Word: clef
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...concerto, Hungarian Bela Bartok knew he was racing against death. Hating to waste one moment of time or one inch of score paper, the poverty-stricken composer wrote in a highly individualized musical shorthand, sometimes indicating whole passages with one or two pothooks, often squeezing in bars off the clef-at the edges and bottom of the sheet-without even indicating where they belonged. His most puzzling short cut was in the correction of notes: instead of erasing, Bartok grafted his improvement right onto the original...
...Most of the instruments got their chance to shine. Boomed the narrator, Nelson Olmsted: "First I invented the flute [deep blue solo]. Next, the oboe [etc.] . . . But that wasn't all I needed. I had to have -Sharps and flats and pizzicato, Molto Lento and staccato, Treble clef, ritard, repeat, Allegro, chord, and boogie-beat, Major, minor, jig, and waltz, Scherzo, downbeat, jazz, and smaltz, Jukebox, drumstick, and Puccini, Bassoons, batons and Toscanini...
Jimmie formed a band for "gigs" (one-night stands) which was booked through James Reese Europe's Clef Club. He played for debut parties at the Plaza, the Waldorf. He heard what Scott Fitzgerald once described as "a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers" shuffling "the shining dust." Jimmie began making pianola rolls, often in the same studio with a youngster named George Gershwin...
...played only potted-palm tunes, big, black, Alabama-born Jim Europe held Negro jam sessions in a cafe in West 53rd Street. White folks dropped in, hired so many of Europe's friends to play "gigs" - single party dates - that Jim opened a booking office. He formed a Clef Club of Negro jazzmen, gave a concert in Carnegie Hall in 1911. He (at the piano) and his boys played for Vernon and Irene Castle. Once he excited the Castles' curiosity by playing Memphis Blues too slow for their brisk one-step. That, said Jim Europe and his friends...
Oswald, miming for all she was worth, hoarsely sang about stars in the sky, a hungry man, a family with 15 children, a man hearing sounds in the night, a child escaping from a reformatory. In one number she was accompanied by a harpist as curvesome as the treble clef: beauteous Daphne, wife of socialite Editor Harry Adsit Bull of Town & Country...