Throughout the history of Disney — its films, theme parks and more, there are some people whose talents and contributions make them true legends within the industry. For entertainment scores and park soundtracks, there is no better modern master than Bruce Healey. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Healey was raised in Southern California and has been a professional composer and arranger since 1972.

He plays keyboards, percussion and also conducts. His educational background includes a Bachelor of Music Composition from California State University Fullerton and graduate studies in composition and orchestration at the University of Southern California School of Music.

Joining the Walt Disney Company as a composer and arranger in 1973, he then became Music Coordinator and Arranger in 1980. During this time, Bruce wrote arrangements and orchestrations for many projects, including Disney television specials, Super Bowl halftime shows, and parades and stage shows for Disney Parks. In 1986, he became Musical Director for Walt Disney Attractions.

If you’ve ever been inside a Disney park — and let’s hope so — you’ll have heard his work, or his influence, somewhere. He has directly composed scores ranging from ‘Fantasmic!’ to ‘One Man’s Dream’, and, of course… Disney’s Fantillusion…

The music of Disney’s Fantillusion Parade shines as one of the most symphonic parade scores ever written. Can you tell me about that?

Yes, it does. All the other parades before it were smaller types of things. In order to be able to represent all of these different themes that we were going to see as visuals from the films — for example all of the different themes of the Evil section of the parade, I wanted to use an approach of variations on an original theme that I could mould to whatever shape I needed it to be, to support all the themes included.

So, I decided: what better way to go about it than to use the device of the classical composers in my own way, such as Haydn, Beethoven or Mozart. What would they do if they were given the assignment of working with this kind of format? So, the theme and variation approach would be flexible enough to allow all that to happen. Using a more classically oriented theme, something that had the kind of feel and structure of a classical symphony, if you will –although not the scope of a classical symphony, but something that had that kind of structure to it and allowed more variations, would give me the best opportunity to succeed and would also be more timeless.

I didn’t want to write something that would be stylistically limited to a particular time period. I wanted to write something that would be more timeless and would last for a long time. Something that would be accessible to just about anybody who heard it, so that they could say: “ah, that sounds familiar to me in some way” and they would immediately accept it as an interesting and entertaining idea. That’s how I came up with a theme that has got some classical music value to it and can be shaped and moulded into forms, allowing me to incorporate all the Disney themes in a variety of ways.

The original Tokyo Disneyland Fantillusion parade opened in 1995, not very long after the opening of Disneyland Paris, which presented more symphonic music than any other Disney park. Do you think that had any kind of influence on your choice in that matter?

I think so. As Disneyland Paris came online, Vasile Sirli was producing music for that park using orchestras in Europe. In doing that, he was looking at different ways of representing the musical ideas, and I think he came up with that approach of using an orchestra for a lot of their projects in a very appealing way.

At the same time, the late 80′s, with the Little Mermaid score — which was not really symphonic but started to lean at that direction — and Beauty and the Beast after that, which was much more symphonic in nature, the film scores also gave us permission at the theme parks to go into that more symphonic realm. The Disneyland Paris park began doing that from the very beginning of its existence and we started doing those kinds of things as well.

The Christmas Fantasy Parade at Disneyland, in 1993, had a pretty good sized orchestra and some of the “symphony” feel to it from time to time. But the concept of it was not symphonic from beginning to end. It was just orchestral where it needed it be, as opposed to Fantillusion which is more symphonic all the time. The whole concept is symphonic.

You not only composed the Fantillusion score, but also orchestrated and conducted it!

Yes. I orchestrate what I arrange and compose. It’s just part of my process. There are a lot of film composers now who don’t orchestrate their own work, but I’m a more traditionally trained musician – composition, orchestration and arranging go hand in hand in my brain.

In this parade, there are some interactions between lights (notably on the float and on the Castle) and music. Did you take that aspect into account during the writing process?

In some cases, I did, yes. In the Enchanted Fairy Garden, I composed and orchestrated the music so that the floats could sparkle or the Castle could change colour.

I didn’t specifically know how they would be programmed at the time. I just made musical pictures that afforded the opportunity to make those kinds of programming changes. Because the music was written and recorded well before the floats were finished. So, when they built the floats, they were reacting to the music that I wrote.

We actually had some discussions about what the opportunities were for that kind of programming. We talked about places here and then, like at the beginning of the show moment with the “starlight, starbright” poem. I wrote the music that way deliberately so that they could reflect the music changes in the lighting.

Since the floats weren’t finished at the time you composed the score, what did you draw you inspiration from?

I had what we call a treatment, which is like a concept document that describes the concept of the parade and the fact that it was going to be in three blocks, that the first one would be an Enchanted Fairy Garden and was going to have lots of flowers and fairies, and lots of sparkling lights, with opportunities for lighting changes.

