Scott Bradley of MGM has never been the object of interest that WB's Carl Stalling was but there are anecdotes to be found.
https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2017/01/c ... adley.html
Shawn Roney, in his thesis A Frog, A Cat, A Mouse, A “Deranged Genius” and More: The Story of MGM Cartoons (1998), quoted his interview with [Bill]Hanna:
I worked close with Scott Bradley because I did all of the timing of the Tom and Jerrys and did a lot of my work on bar sheets, where the actual notes were written down. . . . And he was always very cooperative and — in working closely with him — why, we could almost tell him exactly, or I could tell him exactly, what we had in mind and we wanted and he always seemed to be able to fulfill that. ...
We worked with Scott on a daily basis. He was [a] much older man than we were; and as far [as] having any social life together, we didn’t. But he was certainly a pleasure to work with and a great talent and a lot of fun.
While Stalling had the full Warner Bros. orchestra at his disposal, Bradley was limited to 19 or 20 pieces. Winge explained:
Bradley had to re-consider it as a large chamber group: he treated the wood-winds individually, the strings as a quintet and the piano as a solo instrument instead of as a filler. But this approach demanded multiple counterpoint and unconventional harmonic devices. The kind of fast a-rhythmic stories used in cartoons did not lend itself to a steady rhythmic pattern or to long-winded melodic lines. Bradley senses here a strong affinity between the structure of the cartoon and modern music. All this led him away from the beaten path. First, he used Stravinsky’s well-known Petrouchka chord as a shock denoting Jerry Mouse’s horrified gasp. This harmonic innovation ranks—in Bradley’s words—with Wagner’s harmonization of the chromatic scale in Die Walkuere. Rimsky-Korsakoff used the basic progression as a modulation, i.e., C-major to F-major, but Stravinsky combined the two, sounding them simultaneously in various inversions in close and open harmony. This device is the basis of most contemporary harmony, save Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone System. For years, Bradley has been using it, too, as probably the only composer in his field. “The Twelve-Tone System,” he says “provides the ‘out-of-this-world’ progressions so necessary to under-write the fantastic and incredible situations which present-day cartoons contain.”
But about one of [Tex]Avery’s shorts, Bradley said in 1948
In a recent cartoon, Out-Foxed, I wrote a short four-voiced fugue on ‘3 [British] Grenadiers’ with the little tune ‘Jonny’s Got a Nickel’ serving merrily as the counter subject. Cartoons usually do without fugue, but here it fits the action. Musically spoken, you can get away with almost anything in pictures if the score only captures the ‘feeling’ of the sequence.
Miklos Rozsa, in his memoir "Double Life," related with considerable amusement an anecdote about Scott Bradley. He was addressing a film school class (at UCLA, I think), about the role that music played in enhancing a film, bringing two prints of the latest Tom & Jerry cartoon, one without his score, the other with. Bradley first ran the music-less version, and the class laughed uproariously. But when he followed with the scored version, he found to his chagrin the students weren't laughing as much.
