Joe Raposo

Joseph Guilherme Raposo Jr., OIH (February 8, 1937 – February 5, 1989) was a Portuguese-American composer, songwriter, pianist, television writer and lyricist, best known for his work on the children's television series "Sesame Street", "The Electric Company", "Shining Time Station" and on the sitcom "Three's Company", including its theme song. In addition to these works, Raposo also composed extensively for Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, in Geisel's productions of "Halloween Is Grinch Night", "Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?" and "The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat" for DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.

Life

Joe was the only child of Portuguese immigrant parents Joseph Soares Raposo and Maria da Ascenção Vitorino Raposo, Raposo was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. [http://www.muppetcentral.com/news/2004/091804.shtml] Raposo son of Portuguese immigrants from (www.muppetcentral.com/)] He was a graduate of Harvard College, class of 1958, where he was well known for writing the scores for several Hasty Pudding shows, and was a close friend of, among many others, Italian-American actor and singer Frank Sinatra, mathematician, songwriter and satirist Tom Lehrer, WNYC radio personality Jonathan Schwartz, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Bert Salzman.

Raposo worked in musical theater both before and after his work for The Children's Television Workshop and "Sesame Street"; musical theater was where he first encountered future collaborator Jim Henson. According to Jonathan Schwartz, during the mid-1960s, before "Sesame Street", Raposo performed side music in piano bars in Boston to make ends meet, and also served as pianist and music director for a jazz trio working at WNAC Channel 7, Boston. Upon hearing Raposo's musical skill, Schwartz claims in his autobiography he urged Raposo to give up piano bar playing in Boston and "take his ass to New York". Raposo's decision to take Schwartz's suggestion and move to New York in 1965 eventually led him to his fated meeting with Henson, to Sesame Street, and towards international fame.

He was the musical supervisor and arranger for the original Broadway run of "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown", and contributed additional music to that play. He was also responsible for the memorable theme music for New York City television station WABC-TV's '; the piece, called "Moving Pictures," was also used for the station's other movie shows, and subsequently by ABC's other owned-and-operated stations. In the 1970s, Raposo wrote original music for the animated film '; he later teamed with William Gibson ("The Miracle Worker") to create a stage musical about Raggedy Ann. The musical was the first theatre company production from the United States to perform in the former Soviet Union upon resumption of cultural relations between the two countries. It later had a brief run on Broadway in 1986.

Raposo composed "Bein' Green," a song that has had success in popular culture and has been recorded by at least 25 artists, including Van Morrison, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles. His song "Sing," written for "Sesame Street", earned a gold record for the Carpenters.

Raposo also collaborated with Sheldon Harnick ("Fiddler on the Roof") on a musical adaptation of the 1948 film "It's a Wonderful Life". "A Wonderful Life" was first performed at the University of Michigan in 1986, and had a successful run at Washington, DC's Arena Stage in 1991. It was performed in concert on Broadway for one night only on December 12, 2005; the production starred Brian Stokes Mitchell, David Hyde Pierce, and Judy Kuhn.

Along with numerous Grammy and Emmy nods, his song "The First Time It Happens," from "The Great Muppet Caper", was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song in 1981, only to lose to "Arthur's Theme" from the film "Arthur".

During his career Raposo composed themes for several sitcoms, such as "Ivan The Terrible" and "Foot In The Door", and composed for documentaries, most notably Peter Rosen's production "America Is" for which Raposo not only scored a patriotic, critically well-received title theme but, unusually, served as its on-screen narrator. 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 to saudade 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.

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 1970's 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 (e.g., "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" (1974) 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 - and arguably succeeds at - 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 Sesame 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. Although primarily known for work in live-action and animated children's television, Joe Raposo actually aspired to become a Broadway musical composer [http://www.thehoya.com/news/111398/news3.htm] .

Raposo died in Bronxville, New York, in 1989 of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, just three days shy of his 52nd birthday. He was survived by two sons, Joseph and Nicholas, from his first marriage and a son and a daughter, Liz [http://www.thehoya.com/news/111398/news3.htm] , [http://www.thehoya.com/news/111398/news3.htm Family Donates Lyricist’s Music To University] "Georgteown Hoya" Friday, November 13th, 1998] from his marriage to Pat Collins-Sarnoff. [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E6D9103DF933A15750C0A962958260 VOWS; Pat Collins, William Sarnoff] "New York Times", March 20, 1994] In 1998, many of his manuscripts were donated by his widow, Pat Collins-Sarnoff, to Georgetown University Library.

