"Tender into Rude Awakening"

Even more than the movies, radio dramas have always depended on music to get listeners from one mood or scene into another, fast. In the trade, such six-or eight-bar snatches of music are called cues or "bridges." Some radio stations use canned movie-type music; others employ would-be Wagners to grind out poor-man's leitmotives according to script.

Last week the New York Herald Tribune's able Radio Columnist John Crosby stumbled open-eyed into what is one of radio's largest arsenals of bridge music. Picking his way through the library at Manhattan's WOR (Mutual), he found on file, under generic titles such as Love, Hate, Conflict, etc., "6,000 bridges,* and believe me [they] run the gamut." Even more to his satisfaction, most of them had also been tagged by their embittered composers with tongue-in-cheek titles "more descriptive than the music."

"WOR specializes in murder," wrote Crosby, "so naturally it has a lusty collection of these bridges." His favorite finds: There's a Face in the Window; Quick! Follow That Car; Macabre, Running Motor; and, for a really gruesome situation, Out of the Dark Valley Came Slimy Crawling Things . . . etc.

Love was touched on extensively: Girl Doesn't Get Boy; Love, Love, Love, with Apologies to Tchaikovsky; Why Didn't You Tell Me This When We Were Back in Prairie City?

Amateur Musicologist Crosby found that some bridges are just scene shifters: "WOR has one called Big City, another called Bigger City" One all-purpose bridge is called From Here to There Without Fireworks. Some bridges mix both scene and mood: Menacing Humor to Racetrack Background; Light Confusion --and Then Down the Stairs in a Hurry. If a radio dramatist likes music behind his words, Crosby found, one piece he can get is Background-Nostalgic--Tender into ye Rude Awakening. "Ye Rude Awakening, in this case, is simply a sad chord of a sort known in the trade as a stab . . . Not all stabs are bad news, though. WOR can also provide you with a hopeful stab called Things Are Looking Up."

What Columnist Crosby did not report is the way WOR's two unabashed staff composers, Elliot Jacoby and Richard duPage, turn out their bridge music and titles. Explains Composer Jacoby: "Ye Old English Countryside but Something Is Amiss breaks down into an opening of nostalgic muted strings; then the French horn dirties it up at the end." "Hate," says he, "is almost always bitter brass and off-key woodwinds." Love is usually-a muted string solo, but, "if very throbbing," the sweetly sighing string section is divided, "like Kostelanetz."

*WOR says he stopped picking too soon: there are closer to 10,000.

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