Copy Cat

Arnold Arnstein, 68, is one of music's obscure middlemen--or more accurately, muddlemen: he is a copyist whose job it is to decipher the scribblings of composers. He works in a dingy cubbyhole on Manhattan's upper West Side, surrounded by towering stacks of music and a massive duplicating machine named Ozalid. Together they make a unique team: Arnie singing an aria from La Boheme while bent over a new score, Ozalid humming contentedly and smelling of ammonia. Yet despite the humble trappings, for the past 25 years Arnstein's office has been the musical clearinghouse for practically every major U.S. composer.

Last week, for example, Arnie and Ozalid were readying Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra for its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in March, as well as Laurence Rosenthal's new musical, Sherry, for its opening in Boston in two weeks. More than just a copy cat, Arnstein not only translates Stravinsky's fuzzy pencilings and Virgil Thomson's smudges into readable music, but also extracts and copies the music for each instrument, calculates the appropriate rests so that a player can turn the page without getting tangled in his instrument, and writes in all the cues. Beyond that, he clarifies the symbols, catches wrong notes, adds missing flats and sharps. Says Aaron Copland: "In his own way, Arnstein is an artist. He makes you feel as if you have an extra pair of eyes looking for mistakes."

Glissando Lecture. Indeed, Arnstein takes such proprietary interest in his scores that he refers to them as "our music," frequently advises the composers on how to simplify complex rhythms and smooth awkward transitions. They are accustomed to Arnie's wee-hour phone calls (he knows all their working habits) and the familiar question, "Do you really mean this?" In the case of obvious irregularities, many composers trust him so implicitly that they tell him to do the patchwork. In one instance, when Arnstein was confronted with a low F for the violins--it just does not exist on that instrument--he juggled the music for the entire string section to correct it. "Few composers," says he, "know much about the technicalities of copying," and he can lecture for hours on the proper method of indicating the duration of a glissando. "Arnie," says Composer Ned Rorem, "has an aural eye."

It is also a bleary eye, for composers invariably slave over their scores until the last possible minute, and then Arnstein and his eight copyists must labor round the clock. It can get tedious, but at the rate of $2.40 a page, Arnstein is not complaining: his copying of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, ran to more than 2,500 pages.

Family Doctor. Arnstein, son of an immigrant butcher, has prepared the scores for 42 operas, hundreds of orchestral works, and musicals like Bernstein's West Side Story. Privy to all the inside news in music, he is an amiable raconteur, and his office is a hangout for composers who want to catch up on the latest gossip or get an instant reading on a rival's work. "Any opera with that many tremolos can't be good," Arnie will say.

Still, there are some secrets that he, as the composer's right hand, keeps discreetly to himself. Says Gian Carlo Menotti: "Arnstein is every American composer's family doctor. He helps us to give birth, consoles us at funerals, knows all of our diseases and, we hope, keeps quiet about them."

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