Dr. Seuss’s Gertrude McFuzz (1995)

Kapilow is a very skillful composer trained by Nadia Boulanger. The scores to Green Eggs and Ham and to Gertrude McFuzz, which had its world premiere Saturday, are cheerful, brisk neo-classical affairs with lots of familiar tunes from classical music and popular culture worked into the texture; it is the kind of idiom that can move with ease from Stravinskian scrub-a-dub to some low-down blues... There's also an element in Kapilow's work that will remind others of the pastiche scores to early Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons. This observation is meant as a compliment -- it wasn't the intent of those soundtracks to introduce the language of concert music to generations of children, but that's what they did.