He was eulogized in the 1990 documentary "Sing! Sesame Street Remembers Joe Raposo and His Music", which was hosted and directed by "Sesame Street" crew member Jon Stone.

Credits and Lectures

Film Scores - Composer

: 1981 The Great Muppet Caper;1978 Raggedy Ann; 1974 Big Mo; 1973 Savages; 1972 The Possession of Joel Delaney; 1966 Steinbeck in Memoriam

Television - Musical Director and/or Composer/Lyricist/Producer

: 1969-1974, 1984-1989 Sesame Street; 1971-1974 The Electric Company; 1974-1979 Visions; 1967-1969 Metromedia Television

Theme Songs - Composer or Composer/Lyricist

: Sesame Street; The Electric Company; Three's Company; We'll Get By; The Ropers; Shining Time Station; Madeline; Steampipe Alley; CBS Morning News Television Specials - Music Director/Composer

: America Is (CBS - Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program); Curious George; Pontoffel Pock (Dr. Seuss); Cabbage Patch Christmas Broadway & Off Broadway - Composer/Lyricist and/or Musical Director

: A Wonderful Life, with Sheldon Harnick; Raggedy Ann, with William Gibson; You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, incidental music with Charles Schulz and Clark Gesner; Half a Sixpence, with Tommy Steele; Play It Again, Sam, with Woody Allen; House of Flowers, incidental music with Harold Arlen and Truman Capote; The Mad Show, with David Steinberg and Linda Lavin; The Office, with Jerome Robbins

Lecturer

: MIT; Yale University; Harvard Graduate School of Education; New York University; SMU

Influences and anecdotes

Raposo was an ardent fan of satirical composer and balladeer Spike Jones. "The Peanut Butter Song" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1TJJJcsCVQ] , which Raposo composed for 1970's-era "Sesame Street", was the former's sound-effects-laden musical homage to the latter. Raposo also composed numerous other works influenced by Jones for Sesame Street, many featuring kazoo and other comical sound-effect objects and instruments. 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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxACew39KLE] [http://musicyouwont.blogspot.com/2007/07/sounds-for-saturday-polkateers-lillian.html] .

Frank Sinatra recorded four of Raposo's songs on his 1973 album, "Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back". Sinatra insisted the album be composed entirely of Raposo's compositions, but the record label balked and, remarkably, prevailed over Sinatra, limiting him to four. Jonathan Schwartz reports Sinatra idolized and popularized Raposo and his music, frequently attending Raposo's parties at his and first wife Susan's New York apartment during the 1960s with glamorous friends and several cronies, including Leo Durocher. Schwartz's memoir adds Sinatra was infatuated with Joe Raposo's piano-playing skill and commonly referred to him to others, characteristically, as "Raposo at the piano", or "the genius" instead of simply, "Joe Raposo".

Sinatra crony James Van Heusen often referred to Raposo in the latter's presence as " The Second", a racist misnomer simultaneously citing Raposo's Portuguese identity as both similar to yet also less worthy than Italian (an intriguing choice of insult considering that Van Heusen was ethnically neither); according to Schwartz, Raposo strongly disliked Van Heusen's remarks, but was savvy enough, and experienced-enough a fringe member of Sinatra's orchestral Rat Pack, never to protest in the presence of either Van Heusen or the singer.

Schwartz also describes Joe Raposo starkly differently from common fan assumptions of him: Schwartz, who knew Raposo well during his life and career, in fact allowing Raposo and first wife and infant son to live at the Schwartz apartment in 1965 while Raposo looked for steady pre-Sesame Street work, characterizes Raposo as, "a Harvard man," "a heavy, round-faced guy with wide-open brown eyes, puffy cheeks and jowls, and appetites more numerous than stars in a desert sky. He was carnivorous, anecdotal, hyperbolic, ambitious. He was Portuguese through and through and ingeniously musical, classically trained. He played the piano in a popular mode as well as anyone I had ever heard. He was simply a wunderkind in his twenties."

Bawdy Sense of Humor

Schwartz in fact twice recalls a specific bawdy joke Raposo apparently enjoyed springing on new acquaintances to test their shock level and political correctness. Schwartz recalls: "(Joe's) first invitation to me was extended after meeting Anna (Schwartz's lover) in her yellow dress. I came alone in Joe's car. Caught in a Storrow Drive traffic jam and so new to each other that we had yet to find a workable punctuation, he told me the following story, in about the same language I will use here. He spoke conversationally and without inflection, like a newsreader."

