Word: songful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...complained later that it was not the national anthem (Wilhelmus van Nassouwe) at all, but just a patriotic song (Wien Neerlandsch Bloed...
...suddenly to burst into song...
While working on a show, he keeps his music and lyrics in neat sets of looseleaf notebooks and Manila folders, and he follows a chart of the book's plot for spotting his songs. The only top-ranking Broadway composer besides Irving Berlin who writes his own lyrics, he usually begins with a song title to fit the plot situation, then finds his melody, and later fits the words to it. He begins with the last line and works backward. Close at hand is an exhaustive library of rhyming and foreign dictionaries (he speaks French, German, Spanish and Italian...
When a Porter song is finished, it generally has a few added staves that are the germ of an orchestral arrangement. He writes out the lyrics in a neat, printlike hand, to be typed by his secretary. First to hear the music is Budapest-born Dr. Albert Sirmay, chief editor of Chappell & Co., Porter's publishers, and also his musical secretary, friend and adviser for 22 years. While the composer plays the song on one of his baby grands, Dr. Sirmay jots down notes and sometimes warns him about cribbing inadvertently from the 400 songs (250 of them published...
...turn out a new number overnight because an old one has been dropped from a show. But unlike most composers and authors, he refuses to lower his own high royalty rate (5% of gross receipts) when a show has begun to slump at the box office. A song generally takes shape in his head before he plays it or puts a word on paper, and a glazed look of creation may come over his face at any time of day or night-and at any place on earth...