Cartoon Film Music Cue [2'00"]

‘Squirrel Picnic’ is a comedic romp into traditional Carl Stalling-inspired television music that relies on fast-paced, texturally complex, and dizzyingly orchestrated funny music. The humor is derived from traditional folk-song melodies of the Stephen Foster 1920’s and 30’s, using home-spun American songs reserved for moments that musically comments and highlights the film’s storytelling. Opening in the classic 1940’s cartoon “Main Title”, the piece offers a complete start-finish story. The extremely high Piccolo scale ends the opening credits and leads humorously to a sudden calmness, and makes use of the typical cartoon formula of opening scenes recalling a nostalgic and bucolic Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg. Suddenly the music accelerates in tempo and urgency as simulated stomping (represented by descending scales in the low brass and strings) move toward drunken trombone plunger solos suddenly gets twisted into a second scene “curtain opener” that immediately is music unlike what has previously been heard. The “Hooray for Hollywood” melody signals a quick nod to a more cosmopolitan area, as fast flourishes whisk the music into a frenzy of two bars of swinging, sexy saxophone stripper-esque music. Suddenly cascades of new musical material in the traditional cartoon idiom of fast-moving, ever evolving passages take the movement into unchartered keys before closing fast scale-like passages before an ultimately quick and grand tongue-in-cheek final, concluding cadence.