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Here's the rest of the article by Lucille Fletcher on the young Bernard Herrmann and his radio work -- from a 1936 article in Screen and Radio Weekly. Typos are my fault:
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Herrmann doesn’t remember knowing any leprechauns. But he does know a great deal about music. He is only 26 years of age now, and has been composing ever since he was 13. He was conducting his own ballet music in the Broadview revue, Americana, when he was 18, and giving a concert in Town Hall that included his own music at the age of 20. He has been a regular staff conductor at CBS for the last three years.
David Ross, the announcer, he says, was responsible for starting him off on a career of cue music. This happened five years ago. Ross was reading poetry in a weekly series called the Columbia Variety Hour. Herrmann, then a shy, thin lad of 21, was working as Johnny Green’s assistant. One day in the elevator, Ross saw him with a copy of Emily Dickinson’s Poems in his pocket.
“Like poetry?” Ross asked. Herrmann nodded his head.
“Why don’t you write me a musical background for my poetry reading?” Ross asked him. He never dreamed Herrmann would take him seriously. As far as he knew, the boy was just a jazz conductor. But young Herrmann went home that night, and in two days turned out a symphonic score for Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It was then his favorite poem. A week later, he was conducting it on Variety Hour as background to Ross’ reading.
It was so successful, so different from any other type of musical background then known, that CBS executives promptly commissioned the youngster to turn out many more.
The melodramas were full of cue music gems – effects like the shrill wind or the scattering of dead leaves in La Bell Dame Sans Merci, the moonlight in Annabel Lee, the mental loneliness of the sightless kings in The City of Brass.
For example there were such instructions as these scattered through them: “Harp: Place long strips of paper among strings to soften tone.” Or, “Piano: Place ruler on 12 notes above high C. Put down damper pedal. Play other notes in score with left hand.”
They made Herrmann’s reputation as a composer, and established him as a man who was as sensitive to words as he was to music. When experimental radio drama came along, he was snapped up right away.
Herrmann was probably the first musician in radio to compose original cues for every radio drama he was asked to score. He felt this was necessary for two reasons – the first being that familiar music tends to distract the listener’s attention from the drama itself, and the second, that freshly composed music, inspired by the script, is more likely to hit the nail exactly on the head than music culled from symphonies or opera.
“The cue music composer seldom has more than 30 seconds to gain his effect,” he says, “and often a discord will make a quicker impression than a snatch of beautiful melody. Dissonant harmonies also express unpleasant emotions like fear, hatred, melancholy and the like much more effectively than do diatonic chords or square-cut melodies.”
Herrmann paid little attention to the tradition that is a symphony orchestra was assigned to a program, the full orchestra ought to play all the cues. He wrote for all kinds of combinations. Once, for a script by Irwin Shaw, he scored his cues for a single harmonica player. On another program, The Broken Feather, he used an orchestra composed only of percussion instruments – bells, chimes, marimbas, drums and xylophones.
Probably the oddest combination he ever wrote music for was for an orchestra of saws, hammers and nails. This was used in a script written by Alfred Kreymbourg, The House that Jack Didn’t Build. It was a play about the Federal Housing Project, and Herrmann conceived the idea of having the rhythm of carpentering substitute for music.
Herrmann and the Sound Effects Department co-operated, too, in a Workshop production of Lord Dunsany’s Gods of the Mountain.
The play was about three Indian beggars who disguise themselves and pretend to be three stone gods who sit out in the middle of the desert. The populace feeds and worships t hem, until suddenly the footsteps of the real gods are heard in the distance, striding over the desert toward the town. Herrmann’s job was to express these giant stone footsteps in music. He and the Sound Effects Department did it together by a very ingenious setup.
Herrmann and his orchestra – fortified for the occasion with a couple of extra kettle-drums and tom-toms – were placed on the twenty-second floor in a studio of their own. Downstairs in another studio, a sound effects man sat, with a huge bag of rocks at his side. But the sound effects man and Herrmann wore earphones which were connected with the main studio where the drama was taking place. At a signal from the producer, Herrmann would bring down his baton, and the orchestra would give out an ominous “rumble” cue. Then, on the off-beat, the sound effects man downstairs would throw his bag of rocks from one end of the studio to the other. Herrmann would pause, and bring his baton down again. Again the rumble would sound, and again the bag of rocks would fly across the studio. On the air, it gave the effect of ponderous feet moving slowly and terribly across the earth.
Three-quarters of Herrmann’s musical cues are only partially heard. But that doesn’t bother him. In fact, he says, his greatest compliment is when people don’t notice the music. He feels with Shakespeare, that “the play’s the thing.”
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