The Press Democrat has an excellent write up about the new exhibit entitled “Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse” that opened at he Schulz carton museum.
The exhibit attempts to show a clear connection between the musical scores Schulz incorporated into some of his “Peanuts” comic strips featuring Schroeder and the meaning of the cartoon itself.
“We’re trying to argue that the choice of music was intentional,” said William Meredith, director of the Beethoven Center, who co-curated the exhibit with Jane O’Cain of the Schulz Museum. “If you don’t read music, then you lose a lot of meaning of the strip.”
For the exhibit, O’Cain and Meredith went through about 300 of Schulz’s cartoons that feature the budding young pianist and his muse, Beethoven, and distilled them down to 55. Then they paired the cartoons with an audio track of the works featured in each strip.
“Musicians talk about the fact that they can play the music from the strip,” O’Cain said. “Now the general public can hear the music from the strip as well.”