William Lava (March 18, 1911 St. Paul, Minnesota - February 20, 1971 Los Angeles, California) was a musical composer and arranger who worked on the Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes cartoons from 1962 onwards, replacing the deceased Milt Franklyn. Lava's music was very different from that of Milt Franklyn and Carl Stalling - it does not draw from Raymond Scott's tunes, and has a tendency towards atonality - a sense of tension is often created in Lava's ...
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William Lava (March 18, 1911 St. Paul, Minnesota - February 20, 1971 Los Angeles, California) was a musical composer and arranger who worked on the Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes cartoons from 1962 onwards, replacing the deceased Milt Franklyn. Lava's music was very different from that of Milt Franklyn and Carl Stalling - it does not draw from Raymond Scott's tunes, and has a tendency towards atonality - a sense of tension is often created in Lava's scores using sequences based on the notes of the diminished seventh chord, sounding almost similar to Hoyt Curtin's Hanna-Barbera music. William Lava also sang the theme to the popular T.V. Western, Cheyenne.
The Tweety cartoon The Jet Cage (where the first half of the cartoon is scored by Milt Franklyn while the second is scored by William Lava) demonstrates well the difference between the two styles of composition.
Animation fans often groan at Lava's work when compared to his predecessors. However, he arrived at Warner Brothers shortly...
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