Conference Agenda

Although Fantasia (1940) predates Disney’s deliberate entrance onto the education market, its didacticism and efforts toward representational accuracy have been observed as characteristics of Disney’s edutainment (Van Riper 2011): an ideological intervention selling together education, entertainment, and “a particular view of citizenship, culture, and society” (Giroux 2010). For example, the “Meet the Soundtrack” scene anthropomorphizes the soundwave to teach symphonic timbres and judgments of tone quality based on some implicit standards. Yet it flexibly construes a representational logic, only loosely imitating the physical properties of a soundwave. As I see it, the scene distorts empirical knowledge to better convey its aesthetic politic: to synonymize a Westernized or Europeanized ear with a virtuous civility, a learned taste for the “fine and beautiful” that Walt Disney later noted as a defining characteristic of US American culture (Watts 1995). The broader intervention of my project, then, is to examine how the Disney empire manipulates affordances of music and fantasy to “colonize the [Americanist] imagination” (Cypher and Higgs 1997) and marshal codes of conduct.

I begin with an analysis of the scene scored by Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite as its musical manipulations problematize a facile distinction between fantasy and reality. I demonstrate how Stokowski’s rescoring and Fantasound sound-panning activate an imaginative audiation process based on tonal schemas to yield an intermediary phenomenon between the sounding and not-sounding. I then contrast this fantasy aurality with the jazz interlude, the only musical evocation of America that is singularly recorded without fantastic interventions in sound engineering or animation. The scene is choreographed as a live performance, a keen if uncanny display of white bliss where orchestral musicians disrupt stage etiquette with impunity. Figured by screen authorities MC Deems Taylor and conductor Leopold Stokowski, white America appears real and powerful while all other scenes blur into a postmodernist collage of vague alterities, enchanted myths, and phantom auralities. Fantasia arguably entrains a tonal ear and appreciation for the symphonic canon while hailing America as a cultural authority with curatorial, directorial, and pedagogical jurisdiction. Ultimately, I conclude that the film determines a musical civility for a global audience by administering fantasies.