"'Recently,'" Schwartz recalls Raposo drolly reciting moments after meeting him, "'a man got on the shuttle flight from New York to Boston and took a seat next to a prim, middle-aged woman who was wearing a gray suit. From his briefcase, the man took out a copy of "Playboy", unzipped his fly, and opened the magazine to the centerfold. Holding Playboy in his left hand, he masturbated to completion with his right hand. When he finished, he dropped the magazine, removed a handkerchief from his jacket's inside pocket, and cleaned up. When he was done, he folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket, before returning the magazine to his briefcase under his seat. He then turned to the woman next to him and said, 'Pardon me, do you mind if I smoke?'" Raposo then turned to Schwartz smugly, arms folded, awaiting the latter's response. Concludes Schwartz, "The happy furore that followed established our line of credit together, and determined our flexible boundaries." Indeed, the two became lifelong friends.

Bolstering this joke's behavioral depiction of Joe Raposo as mischievous and often comedically blue raconteur behind the debatably innocent public image of him presented by having worked on Sesame Street was Frank Sinatra's own confession to Schwartz, after Schwartz later told the above Raposo joke to Sinatra, that Raposo's having earlier sprung the exact same joke on him (Sinatra), moments after encountering Sinatra in a taxicab, was "how we met."

The Electric Company veteran actor Jim Boyd has also stated in conversation that "Joe Raposo, I think, secretly wanted to be a burlesque stand-up comic. If he trapped you in a room someplace, you had to listen to these entire routines he'd spring on you. He and Paul Dooley used to come over and hit me with those all the time, and this was before I even had the job on the show. Joe had all these entire comedy routines figured out. He was always ready with them."

Jonathan Schwartz recalls that Raposo allegedly disliked "clipping his toenails" and sported unusually long specimens of them. Further odd and unusual Joe Raposo anecdotes such as the above can be cited and liberally found throughout radio DJ Jonathan Schwartz's autobiography, "All In Good Time" (Random House, 2004, 2005).

Achievements and trivia

The short-lived but memorable "Sesame Street" character Don Music maintained a framed and autographed glamour photograph of Raposo on the wall of his Muppet atelier; but this photograph was never actually identified on the show as being the composer. Don Music, however, was based on neither Raposo's behavior nor character behind the scenes at Sesame Street. Music's character name was in fact a parody on Henson friend and well-known jazz musician Don Messick, whose surname was pronounced similarly, and his prototypical despairing, atonal frustration and musical ineptitude were an impulse creation of Sesame writer and director Jon Stone and puppeteer Richard Hunt.

In "Sesame Street" segment "The Great Cookie Thief", the muppet seen playing the saloon piano is a puppet characterization of Raposo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CKWoKxCLGA] . However, the pianist's voice is performed by a recording of Jim Henson. The Raposo muppet is first to notice and correctly identify the Cookie Monster as The Great Cookie Thief to several other muppets, but says nothing else for the remainder of the clip.

Raposo performed several uncredited stock characters on "Sesame Street" during the early 1970s. According to his son Nicholas in a 2002 telephone conversation, Joe Raposo usually chose to portray anonymous, silly characters in these segments, which were nearly always produced on 16mm film. One notable Raposo character performance is the 1971 Sesame Street segment "Fred, Get Me A Twenty". In the segment, Raposo portrays the lead role of a dim office employee named Fred who is sent searching New York City during the winter of 1971 for a number 20, finally finding it in the hands of a large gorilla, which then promptly chases him throughout the corridors of a tall building.

Raposo also performed similar joke characters for film segments in CTW's "The Electric Company". One notable segment exhibits him attempting to get dressed in jacket and necktie against a white wall under the word "dressing", until the prefix "un-" appears and attaches itself to the prior word, forcing him to engage in a mock striptease which ends with him modestly hopping off-screen and tossing the remainder of his clothing into an empty chair left on-screen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vNW5vyv2aQ] . In a second variation of this film, he is shown packing a suitcase when the "un-" prefix returns and pesters him using the behavior of a meddling fly until, exasperated, Raposo strikes the word with a hammer, knocking it unconscious into the suitcase, which he then triumphantly slams shut with a smirk [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP9lnnnMcx8] .

His voice contributions to "Sesame Street" were diverse and arguably prolific. Sesame Street voice performances by Joe Raposo include the comic, argumentative dog in the animated segment "The Letter I: It Looks Just Like A Bone" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX1h4_OGJ8k] , and as several singing animals, such as "Round" Hippo, Lonesome Kangaroo and Climbing Frog, in film clips CTW commissioned him to score. Raposo performed a credible and ahead-of-genre jazz rap over his own music in the animated Seventies "Sesame Street" segment "What Do You Do With A Pet" [http://repertoire.bmi.com/title.asp?blnWriter=True&blnPublisher=True&blnArtist=True&keyID=1938201&ShowNbr=0&ShowSeqNbr=0&querytype=WorkID] , quizzed children from an unseen position what they saw in "Can You Guess What It Is?" musical segments, and challenged youngsters "Look At This: Can You Guess What This Thing Could Be?", the solutions to which, shown on film, were common objects found around a child's environment.

The "J-Joe, wearing jeans", who "got himself a pocket full of jelly beans" in "Sesame Street" composition "The J Song", was a fond characterization of Raposo by fellow Sesame composer Jeff Moss.

Joe Raposo was very fond of highly caloric sweets according to many who knew him. One favorite food of his, according to one of his children, was cookies. It has been rumored the Wheel-Eating Monster created for commercial advertisers in the Sixties by Jim Henson may have been altered by Henson specifically into a "cookie" monster after Henson observed Raposo's unusual propensity for cookies. Whether this is true is unknown, however; and Frank Oz has never substantiated it. Raposo was actually the first puppeteer to operate the Cookie Monster on television for "Sesame Street", which with his well-noted "cookie fetish" may be the origin of the rumor. Characteristically, his widow Pat Collins-Sarnoff celebrated his life with a milk and cookies reception [http://www.thehoya.com/news/111398/news3.htm] .

During his life, Raposo apparently greatly enjoyed doing animation voicework. Other forays of his into the craft included not only, understandably, the tenor singing role of "master pickler" Gil Gickler in DePatie-Freleng's Dr. Seuss cartoon program "Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You?", but also the entirety of Gickler's spoken dialogue [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] . Raposo also performed at least three other character voices in the cartoon, including a Groogen musician whose "flugel bugle" is destroyed by Pontoffel in an attack flyover [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] , as the ancient Senior Fairy above McGillicuddy who oversees the fairy squadron's worldwide search for the missing Pock and his piano, and as an angry Groogen dairywoman spilt milk upon by a too-close fly-by of Pontoffel's [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] .

The "Pontoffel Pock" cartoon also contains several musical in-jokes contributed directly by Raposo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] : the most overt is a brief, scathing lampoon of his "Sesame Street" nature film segment musical style heard during an atmospheric segment depicting "beauty in nature": in this case, a Hawaiian surf wave, under which Raposo scores a meteorically quick and deliberately mocking imitation of his own "Sesame Street" writing style [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] . Another is Raposo's broken-down and almost scandalously pathetic send-up of "There's Noplace Like Home", rendered in trademark tack piano. The Arabian belly dancer (termed "eyeball dancer" in the cartoon) Neefa Feefa concludes a harem-girl song composed by Raposo with a culturally highly contrasting Yiddish "oy" thrown in by Raposo, and not Theodor Geisel [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlcGT0q-8cw] .

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

A relative, Arthur Raposo, is a naval aficionado well-known to the Portuguese community in New England, and successfully lobbied for the inception, construction and installation of a noted Newport monument to Portuguese navigator Miguel Corte Real [http://www.portuguese-american.net/portugue/Monument/monument.html]

Raposo died exactly one week after the first episode of the final children's series he composed for, "Shining Time Station", aired. Jim Henson died the same night "Sing! Sesame Street Remembers Joe Raposo and His Music" aired on PBS. WTTW announced Henson's death in a voice-over immediately before airing the special.

The HBO animated adaptation of "Madeline", for which Raposo composed the music and songs (with writer/lyricist Judy Rothman), aired four months after Raposo's death. His grave is located at Union Cemetery in Chatham, Massachusetts.

References

External links

*imdb|0710809
* [http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=12273 Joe Raposo] at the Internet Broadway Database
* [http://www.rnh.com/org/index.php?page=biographies&person_id=127 A brief biography of Raposo at the Rodgers & Hammerstein Association]
* [http://www.muppetcentral.com/news/2004/091804.shtml Muppet Central article with photo of Raposo]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6Q1x1seS8] Sesame Street - Little Weaver Bird
*