#2: Impossible Things In Music

SPEED:

I write songs very slowly. On average, it takes me two months to write one song. I have written faster, but the quality tends to tank.

Other people write so much faster that I find it hard to believe. For instance, after they’d settled on the title for Anything Goes, Cole Porter wrote the title song overnight. And Ira Gershwin reported that he and George wrote the song “Do, Do, Do” from Oh, Kay! in 45 minutes. (I think their time could have been better spent, but that’s just me.)

Even more impressive, I think, is what Irving Berlin did when he was asked to write the score for Annie, Get Your Gun. Just to see if he felt comfortable with the project, he holed up in a hotel for the weekend and wrote two or three, or even five songs (depending on who’s telling the story). You might even recognize one or two: “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun,” “They Say It’s Wonderful,” “The Girl That I Marry,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

In one weekend? As far as I’m concerned, that’s impossible.

ARRANGING:

Recently I have been writing vocal harmonies. I have no business writing vocal harmonies, or arrangements either. My method is to sit at the piano and go plunk-plunk, “no, that’s not right,” plunk-plunk, “no, that’s not right,” plunk-plunk, “okay, that’s all right.” Then I pick up my pencil and I think, “now, what was that, again?” Plunk-plunk, “no, that wasn’t it”. . .

If I were writing songs for Broadway I would have an orchestrator to do this for me. In Broadway’s golden age, orchestrators got their assignments at 11:00 in the evening and worked all night in a hotel room to have the orchestrations ready to be copied for the next day’s rehearsal. Even today the orchestrator will complete maybe 100 bars in a day, and all without recourse to a piano. They hear the instruments in their heads and they write it down.

All I hear in my head is the buzzing of tinnitus.

MEMORY:

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I have a terrible memory for music. Frequently I can’t remember the melodies of my own songs.

Other people have much better memories. For instance, there was a bass player interviewed in our local paper who could remember the bass part of any song he ever played. Consequently, he could substitute in a band he hadn’t played with for years and know all the tunes.

There are more impressive stories, however:

Leonard Bernstein, when he first came to New York, stayed with a friend of his father’s. The friend took him to a concert and Bernstein was so entranced by one of the pieces that afterwards he asked that they stop by the library so he could look at the score. When they got home, he sat at the piano and played the piece from memory. His host asked why, if he already knew the piece, they had to stop at the library. Bernstein said, no, he had heard it for the first time that day.

Artur Toscanini was so near-sighted he had to conduct from memory. He was once rehearsing a new opera but hadn’t yet seen the score for the last half. When it arrived he called for an hour’s break so he could study it. After the rehearsal resumed and they were part-way through, he stopped the orchestra and told the horn player he should have played a forte-piano at that point. But the horn player reported he had a forte marked in his part. Toscanini asked his assistant to check page 41 and see how the G in the third bar was marked and, sure enough, it should have been a forte-piano.

Finding out these things tends to make a fellow like me feel inadequate as a musician.

But then I remind myself that these things are actually impossible. I’m pretty sure the only way a real person could do any of this stuff is to sell his soul to the devil. And it makes me wonder: why has the devil never offered to buy my soul?