there are three types of The music in this Fantasy show first is the type that tells a defined story, then there is the type that , while it does not have a specific plot, paints a series of more or less defined images, then there is a third type of music that exists simply by itself, which is considered What Taylor is talking about here is the age-old question between music absolute versus progressive music.

Absolute music is music that simply exists as music, is created and exists to be music and nothing more. Progressive music, on the other hand, is music that calls for some kind of additional musical imagery or narrative, so, for example, if I write a piece of music based on my favorite poems, say The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and I use music to tell the story instead of words, then that piece of music is a piece of progressive music because it uses more than just the music, but for an absolute piece of music you won't get any kind of story or images or anything like that, you tend to see titles really creative ones like Symphony Number Three or Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, technically there is a type of music that exists between these two, as we see Taylor describe it, but we'll get to that later, why is this important?

Well describe the origin of what Fantasia is doing, let me explain, so once upon a time a guy named Beethoven was the greatest composer who ever lived and anyone who doesn't agree with that is wrong and their mother is ugly right after After Beethoven's death, the music scene began to change for a variety of reasons, people began to look critically at these old composers such as Bach Mozart Haydn and Beethoven and many scholars began to argue that the music written by these composers was classical and deserved intense study soon after concert halls were filled with music by dead composers and the idea of ​​the cultural institution we now know as classical music began.

TLDR, people started bragging a lot about music written by dead Germans, so now we all have to be very quiet and disguised when we go to the Opera, but while all this was going on, a composer named Brahms, who I

love

fight composers like Beethoven on their own terms. Brahms wanted to earn his place alongside legendary composers like Beethoven and wanted to write music that he believed would be worthy of being played in concert alongside those old masters, so he took his sweet time. He didn't write as many symphonies as the others, but he did. What he did publish was one of the best works of the time; in fact, he wrote my favorite piece of music, which is the third movement of his third symphony.

Bronze is remembered as the type. who wrote absolute music because he was trying to compete with these older composers in terms of musical construction and Brahms did this more or less because of how he interpreted Beethoven's legacy, but on the other side of the spectrum there was this guy, vogner vogner, he was just a terrible He really was a human being, but when he saw Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which is one of Beethoven's last works, it kind of changed him. See at the end of Beethoven 9, he uses a giant choir. The Symphony until then had been explicitly an instrumental genre.

Vogner believed that Beethoven was amazing and there would be no point in trying to write a symphony that could ever compete with him as Brahms was trying to do because in Vogler's mind Beethoven had already written what was effectively the definitive instrumental music, so Beethoven added text to At the end of his instrumental work, Vogner thought it was great, in short, Vogner thought that since you couldn't write music better than Beethoven, you should simply add other art forms to his music to make it better and Vogner believed that was what Beethoven was trying to say by adding words to a symphony.

I think he was wrong and a Nazi, but I'm still very wrong about that feeling. However, Vogner and a considerable collection of composers at that time began using non-musical components in their works. A type called lists, for example. He used texts as inspiration for his symphonies which he called tone poems, so when you hear lists of Hamlet, that's him telling Shakespeare's story but using music instead of words and a setting. Berlioz wrote a 5 movement symphony called Symphonie Fantastique where the music says this really strange thing. story of an artist who tries to commit suicide because he's in love, but he tries to commit suicide with an overdose of opium, but he doesn't take enough to really be a lethal dose, so instead he just gets really high and has this.

Opium dreams about killing his crush and then gets sentenced to death, but then after he dies he ends up taking a trip to hell or something. I don't know, it's very strange, but Berlioz used a repeated theme that he called an EDA solution or fixed idea. to represent the love interest, this was also the first time that someone used the DSE ray to represent death in a piece of music, but generally these were the two sides that emerged after Beethoven's death and there has been a lot of discussion about who really was Beethoven's interest. successor now, the funny thing is that you can find pieces of music by Beethoven that fall in the middle of all this depending on how you look at them, for example, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is called pastoral, so you immediately think of the field, but Beethoven .

