It’s been seven years since I last posted in “Ozalid Days,” my memoir about music notation. At the end of that blog entry, “Ozalid Days, Part 3,” where I introduced my mentor Arnold Arnstein, I promised “in a future blog … to offer some transcriptions of [Arnie’s] reminiscences” that we had recorded in several conversations in 1979 and 1980. It’s high time I picked up the story again. So here is an extended excerpt from our session on May 12, 1979. He was eighty at that point, still sharp, still coming into the office every day, overseeing his stable of copyists, proofreading everything that went out the door, teaching a music copying course at Juilliard.

Born in Budapest in 1898, Arnstein came to the US with his family as a four-year-old and grew up in New York City, attending Stuyvesant High School and then getting a degree in chemistry from City College. Along the way, he also became a fairly accomplished violinist, studying with the renowned Philipp Mittell. He talked with me about those early days and how he got involved in the music copying business following a serious injury that put an end to his performance career. I edited the following transcription very lightly, trying to preserve the rhythms of his speaking, complete with his clarifications and little tangential excursions (which he usually got out of with the quick interjection “Any rate…).

I had gotten my job at the Paramount Publix Circuit through knowing the librarian. Also, the fact that the librarian—the music librarian at the Paramount Publix Circuit was not a musician. He had been stage director at the Irving Place Theater—which was the German theater I mentioned before in connection with stories about my aunt. He met me on the street one day and said “Look, I don’t know C minor from C major,” he says, “there are some key changes involved but I can’t fathom that, and a man of 50 or 55 starting from scratch would be too late, anyway.” He said, “Why don’t you front for me?”

I had a pretty good fiddle education. My teacher’s name was fairly well known in those days by the name of Philipp Mittell. He wrote a good text on—an exercise book. We drank a little too much beer at these sessions, of course, but then, a triple fracture of the left elbow—which prevented me from playing at all for about a year and a half—would mitigate against becoming a professional violinist.

I did some violin playing in movies before sound where three and four and five people used to sort of cue a picture from music sent to them. These groups could be—would be specially cued for certain aspects of—when it’s sad you play “Adagio lamentoso No. 4,” when it’s not quite sad you play number 3, etc., etc. And very often I had a chance sometimes to—I had a difficult time taking a trumpet part—we didn’t have a trumpet player—and transposing it a tone down because I didn’t know what a trumpet part did in those days; all I knew was about a fiddle.

Any rate, I got the job as this guy’s assistant in 1926 [or] the end of ’25. And my job as librarian was fairly cut and dried. I’d order music we needed. We had little half-hour units that were sent on the road for 52 weeks a year. All the stuff was specially arranged. We had all kinds of conductors, and each unit consisted of a conductor who sometimes could read music and sometimes could not read music, and a little orchestra depending on the size of the theater. So we gave different size orchestras for each week where this conductor took his little group. And there was a dancer and a soloist of some kind, instrumental, sometimes a vocalist. And that was about a half an hour show. This was made up in advance. And he took this show to Milwaukee and there was a larger orchestra. The Brooklyn Paramount was a large orchestra. New Haven was a small orchestra. And this was my job, to see that all these things were arranged. We had a group of arrangers, and the Paramount theater orchestra was about a 50-55-piece orchestra which played specially cued music for movies and newsreels and so forth and so on.

One day after taking this job—two or three days later—I walk into a huge room where there were 15 to 18 copyists working on these little arrangements that we sent out on the road. And I looked over their shoulder and they smelled competition, and as I looked over their shoulder, they raised their arms so I could hardly see what they were doing. I had once tried to write a G-clef which turned out to be a minor disaster. I saw the man in charge sitting on a dais all by himself, and of course he turned out to be Austrian like everybody else around there, and I speak Viennese from home, so we got along famously and I asked him “How does one copy music?” He says “You have music home?” “Yes.” “Copy it!”

So that night, instead of having a date with my girlfriend (who I later married—or, we later got married), I stayed home and tried, disastrously, to copy the first page of the Mendelssohn violin concerto—the first fiddle part, not the solo, but the first fiddle. This was an engraved part, with 13, 14, 15 bars on a line, and I tried to imitate that instead of spreading it out to four or five bars on a line that were convenient. It’s like trying to do a single-spaced, typewritten letter or article and then trying to copy that same thing on the page with the same spacing, which would be a disaster.

Any rate, I gave it up after five or six attempts. And the next day this German chap or Viennese chap who was in charge of copying said to me “Well, where’s the copying?” I said “It was bad” and he said “Do it again and bring it in!” Well, it felt like a challenge, so I did it again, and it wasn’t much better. And I did about four lines, which—and the G-clef was still a pretty bad thing. Any rate, you know, if you’ve ever tried copying music the first time, you ought to see what a mess that is. Nothing fit, nothing is exact, and yet one could easily imitate what’s on the page, but one doesn’t. It’s like the difficulty most people have with arithmetic—it’s beyond their comprehension.

Well, I brought my four lines in the next day and he said “Okay, I’ll give you a job.” I figured if he’s going to give me a job, what am I going to do with it? I know nothing about this business. I know nothing about transposition. I don’t know how anything transposes if it’s a transposing instrument. I’ve learned a little since. And what he did was he gave me a job for what is known as a “playoff.” That’s when a vocal—when an act is about to finish and is coming back and forth for applause—on the stage, off stage, on stage—which, in the meantime, is accompanied by 16 bars of rather full orchestration of the piece they sang or played just before—it’s known as a playoff. Actually, it’s eight bars with a first and second ending. So I took that home and puzzled for about two or three hours then began calling at least ten or twelve people to find out what it means when it says in the horn part, the French horn part—you take that from the viola. I didn’t know how the French horn transposed and I couldn’t read the viola clef. I made myself all kinds of signs [with] sharps at the beginning, and I had finished this job, which took me all night—which today would take me about half an hour, maybe 35 minutes. I brought it in and I got the sum of two dollars and 85 cents, which, those days, if I’d done it in half an hour, that would have been beautiful pay, but it took me all night, and I got paid immediately, my first check. This man paid COD. He added five cents to each page that was his take.

So finally I ran into an architect in the building—the Paramount building—and he was looking over some structural change that was being made, and we got to talking, and sure enough, he had been a chemist before and I told him I’d quit chemistry some years ago. And we got to talking and I began asking questions and he’d ask me questions and then he came up with the idea of using relatively thin paper, and to sort of trace the G-clef, and to trace with semi-translucent paper, and that became—that was the break in my equipment. I could trace these things pretty well, and then after tracing you began to understand what these components were. It took about a year, and by that time, I had started with a salary of 65 dollars, I got a raise to seventy-five by the middle of 1927, and I was making about eighty dollars on the side copying—sometimes on the firm’s time—it’s not—the firm is no longer in existence, so, it is perfectly le—we had a boss by the name of Boris Morris who died as a counterspy much later on, a really first-class crook. He claimed he’s studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. He might as well have made the claim—he might have said Mozart. He was quite a guy.

Come back in a week or so for the next installment!