When the average composer has to do a score that will cover approximately a half hour of a picture, he thinks he has a colossal job ahead of him. And when a composer for cartoons has a score to do that will run for more than eight to ten minutes, he puts his head between his hands and cries out in anguish, “Why did I ever pick out music as a profession?”
Imagine, then, what must be the feeling of Leigh Harline, musical director for Walt Disney, when he is given the task of preparing a score for a cartoon that will be of feature length! Bear in mind, the cartoons have continuous music from the very beginning of the Main Title through to the End Title. A feature length picture runs for approxmately an hour and a half. Ergo Haline has to do a score that will take an hour and a half to play. That is more music than is contained in any symphony ever written.
When I heard about this, I went over to see Harline and found an affable young fellow – a bit over thirty years old—hard at work on the score for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Disney's feature length cartoon. I began thinking about the amount of music composed for the ordinary picture with the average number of “musicless” sequences and then began trying to figure out how much music this cartoon would require.
“The picture will run about ninety minutes and there will be music for every minute of it, with just a few exceptional places. There are only a few instances where there is no underscoring and the longest one of these is only twenty-two seconds,” said Harline, “so you can judge for yourself how much music we must prepare for ‘Smow White.'"
[…]
“Your readers ought to be interested in the fact,” said Harline, “that we now are getting ready to produce a cartoon on the story of Paul Ducas’ ‘The Sorcerer's Apprentice. A script already has been written and preparations are getting under way for it. We will use the Ducas score as the music for the picture and simply will have to add a Main Title and an End Title to it. I am looking forward to that with real pleasure. You see, we expect that Leopold Stokowski will conduct the picture, and the prospect of working with him for a period of weeks is one that is entirely pleasant.”
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