He also named each of the movements with a title that might suggest an image of what he was trying to communicate, but in the notes for this symphony Beethoven mentioned that this piece was more of an expression of feeling than a painting, making it a kind of absolute piece of music that can be seen from the perspective of a program. I've heard people call this characteristic music or descriptive music, but music like this actually exists between absolute and program music, but the interesting thing here is that Vogner became the father of the modern soundtrack, he ended up going to the limit in terms of adding other art forms to his musical works.

He started writing these massive operas where he wrote the script, wrote his own lyrics and music, and micromanaged the costumes, the set, and the casting. and as much as he could, he believed in something called gazhams kunst work, which means a total or complete work of art where all the different arts would come together on the stage and form the supreme art form, so that by having control over every aspect of his works, he could be sure. that everyone was working together for the benefit of the final product and when it came to the music he used a technique called light motif.

Now I'm not sure I've ever mentioned this on my channel, but a light motif is one piece. of music that represents a person, place or thing in a narrative, so the summoner put together these stage works, used other forms of art to draw attention to what was happening in the music, used the stage in the drama to creating a visual representation of what you were doing in the score to emphasize the music, which is exactly what Disney did with Fantasia Vata always emphasized the music first or more specifically the orchestra, it was quite common at that time for the drama to take the center from the stage or to Arya's right.

That would make your soloist sound amazing, but Vogner valued the fundamental structure of his music above everything else and when Disney made Fantasia, they basically did the exact same thing: they used a visual medium to emphasize what was happening in the music with a Critical difference when putting together a movie, the movie usually comes first and the music second. This is the fundamental flaw in all soundtracks. You don't have full control over your work if you need two minutes to develop a musical idea, but the scene only lasts 30 seconds. you have to change your idea to fit the screen by having complete control over the entire work.

Vogner could change what was happening on stage to fit the music if the script did not allow him to develop a musical idea the way he wanted. He could just change the script so the music could do what he needed, but film composers don't really have that luxury, so when they write music they have to be economical with the ideas they use. Some of them write music for a script. can't really be absolute, otherwise by definition they couldn't have a piece of music that goes with the story of the film, a soundtrack couldn't be a standard piece of progressive music like a tone poem either because they could still have to alter their musical ideas or the way the music is developed to fit what's happening on the screen, listening to a soundtrack from an absolute perspective, while it can be fun at the end of the day, is to miss the point of what it means. work of art is because a soundtrack will have to deal with a different set of goals and limitations than its cousins ​​in the concert hall;

In other words, it's unfair to ask if John Williams is as good as Beethoven because they're both doing different things right now. In essence, this is why I advocate using light motifs and soundtracks, although you can't make your music come first if you write a piece of progressive music and use it to score your film. The direct association between the musical technique and the theme. on the screen would effectively create a light motif, in essence the light motif is the process of adhering the music to what is happening in the visual medium, which when you think about it is what Fantasia did, where the film usually makes the music appears after the movie is completed. music first and used the visual language of animation to emphasize that music, regardless of whether the music was an absolute piece that never had anything more than just the music associated with it or a piece of progressive music like a tone poem or even something somewhere in between, the animators had to figure out how they were going to represent the music in their own visual art form in the same way that a composer might have to interpret a story in order to write a piece of progressive music, they had to deal with With the limitations of making their animations fit a pre-existing piece of music in the same way that a film composer might have to deal with the limitations of scoring an entire film, they used the visual language of animation to emphasize and direct attention to music in the same way. vogner did with the visual language of the stage all those years ago I love Fantasia because Fantasia is to music what a soundtrack is to a movie Fantasia is what a soundtrack looks like this is what a light motif looks like thanks for watching Me I would like to thank all my sponsors for making these videos possible and a very special thank you to Anna Burch Haydn Elsa Donovan Hodges Megan Hearn for sure: Matt Ethan Rooney and Clara tan.

If you like what you saw here, be sure to check out my other videos, follow me on Twitter and Twitch to get your musical questions answered live, and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on Patreon but that's all I have to say. I have for now thanks for watching, so I understand that they didn't want to use the original program. for the Rite of Spring because it literally ends with someone dancing to death and that's not super Disney-friendly, okay, I get it, but Night on Bald Mountain has some creepy things going on.

I think Disney just wanted an excuse to draw volcanoes and dinosaurs.