Joe Raposo wrote music for television shows such as The Electric Company, Shining Time Station and the sitcoms Three's Company and The Ropers, including their theme songs.
28 Facts About Joe Raposo
2.
Joe Raposo was a graduate of the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger.
3.
Joe 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.
4.
Joe Raposo was the musical supervisor and arranger of the original off-Broadway run of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and he contributed additional music to that show.
5.
Joe Raposo was responsible for the memorable theme music for New York City television station WABC-TV's The 4:30 Movie; the piece, called "Moving Pictures," was used for the station's other movie shows, and subsequently by ABC's other owned-and-operated stations.
6.
Joe Raposo is best known for the songs he wrote for Sesame Street from its beginning in 1969 through the mid-1970s, and for a time in the 1980s.
7.
Joe Raposo was very fond of sweets according to many who knew him.
8.
Joe Raposo served as the musical director of the show for its first three seasons, and contributed songs throughout the show's run, until 1977.
9.
Joe Raposo performed joke characters for film segments on The Electric Company similar in style to what he had done on Sesame Street.
10.
Joe Raposo 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, 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.
11.
Joe Raposo collaborated with Sheldon Harnick on a musical adaptation of the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life.
12.
Joe Raposo was an ardent fan of satirical composer and bandleader Spike Jones.
13.
Joe Raposo composed numerous other works influenced by Jones for Sesame Street, many featuring kazoo and other comical sound-effect objects and instruments like siren whistles, bulb horns, and tenor banjos.
14.
Joe Raposo's songwriting tended toward wistful introspections on life and nature.
15.
Unlike his children's television scoring contemporaries, Joe Raposo exhibited an uncommonly broad grasp of compositional styles.
16.
Joe Raposo was classically trained as a conductor and at the Ecole Normale in Paris as an arranger.
17.
Joe Raposo 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.
18.
Joe Raposo evidenced skill as an American funk composer, making frequent and arguably credible musical allusions to the underground black soul and funk performers of his day.
19.
Themes written for muppet Roosevelt Franklin and the segment H exhibit some of Joe 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 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.
20.
Joe Raposo made several stylistic allusions to jazz-funk organist Louis Chachere in 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 Joe Raposo's idol, Spike Jones.
21.
Vocally, Joe Raposo was a tenor, possessing an unusually warm, buttery attack and an easily identifiable, very stable, mellow trademark vibrato.
22.
Joe Raposo had two sons, Joseph and Nicholas, from his first marriage.
23.
Joe Raposo had a son, Andrew, and daughter, Elizabeth, from his marriage to Pat Collins-Sarnoff.
24.
Joe Raposo was a close friend of Frank Sinatra, Tom Lehrer, WNYC radio personality Jonathan Schwartz, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Bert Salzman.
25.
Schwartz's memoir adds that Sinatra was infatuated with Joe Raposo's piano-playing skill and commonly referred to him to others, characteristically, as "Joe Raposo at the piano", or "the genius".
26.
Joe Raposo died on February 5,1989, in Bronxville, New York, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, three days before his 52nd birthday.
27.
Joe Raposo was survived by wife, Pat Collins, his four children and by his parents who were at the time living in Chatham, Massachusetts.
28.
Joe Raposo's grave is located at Union Cemetery in Chatham.