A Dictionary of Musical Themes

The book collects 10,000 musical themes (mostly classical works) and indexes them using a notation index based on transposing the pitches to C major or C minor (so that God Save the Queen/America, for instance, would come out as CCDBCDEEFE). It was followed a year later by A Dictionary of Vocal Themes (1950), including themes from songs and opera.

Sam Morgenstern (1906–1989) was a teacher at Mannes College of Music in Greenwich Village, New York, and the conductor of Lower Manhattan's Lemonade Opera Company, which gave the US premiere of Prokofiev's Duenna in 1948. He composed the music for Warsaw Ghetto (to accompany a spoken word poem by Harry Granick), which premiered at Carnegie Hall on February 10, 1946. A radio disk transcription of the work, made in the studio a week after the premiere with the same performers, has survived.^[1]

Other works include a choral cantata Age of the Common Man (1943), the Latin-tinged piano piece Toccata Guatemala (1947), and in the late 1960s two short chamber operas (The Big Black Box, 1968 and Haircut, 1969) which were both produced at the Metropolitan Opera Studio.^[2]

Morgenstern's other books include the anthology Composers on Music (1956).^[3]

Harold Barlow (1915–1993) devised the notation scheme. He was a popular song composer who studied violin at Boston University and became a bandleader during World War II.^[4] He wrote the comedy song I've Got Tears in My Ears in 1949 (recorded by Homer and Jethro),^[5] and the lyrics to the 1960 Connie Francis hit Mama. Barlow became better known later in his career as a consultant on plagiarism, most famously defending George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" against accusations that it was copied from the Chiffons' hit He's So Fine. (Harrison lost the case).^[6] Barlow also worked on cases involving Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Elton John, Dolly Parton and Billy Joel.^[7]