Joe Raposo - Musical Style and Influences

Musical Style and Influences

Raposo was an ardent fan of satirical composer and balladeer Spike Jones. "The Alligator Song", which Raposo composed for 1970s-era Sesame Street, was Raposo's sound-effects-laden musical homage to Jones. Raposo also composed numerous other works influenced by Jones for Sesame Street, many featuring kazoo and other comical sound-effect objects and instruments like siren whiistles, bulb horns, and tenor banjos. Another Raposo composition, "Doggy Paddle", features Raposo barking like several singing dogs during its instrumental verse, a blatant musical homage to the singing and barking dogs of "Memories Are Made Of This" by Jones and His City Slickers.

Raposo's songwriting tended towards wistful introspections on life and nature. Primarily celebrated for his bright, uptempo major key compositions, he also showed skill at arranging original blues and jazz pieces in minor key, and often took sudden melancholy lyrical detours in the midst of otherwise cheerful songs.

Unlike his children's television scoring contemporaries, Raposo exhibited an uncommonly broad grasp of compositional styles. Raposo was classically trained as a conductor and at the Ecole Normale in Paris as an arranger. As a student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he extended his facility in piano technique. This classical background gave him the ability to engage different music genres authentically. So diverse were the genres he regularly frequented, that often the only identifying mark of his songs as "Raposo" were common lyric allusions to "sunny days" or "flying", or his signature use of piccolo and glockenspiel atop the melodic or contrapuntal line, as well as the prominent uses of guitar in the rhythmic line.

Most overtly, however, Joe Raposo's sonic trademark was his seemingly obsessive, and often exhaustively authentic, live replication of the tonal quality and exact playback cadence of the 20th-century self-operating player piano when composing for and performing on a grand, baby grand or upright piano. He appears to have specifically tuned his Children's Television Workshop pianos not only to blatantly mimic the player piano in its antique tonality, but to achieve and then maintain what became a signature ragtime tack or "saloon" piano sound by them.

Raposo's considerable stylistic ambition during his tenure as music director lent Sesame Street its trademark extreme musical diversity. For The Electric Company, particularly for songs he composed for The Short Circus, he led CTW to "pop record" production values and generally strongly enforced an adult musical sophistication for all content he supervised. Given an unusual creative freedom in the Music Department at 1970s CTW, Raposo toggled from convincing country ballads (e.g. The Ballad of Casey MacPhee, depicting Cookie Monster as a heroic train engineer caught in a mountain avalanche) and authentic hillbilly ("It's A Long Hard Climb, But I'm Gonna Get There" and "The P Song," among others) to blues elegies of considerable emotional and tonal complexity, like "New Life Coming" and "Bein' Green".

Raposo also evidenced skill as an American funk composer, making frequent and arguably credible musical allusions (on 1970-1974 Sesame Street) to the underground black soul and funk performers of his day. Themes written for muppet Roosevelt Franklin and the segment H exhibit some of Raposo's most convincing soul and funk composition and arrangement; the former contains clear allusions to The Philly Four and Lee Dorsey while the latter attempts coupling a convincing African-American Seventies funk bassline to the cycling musical structure of a European round, all while still somehow retaining his signature high end accents along the upper melodic ramparts of the composition. Raposo also made several stylistic allusions to jazz-funk organist Louis Chachere in compositions Fat, Cat, Sat and Some, All, None, and on both selections played the Hammond B-3 like Chachere, but using its leslies as a comedic device as would have Raposo's idol, Spike Jones.

Vocally, Joe Raposo was a tenor, possessing an unusually warm, buttery attack and an easily identifiable, very stable, mellow trademark vibrato.