My research is about music composition and arrangement in Fantasia 1940 produced by Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski (conductor the animation film). More particularly, is about Pastoral Symphony (with unicorns, pegasus, centaurs, god and goodness) and The Rite of Spring (Dinosaurs sequence). I choose them because I realized that the musical score was incomplete and I want to know why! There are several answers to this question. Firstly, the length of each score lasting at least 40 minutes in real life. So, it’s really too long for an animation film sequence. Secondly, some sequences were cut voluntarily and IT is the home of my research. In this post I’m going to talk about stylistic and aesthetic of music and film rhetoric. First of all, What is Fantasia? Initially, it’s a visuel representation of the musical score according to the first speech of Deems Taylor who is the narrator of the film. But, if we really look closely, initiative of musical score transformations shows that it’s a little beat confuse because isn’t the visuel representation of all the musical score. When I started my research, I have seen many analysis about music arrangement of The Pastoral Symphony and The Rite of Spring and they qualified the Stokowski’s arrangements like blasphemy. I have seen also film aesthetic analysis but never in the same time except in one book but it was so much turned on music rhetoric way because it wrote by a renowned musicologist. In this research I want propose an analysis with the two rhetorics in one and I want to prove that music and film rhetoric are interactive. In this way, one cannot live without the other and they were established in concomitance. So, it’s for this reason that there are musical score transformations. For me, it’s a stylistic and aesthetic choice, not an obligation to shorten music rhetoric by half.
