Scott Bradley

• Name — Scott Bradley • Birth Name — Walter Scott Bradley • Born — 26 November 1891 • Birthplace — Russellville, Arkansas, U.S. • Died — 27 April 1977 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Occupation — * Composer • Arranger • Years Active — 1931–1956 • Employer — * The Iwerks Studio (1931-1934) • Harman-Ising Productions (1934-1937) • MGM Cartoons (1937-1957) • Walter Lantz Studios (1938)

In an autobiographical sketch, Bradley noted that he began his career performing with and later conducting theatre orchestras in Houston, Texas. He studied organ and harmony with Horton Corbett, the choir director of Houston's Christ Church Cathedral, but was "otherwise entirely self-taught in composition and orchestration." (Years later, when he was already established in Hollywood, he sought to improve his technique by studying privately with MGM colleague Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco). In 1926, Bradley moved to Los Angeles to conduct programs over KHJ Radio, an activity that led to his growing involvement in animation at the start of the talkie era. He was a staff musician for Walt Disney (1929) and the Ub Iwerks studio (1930–1934), then became music director for Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who were hired to produce cartoon shorts for MGM. After MGM established its own cartoon studio in 1937, Bradley was hired permanently and remained with the company for twenty years. During the 1930s, Bradley also composed music for the concert hall, including the tone poems The Valley of the White Poppies (1931), The Headless Horseman (1932), and the oratorio Thanatopsis (1934), based on the poem by William Cullen Bryant. His most notable success was Cartoonia (1938), a four-movement orchestral suite of his MGM work, premiered by Pierre Monteux with the San Francisco Symphony. It was an early expression of Bradley's belief that cartoon music was an art form of great potential. As was common practice in scores for animation, Bradley's early style incorporated fragments of popular and traditional melodies. By the mid-1940s, however, his compositions and orchestrations had become more original and complex, occasionally utilizing the twelve-tone technique devised by Arnold Schoenberg; the first being the 1944 Tom and Jerry cartoon Puttin' on the Dog. Other influences were Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. Sight & Sound magazine quoted concertmaster Lou Raderman's mock complaint: "Scott writes the most blank-blank-blank difficult fiddle music in Hollywood … He is going to break my fingers!" Bradley would also compose music for two MGM films, Courage of Lassie (with Bronislau Kaper, 1946) and The Yellow Cab Man (1950). Bradley expressed considerable pride in his "funny music" and believed scoring for animation offered far more possibilities to the composer than live-action films. About his score for MGM's Puttin' on the Dog, he later wrote "I hope Dr. Schoenberg will forgive me for using his system to produce funny music, but even the boys in the orchestra laughed when we were recording it." The conductor Simon Rattle has specifically highlighted the influence of the Klaus-Narr passages in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder on Bradley's compositions. While working with William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, Bradley would often incorporate classical, pop, and jazz music in their Tom and Jerry shorts, on top of composing original melodies. He was, however, less fond of working with Tex Avery, who often encouraged Bradley to use old folk-tune music for cues akin to Warner Bros. musician Carl Stalling. During an interview with Milton Grey, he said that "Tex Avery didn’t like my music. We disagreed a lot on what kind of music was appropriate for his cartoons. His ideas on music were so bad that I had to put a stop to it.... I gave in to him for a while, but finally I went down to see Quimby in his office and complained.... And Quimby backed me up." In 1954, MGM terminated his weekly contract but retained his services as a freelancer, paying him $1,000 per film. This arrangement lasted until MGM closed its cartoon department in 1957, after which Bradley retired.

Bradley married Myrtle Aber on December 2, 1934, in a small ceremony. He died on April 27, 1977, in Chatsworth, California, and is buried at Chatsworth's Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery.