from 2012
BRUCE HEALEY
talks about his job and
His work with Disney, the parade process, Fantasmic! and more

by Scott Wolf

From my earliest days going to Disneyland, I've always loved the music throughout the park. And while I love the attractions, for me there's something electrifying about sitting in the audience for the shows and parades.

Naturally, it was exciting for me to interview Bruce Healey. Bruce is a wonderfully kind person who has been responsible for the music for every show and parade at Disneyland since 1986, and he is often involved in the music for other parks as well.

I'm sure you will enjoy learning about Bruce's musical life as much as I have.

Scott Wolf: You started out in parades and eventually became an arranger? Where did you go from there?

Bruce Healey: I got promoted to music coordinator and after my boss (Jack Eskew) left the company I eventually was promoted to music director in 1986.

SW: What's the difference between music coordinator and music director?

BH: Music Coordinator does a lot of organizational functional things and basically coordinates production processes and might go out and do rehearsals or prepare materials and things like that. A music director basically oversees what the music is going to be for any particular event or show. In the classic sense of it, it's the person who actually conducts the performance. A music director would have broader responsibilities than a conductor and have significantly broader responsibilities than a coordinator. Anybody who's ever had a job in the music department at Disneyland is kind of a multi-skilled person and pretty much has to be.

SW: Was it primarily live music by the time you were promoted?

BH: No, when I got promoted in 1980 into the music department we were doing full blown recorded production as well as live shows and production of live music for a whole variety of things. It was quite an energetic experience. A very full schedule of activity.

SW: So you were promoted during the 25th anniversary.

BH: I marched in the 25th anniversary parade and I think before that parade was finished I had left the band.

SW: So you played "Disneyland is Your Land?"

BH: Oh yes. Many, many times.

SW: Were you working only for Disneyland or other parks?

BH: Just for Disneyland. My predecessor (WHO WAS THAT?) was music director for both Disneyland and Walt Disney World but then there was changes in the management structure of the whole division, the theme park division and when he left the two departments split. Then there was an interim time when there was no music director. Then there was another music director hired who didn't work out and then I was given the job.

Soon after I got the job and started doing things, Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983. One of my assignments was to go over there and help out with the grand opening in 1983, so I made a lot of friends in Tokyo. It's a great park and a great bunch of people, but a very challenging thing to open a new park, especially when it's something that big and that far away with foreign languages and all the aspects of that.

I was there for six weeks for the grand opening. I rehearsed some groups, I organized a lot of music for a lot of things. They had a dedication for every attraction. A press event and dedication ceremony. Some were very small but others were quite large.

SW: Were they all in the same day?

BH: No, it was spread out over about two weeks I think.

SW: I guess it would be insane in one day.

BH: It was insane enough.

SW: Did you arrange new music for it?

BH: I didn't arrange any but we cross utilized a lot of stuff from the Disneyland library to get Tokyo Disneyland started. The core of their library came from our library. That's part of the reason I was over there was to implement what came from our library. The Diamond Horseshoe show and a lot of things like that.

After I came back from Japan, which was 1987, they asked me to work on their fifth anniversary parade. They had a pre-existing song they wanted to use. I arranged and orchestrated that parade and I started doing other shows for them and also when I was over there, one of the things I did is I re-recorded and produced the recording of the Japanese vocals for "Disneyland is Your Land" for their version of the show.

SW: Did you use the same music recordings from Disneyland and do vocals only?

BH: Yeah. I produced and arranged a lot of things for them in their first ten years. I produced the "Fiesta Tropical" show, "Sebastian's Caribbean Carnival," I wrote and produced the recording for the "Fantillusion" parade, "Aladdin's Great Adventure," their fifth anniversary parade and another one I can't remember right now. I did a lot of their big things at the time.

SW: Did you feel the audience was different than American audiences?

BH: The audience is definitely different. The Japanese philosophy at the time, which may have evolved a bit since then, was that even though the audience was different they wanted it to be an American experience. Certainly, they presented some things that were purely American that maybe the Japanese audience didn't gravitate to quite so readily so they started making other aspects of their entertainment more suitable to a Japanese audience.

There's been some modifications over the years I'm sure, and in fact some of the audience participation things that they like to do, they engage differently with the Japanese audience and so those kinds of things came into the discussion about how to engage the Japanese audience in this participation moment. We like to do it and we can get them up to do it, but we have to do it in just a certain way.

SW: Do you think those types of things would work here, like the way they do the audience participation?

BH: No. It is different here and ours is more instinctive and theirs is more instructive if you will, where you have to really show them what you want them to do.

SW: I know they literally teach you the moves in some of the shows I've seen.

BH: Yes, and here you just get people to clap along or you get people to come on the street and dance or something like that. You just grab them.

SW: I remember being pulled up to do the conga on the street in "Party Gras" at Disneyland.

BH: That was a landmark parade for us and I arranged that parade and orchestrated and produced the recording. It was the first time we ever had a parade stop and do a show and then pick up and move on.

SW: That was my favorite Disneyland parade and my wife's favorite was the "Totally Minnie" parade.

BH: I did that parade as well. Since 1986 I produced all the music for every parade for Disneyland and California Adventure and some for other places as well. It includes the "Mulan" parade, "Hercules" parade, the "World According to Goofy" parade, "Celebration, USA." All of those parades. I wrote part or all of and produced the recordings for.

SW: What is your official title now?

BH: My official title is senior music director and producer. It leans a little bit more heavily on the producer side than it used to but the resort still needs a music director, a person of a certain vision and focus who can communicate that to both the musicians side, the performers, as well as to the management side who need something to be translated. So I'm probably more proud of the idea of being a music director than being a music producer because I think it's a more important role and it's just more fun.

SW: Was it always part of your job to work on the other parks?

BH: It's never clearly defined, but when the folks in Tokyo would ask me to do something I just get it cleared by my boss and they say yeah, you can do it as long as it doesn't interfere with what we need. I always manage to work it out, and still do.

THE PROCESS

SW: When you get started on any project, let's say a parade for example, what is your process from the start?

BH: The process has changed over the years. We used to have a smaller group of people that were responsible for the creation and development of something like that. Now it's become more globalized, so there's a division called Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Creative Entertainment.

It used to be that the vice president of entertainment in concert with the other park management would decide, well, we need to do a new parade for this because we want to put something new out there for our guests. A show director would be assigned to that and the show director would come to me and say, "Let's figure this out." We'd figure out what we were going to do and we'd make some presentations and make some demos and develop it from there. When we got approval and everybody had their plan together we'd go out and produce the recording or write the music if there were live bands involved. But that process has evolved.

It's become far more critical to the whole organization as to what's going on in each park and how it relates to other parks and can we move it from one park to another. When we have something that's really popular and really effective in one place we want to be able to share it with other parks, so Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Creative Entertainment is taking the lead in conceptualizing those kinds of shows and making them globally effective.

So now I've become involved more from the production side of things and called upon to produce things for them. That's how the Mythica project for Tokyo DisneySea worked and that's how “Mickey’s SOUNDSATIONAL Parade” at Disneyland worked. I was basically educating other creative people who got involved as to how parade music works in a parade audio system and in floats and how it might be arranged and what you can and probably shouldn't do, from a technical side of things and to a certain degree to a musical side of things.

SW: The audio system amazes me. For example, when a parade unit is in front of the audience, the big speakers are playing the music corresponding to that float. How does that work?

BH: It's magic. Really, we have a proprietary control system that is programmed to do that with certain kind of hardware. It's pretty complicated to explain but suffice it to say that through the use of computers and multiple audio sources, we have the ability to send audio to any speaker on the parade route from one control room.

SW: How many speakers do they deal with?

BH: We used to have 33 zones of operation with various speakers in a zone. We have hundreds of speakers in the parade audio system and each one is now individually controllable. In order to do this manually, you would have to have a crew of thirty audio guys moving faders to accomplish that and they'd all have to do it precisely in a certain amount of time. That's why it's all controlled by computers and a script. That same kind of control system is applied on an individual basis to each float. Those floats run in sync with the main audio system. We write a script that says when this float is in this position on the street, we want its corresponding music to come out of that corresponding speaker. In simple terms that's basically what's going on. It hasn't always been that way. It's evolved. Every time a creative need comes along to change it, we take the time and spend the money and energy to make the technology do what we want.

SW: I noticed that sometimes Main Street music is in stereo. Like one side of the street is different than the other.

BH: That's a recent enhancement that I took advantage of for the first time with "Remember, Dreams Come True" (fireworks show). That's kind of a landmark for us. It's not something that a lot of people are aware of, but when you're standing in the middle of the street and you hear it that way, it's a completely different experience.

FANTASMIC!

SW: Was "Fantasmic!" an unusual project from your standpoint?

BH: It was very unusual. It was very challenging. It was a great experience. I actually got to fulfill a dream I had for quite some time which was to basically write a film score so I composed all of the underscore material and then I arranged all of the Disney themes that are incorporated in it.

I worked with a great show director, Barnette Ricci on that. She's working with Buena Vista Pictures special events now. She's directing and conceiving all of those special events like the "Pirates" premieres at the park and the El Capitan shows. When she left Disneyland and went up there and started working on that I was working with her on all of those kinds of projects as well.

SW: What are your favorite projects that you've worked on?

BH: I'd say "Fantasmic!" is the big one and "Fantillusion" (an electrical parade set to an orchestral soundtrack) for Tokyo.

SW: Did you work on the original "Electrical Parade" when it was at Disneyland?

BH: Not initially since I came onboard in 1980, but along the way for many years, from 1972 up through about '86 we'd make little changes to it here and there. When I came onboard in the music department, somewhere in the next five years or so we changed it a couple of times so I touched it, my voice and my mouth was the envelope generator for the "Heigh Ho" of the Dwarfs on the mine train.

We were in the studio and Don Dorsey was there. The success of that parade is due in large part to Don's contribution so he was always hired to make changes to it. We went in and wanted to make changes to the dwarf mine train and a couple of other things, and he needed somebody to go and sing "Heigh Ho" into a microphone so he could perform the Vocoder synthesizer aspect of that sound. So I volunteered to go in and do it - and they made brutal fun of me.

SW: Did you also do the line of "We did, dig, dig"?

BH: Yeah.

SW: Do you have a favorite memory of working for Disney?

BH: I think one of the highlights was the "Pocohontas" premiere in Central Park. We took over the great lawn in Central Park. We put up three giant movie screens and invited two hundred thousand of our closest friends from around the country and did a premiere of the film, "Pocohontas." I had a live 72 piece orchestra, Lebo M from "The Lion King" (who did the African vocals) and a group of his folks singing, and the Boys Choir of Harlem singing and we put on a concert as part of the premiere of that show. That was a great experience.

There are so many great events that we've done over the years. Some of them that are not seen by the public hardly at all.

I was also really proud of the work I did on "Light Magic" even though it wasn't a successful event for us.

SW: But it really was good music. I still listen to it... it was on a CD.

BH: I liked it. I wrote it, and I like it. I can't say that about everything I've written.

SW: Do you generally like to listen to your own music?

BH: Not really. No. Because I have to deal with it so intensely and for so long when I'm writing it and recording it and producing it that by the time I'm done with it, I'm pretty much done with it. I'd rather not revisit it. It certainly doesn't bother me to go listen to it and I can appreciate the things that I like about it and still wince at the things that I don't like about it. But, most of those are pretty private thoughts and not really apparent to other people. But I had a fun time doing the music for that particular project.

SW: Sometimes you have to revisit music, right, for different projects?

BH: We certainly can and would if it were creatively appropriate. That's what defines what we do. I've taken some music from shows in the park and put them in other situations. For example, there are a number of things from our library that have found their way into the Disney Concert Library for use by symphony orchestras. The Disney Concert Library is a rental library that rents out Disney music to Pops orchestras around the world.

I wrote a big medley that wound up in their library and several other pieces.

SW: You worked a lot on that "Disney Spectacular" album by the Cincinnati Pops, right?

BH: Right. I wrote some of that, but most of it was material that existed in our library from a show that we took around the country called the "Disney Symphonic Spectacular" tour that I was music director for. It just went to three cities, and then a few years later we did the "Disney Symphonic Fantasy" tour that did a lot more. Those were good projects because I like the idea of promoting live performance, especially orchestras because I think they are a bit undervalued, underappreciated entities in the artistic community. They're expensive, they're hard to keep going but I think they're worth a lot to our culture. So I'm an advocate of that and that's why I like to be able to provide things to the Disney Concert Library.

As far as other things I'm just really proud of some of the really significant parades and shows. The recent fireworks shows I produced the recordings and was Music Director to a certain degree on all of those, but I'm especially proud of how they come out and how they're received by the guests.