The NBC Symphony musicians had seen their tall, usually self-confident program producer, Don Gillis, looking like a colicky cat before—the last time, the day Arturo Toscanini first rehearsed Gillis' new Symphony 5^ (TIME, Sept. 29, 1947).
Last week, musicians who saw the same expression on Producer Gillis' face again had no trouble guessing whose score they would find on their rehearsal racks.
U.S. Steel, which sponsors the NBC Summer Symphony series, had decided it would also sponsor an original work, and had asked Gillis, 37, and vivacious NBC Scripter Claris Ross, 26, to write one. In a month, they had cooked up a 15-minute fantasy for children about a baby-sitting grandfather whose charge doubts his ability to sing her to sleep: "Humph! I'm the fellow who invented lullabies. In fact, I invented music!"
Almost as soon as Guest Conductor Antal Dorati signaled for the first crashing ta-ta-ta-dah (from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5), then some muted lullaby music, the musicians began to look like small boys getting into a new game that was going to be fun. Most of the instruments got their chance to shine. Boomed the narrator, Nelson Olmsted: "First I invented the flute [deep blue solo]. Next, the oboe [etc.] . . . But that wasn't all I needed. I had to have —Sharps and flats and pizzicato, Molto Lento and staccato, Treble clef, ritard, repeat, Allegro, chord, and boogie-beat, Major, minor, jig, and waltz, Scherzo, downbeat, jazz, and smaltz, Jukebox, drumstick, and Puccini, Bassoons, batons and Toscanini!"
By the time the orchestra got to the last full-band chords, Composer Gillis, a man who knows how to use every bleep, boom and buzz in an orchestra with a light touch, had given them just about everything in music but Toscanini. Said grinning Conductor Dorati, mopping his perspiring brow: "Great fun."
This week, NBC's radio audience got a chance to agree.