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From:
Art Scott <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 11 Jul 1999 19:26:34 -0700
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The following wonderful story about Bernard Herrmann, famed for his
inventive scoring, turned up in a book not likely to be seen by most here,
Leonard Maltin's The Great American Broadcast (Dutton, ISBN 0-525-94183-5),
a great book for fans of Golden Age radio:

In the early 1950s, producer-director [Elliott] Lewis sold a weekly show
to CBS called Crime Classics.  These were the waning days of network radio,
and the budgets were small; music would suffer more than any other facet
of broadcasting.  The executives asked Lewis to use recorded music, and he
said, "I don't want to use recorded music; it sounds terrible.  We have
no theme on this show; each show is in a different time period, could be
1500 or 1900, each show is in a different part of the world.  Can I have
a three-piece orchestra? They said, 'What are you going to do with a
three-piece orchestra?' I told them, 'Whoever is going to write it, will
write for any three pieces he wants.'

Lewis lucked out and got Bernard Herrmann, who rose to the challenge in
spectacular fashion.  "He said, 'Any three pieces I want?' I said, 'Any
three pieces you want; it depends on the show.' 'But one thing,' he said,
'when you break for the music rehearsal, you have to leave the studio.
I don't want you to see-and I'm not going to tell you.  I want you to
be surprised when you start your dress rehearsal.'

"He had the damnedest collection of people," Lewis recalled.  "He called
me one week and said, 'Can I have a fourth person?' And I said, 'Yeah, we
have some money in the budget.  What are you using?' The show was 'The
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.' He said, 'I'm not going to tell you.'
Okay.  I got to the studio and you could barely enter the room; his four
men were percussionists, and he had every percussion instrument known to
man.  I never knew there were so many drums: snare drum, field drum,
bass drum, double bass drum, [plus] finger chimes, xylophone, tambourine,
everything you can think of, and that's how he scored 'The Assassination
of Abraham Lincoln.'

"One week-oh, it was so marvelous-he called one week and said, 'I need a
fourth instrument.'l said, 'Okay, you can have it.'And this week, why he
needed a fourth instrument fascinated me, so I stayed in the, booth and
turned the lights off.  And as soon as everybody broke, the stagehand came
in with four music stands and four chairs, then the guy from the music
copying department and he put down the parts on the four music stands.
And I waited to see how Bernard Herrmann had scored 'Jesse James.'

"Four men came in, and they were all trombonists!  And each one was
carrying a trombone case: a big trombone case, a little trombone case, a
regular trombone case.  And the expression on their faces when they came
in ... For the first time in their lives it was perfectly obvious they
were the orchestra.  They weren't the trombone section, they were it."

Art Scott
Livermore, Cal.

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