As part of our ongoing celebration of Walt Disney World’s 40th Anniversary, we wanted to bring you something special to mark one of the reasons why the Magic Kingdom is so musically significant. So we spent some time researching the music of the park (which we began illustrating here) and came across a group of musicians from Pennsylvania who have left an indelible mark on an everyday visit to the park.
While Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (PRO), based in Lewisburg, PA, do not revel in a multi-platinum album selling environment like today’s top stars, their music is enjoyed by millions of people every year, as tracks from two of their albums compose a large portion of the music loop that plays on Main Street USA in the Magic Kingdom every day.
Beyond that rare honor, the PRO has released 14 studio albums, recorded several scores for film and television, and performs live concerts around the globe every year. On Saturday, October 22nd, the PRO is performing its 25th Anniversary concert at the Weis Center in Lewisburg!
Read on, Disneyphiles and music fans, as we uncover a link between our past and present with an eye-opening interview with PRO conductor and curator, Rick Benjamin.
So, I guess, to start off, how exactly did you come to establish the PRO and become immortalized at Walt Disney World?
The music that is heard on Main Street USA is about 98% culled from my Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, and we are the only organization that exists to preserve and perform the music of America from the late 1800s and early 1900s. We are actually a non-profit corporation, and we’ve been around for 25 years.
I started Paragon at The Julliard School back in 1986; it was an American Music symposium. And it was kicked off by a discover I had made by accident of the original sheet music library of the old Victor Talking Machine Company – that was one of the world’s first record labels! When I was a student, I had learned that the Victor collection was being sent to a landfill; the company thought this stuff was totally useless – after all, who would want to listen to Jerome Kern music from 1907? You know, it was just done with.
So, I managed to rescue all of that stuff – these were fully-orchestrated pieces including every sheet for all the instruments. And I brought it back to Julliard – it was about 4,000 music compositions – and started Paragon. And we’ve been chugging away ever since.
I’m really surprised that material was doomed for a dump, because those documents are essentially pieces of American history. I can’t imagine that The Smithsonian or The Library of Congress didn’t want a piece of that!
Well, they actually didn’t know about it at the time and the folks who were in control of the material were simply unconcerned with it. Nobody was really paying much attention. And I just happened to come along at the right time, and I started this orchestra with it.
And right after we gave our first concert at Julliard, we were approached by a very famous Classical producer, a man named Thomas Frost, who is probably the most Grammy Award-winning Classical producer! At that time, he was working with [Vladimir] Horowitz and the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra and the “who’s who” of Classical music. He heard us play, and he came up to me and said, “I’d like to be your producer.” That was fantastic, because it was just like writing your first screenplay and having Steven Spielberg come up to you and say that he’d like to produce it. But that’s what happened!
We started recording in 1986/87, and we made several albums, and somehow, Eddie Sotto, who was a Vice President at Disney Imagineering, happened upon these recordings and thought that they would be amazing to use as the loop for Main Street USA.
Eddie had the brainpower to understand that what he was hearing was not just happy, lively tunes, but the actual orchestrations as they were written in the early 1900s played on period, antique instruments. He loved the authenticity of that, and also the fact that the music is good and fits that theming very well. And that’s how the connection happened. Disney licensed a couple of recordings that we made back in the 1980s, and they’re still running now!
I was actually just down there last January with my kids, and we were listening to a 120dB of one of the things we had recorded. And I went up to one of the vendors there and said, “How do you like this great music?” The guy just looked at me and said, “I HATE IT!” [Laughs] So, there is maybe something NOT to be said for repetition.
When we did a winter concert in Los Angeles in February of this year, a couple of Disney guys showed up and were talking about the idea of redoing the loop with some newer renditions. We’ll see where that goes. I would guess that a lot of people won’t like it, because what is there now is nice and working, and they might like to come back to hear it.
Comments