It also described who the cast members would be in each block, in other words that there’s going to be Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, etc. So, I just started off with the logo float opening the parade. I also had storyboards, and each storyboard was basically a drawing of what the float might look like. Of course, those floats changed a lot during the development, but that’s what I started with.

With storyboards to guide you, it seems that this process was very close to filmmaking.

Yes, it’s very much so. Except that in animation, after storyboard, you get pencil tests animation and that pre-determines a length of time possibly. Then, you get colour tests, then you get clean-up and you see all these different stages of animation along the way as it’s growing and coming to life. With a parade, you get storyboards and then that’s it. When the floats are built and ready to go on the street, then you see it. Until then, a lot of things remain in the imagination of the composer, the choreographer and the director.

Your music begins with some kind of a fanfare. Is it reminiscent of the live bands that accompanied the first Disneyland parades?

Yes. You know, Disneyland’s Very Merry Christmas Parade and Fantasy On Parade had live bands in them. One of the great things about those is that they had an opening unit that was a fanfare unit. They would have about nine fanfare trumpeters that would start off, and there would be a whole brass band that was behind them. So, the parade started off with a great, big fanfare, to announce the arrival of the parade.

And I wrote the fanfare of Fantillusion to achieve the same purpose: tell the audience that the parade was starting and there was something big about to happen. In place of an extended overture, it seemed like the fanfare idea was the most effective at getting people’s attention and saying: listen and get ready to watch and be entertained!

I do that a lot with parades. It’s difficult to get away from that idea because if we do something that goes the other direction, with a more subtle opening, it would not be as successful outdoors, with all the distraction and noise.

So, you kept with a tradition while always moving forward.

Yes, and it’s always a great challenge to come up with new, fresh ideas that still serve the purpose of the show. It would be easy to do something completely different, but we would not be as effective because there are physical considerations of the environment from which we have to take our inspiration.

Did you want to nod to the Main Street Electrical Parade in some way in your music?

Well, I admire the theme from the Electrical Parade. It has its own contrapuntal approach, if you will. I like the idea of that and I wanted to explore that idea in Fantillusion by using counterpoint. There are electronics in Fantillusion, but they are more “happy Disney sounds”, bells and things like that.

How did you create the main Fantillusion theme?

It was inspired by what I know of Bach and Mozart and, although I don’t pretend to put myself in the class with Bach and Mozart, I came up with a theme that was attractive to me at the time. I wanted to it to be simple enough to be accessible to just about anybody and sophisticated enough to allow developments of the theme in a variety of ways.

When creating it, did you anticipate the way you would include classic Disney themes in it?

Very much so. I constructed a form that allowed for the exposition of the theme and then allowed for certain areas of that to be used as development areas or places where these other themes could be applied. That’s why, if you hear each scene separately, you’ll hear the Fantillusion theme pretty much in the same place in the structure of the music every time, and the other Disney themes always appear in the same development areas.

Can you tell me about your way of using the classic Disney themes within your music?

Of course, you can’t use the original recordings, but you can certainly make your own, new arrangements and treatments, a re-composition of the original themes and new orchestrations and recordings of those. That’s what I did with Fantillusion, and combined them with my own themes that would make a unified piece of music for the whole thing.

In a feature animation sequel, the story of the sequel may be complementary to the original but not the same. So, the musical moments and the message of the lyrics of a particular song might not apply in a sequel, they may have no place in that story. In the Fantillusion parade, it’s a re-telling of the stories through images and the guests’ memory of what the story is about. So, it’s not really a sequel; it’s kind of a refreshment of people’s memory of the movie.

Disney animated sequels composers are sometimes confronted to legal issues to re-use classic Disney themes. How do you deal with that?

Believe it or not, in parades, when you’re using a lot of different themes from a lot of different films, we’re in what one calls the “background music” context. In other words, it’s not a stage performance of the music. Nobody is out there singing it. They may be dancing on it, but the music is always in a background context to the visual. So, the legalities of the use of that music are different.

How did you conceive musically the rest of the parade?

In Tokyo Disneyland, in the development of the parade, we had discussions about what was appealing to the Japanese audience. There are a couple of concepts that are very appealing to the Japanese audience and they really line up very well with what was appealing to American family audience.

One of them is the concept of fantasy — the idea of fairytales — princes and princesses, and the battle between Good and Evil. And then, there is the idea of gardens and fairies. The Japanese audience very much enjoys this kind of escapism into the visuals of gardens, fairies and flowers. All of those beautiful visuals, fantastic and fanciful visuals and things like that.

