Cat Concerto Transcription

Little did they know, the cartoonists who drew the 1947 Tom and Jerry cartoon Cat Concerto were also composers. This piece realizes what keys and strings are shown in the cartoon, which centers around a performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. While the cartoonists were sometimes astonishingly accurate in depicting the actual notes from Liszt’s work, there also many, many mistakes. Liszt is identifiable especially in the beginning, but soon after that the music gradually becomes something entirely different.

Some passages were very tedious to transcribe, such as the virtuosic ending, but it was also challenging to find the music for when the keys and strings are not shown. For these moments, I imagined how the cartoonists might have drawn it, with the exception of a few passages where I stretched the limits so far that it becomes more composition than transcription.