Scott Bradley

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Scott Bradley (born November 26, 1891 in Russellville, Arkansas, USA; died April 27, 1977 in Chatsworth, California, USA) was an American composer, pianist and conductor. His genealogy includes General Omar Bradley.

He is most famous for scoring the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M) theatrical cartoons, including those starring Tom and Jerry, Droopy Dog, Barney Bear, and the many one-shot works of Tex Avery.

Bradley was a serious composer and conservatory-trained English Horn player, who had studied under Arnold Schoenberg. Some biographies mistakenly report that Bradley began work at the Disney Studios (confusing him, undoubtedly, with fellow cartoon composer Carl Stalling). However, Bradley made the move to cartoons from live-action film scoring as well as concert work in the early 1930s. Some sources mistakenly report 1938, which Bradley himself erroneously relayed in a later interview. However, Clifford McCarty's Film Composers in America: a Filmography, 1911-1970 lists almost fifty cartoons scored by Bradley between the years 1931 and 1938. During this period, both Bradley and Carl Stalling (who had recently left the Disney Studios) scored cartoons for animator Ub Iwerks, a former Disney employee and co-creator of Mickey Mouse.

His early style was to incorporate popular and traditional melodies in the manner of a collage, as was common in early animation. However, a discussion with Fred Quimby encouraged him to develop his own style and by the late 1940s, Bradley had a complete set of musical metaphors for all emotions and actions. Leonard Maltin quotes an MGM studio musician saying Bradley wrote the most "god-dammned difficult" violin parts.

Classic works include The Two Mouseketeers (1952) and The Cat Concerto (1946), the latter of which uses Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as the basis for the animation and humour.

Bradley retired in 1957 when MGM closed its cartoon department.