So, the whole opening section of the parade, which we refer to as the Enchanted Fairy Garden is directly inspired by that concept and that aesthetic. I took the theme that I wrote and I embellished it and wrote variations on it for each one of the units of this Enchanted Fairy Garden, and they all kind of merge together into one long theme and variations based on this one main theme.

There is no single one of the Disney themes in that part of the parade, until you come to the show moment which has all the Disney themes like The Working Song and Heigh Ho woven into that almost frenetic, fairy-type of a production number. And it’s the same for the two other chapters of the story, with the Disney Villains and then with the Disney Princes and Princesses.

I have to admit that the Villains section’s show stop, The Light Turns Into Night is certainly my favourite because of the drama and the dense counterpoint.

I was very happy to get the opportunity to stretch that far and get into the darker side of our emotional reaction. Because that’s what those Villains do: you can’t have light without dark; happiness doesn’t mean anything without sadness. It’s about the contrast of those things. The flow of the parade starts out very fancifully and happily, hosted by Mickey Mouse, and then there’s that transition into all the bad things that happen in this story, and then the transition into the Happy Ending of the whole thing. So, it’s kind of a very large but simple arching form of Good to Bad to Good.

The orchestration of the Jafar section is quite unusual. Can you tell me about it?

There are tabla drums coming from India and dumbek drums, used in Middle East, along with a string instrument similar to an oud, but more like a balalaïka. They were all live instruments.

And then, we have very low-key harps for Ursula.

I used two harps in most of the orchestration for Fantillusion so that I get enough weight on that kind of a colour. Two harps allow you to do more things, change keys quickly and do chromatic writing. Ravel and Debussy, of course, did that a lot.

In that Villains section, music seems to be no more about Mozart, but rather about early 20th century.

Yes. I really like Eastern European aesthetic. Working in a minor key is much more harmonically interesting, especially if you’ve worked in major key for some much of the time.

I wanted to make The Light Turns Into Night and the Ghouls Dance go another step further in terms of harmonic and counterpuntal sophistication. So, I had to make sure it was more evolved than the music that happened before. And at the end of the cue, I wrote a kind of a passacaglia, with strong, Japanese taiko drums played by a group called Kodo that performs concerts of authentic Japanese music mostly based on taiko drumming.

The drums are very unusual, very large, all hand-made. Authentic taiko drums are very expensive because they’re made out of one tree! It’s a very interesting instrument, and I knew that the Japanese appreciate the sound of them and are very familiar with that sound, so I wanted to use them in my orchestration.

And there’s also some choir part in it!

Yes. I used choir a little bit in this Evil section, but I didn’t really want to expose the choir in any significant way until the finale. But I did use it in the Maleficent part. It’s another element that makes that part of the parade unique in its identity and also kind of acknowledges the choir-sung ending of almost every classic Disney film. I wanted to integrate that into the music of the parade.

For the French version of Fantillusion, Disneyland Paris Music Director Vasile Sirli asked you to help in the new mix of your music. What changes did you make?

We changed a few things. We changed one of the voices in the show that we needed to change and we combined all of the three fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, which used to be on separate floats in Tokyo. So, we combined them all into one float. So, all of that dialogue was re-edited and re-mixed. Now, the three fairies tell that little story and make their own comments kind of alternately on the one float.

There were also pieces of music from the Tokyo mix that were eliminated from the Disneyland Paris version because the number of floats is different. It was a directorial choice, mostly. But I mostly worked on the souvenir soundtrack. Based on the content of the Disneyland Paris parade, I edited a new souvenir soundtrack CD and made a new mix of that material, especially for this CD.

Indeed, with that CD, we can enjoy the overall music of the parade, yet not the ones of the show stops.

Actually, I was given a time limitation as to how much time I could have for the whole piece and how long the whole piece could last. Completing what I call “the version as the parade passes by”, took all of the time that I had, so, I wasn’t able to include the other pieces of music.

I would love to see another version of the CD come out that has all the pieces of music either on separate track or part of a newly edited version of the soundtrack.

Vasile Sirli is well-known for his respect of his fellow composers from the other Disney parks, so it’s no surprise he asked you to return to the score.

Yes. And I appreciate that! I look forward to another opportunity to work with him like that!

We’re now coming to the end of the fifth year that Disney’s Fantillusion illuminates the nights of Disneyland Paris. How do you feel about that?

I am very happy that it’s been so well received in Paris. I hope it has a longer life still and is bringing a lot of magic to the guests there.

Did your work on Fantillusion change your approach to the parade music you produced after it?

That’s a good question. I think it made me aware — especially after I heard it in its environment and saw how people reacted to it — of how far one could go in terms of sophistication and complexity and still be able to be entertaining to people of all ages, to put something into a piece of work that can appeal to people on a variety of levels.

You don’t need to know anything about music to listen to Fantillusion and appreciate one act at a time as it goes past you.