All there is in the room is a piano and a few chairs.  One of the chairs has a broad arm, or there may be a tiny table or a desk.  With this slender equipment two persons are working as though the salvation of the world depended on their efforts.  One of them is at the piano and the other is frowning over a piece of paper covered with pencil marks.

Perhaps the composer had the original idea—­a theme for a melody.  Perhaps the lyric writer had one line—­an idea for a song.  It does not matter at all which had the idea originally, both are obsessed by it now.

“Play the chorus over, will you?” growls the writer.  Obediently the composer pounds away, with the soft pedal on, and the writer sings his words so that the composer can hear them.  There comes a line that doesn’t fit.  “No good!” they say together.

“Can’t you change that bar?” inquires the writer.

“I’ll try,” says the composer.  “Gimme the sheet.”

They prop it up on the piano and sing it together.

“Shut up!” says the composer.  And the writer keeps still until the other has pounded the offending bar to fit.

Or perhaps the writer gets a new line that fits the music.  “How’s this?” he cries with the intonation Columbus must have used when he discovered the new world.

“Punk!” comments the composer.  “You can’t rhyme ‘man’ with ‘grand’ and get away with it these days.”

“Oh, all right,” grumbles the harassed song-poet, and changes both lines to a better rhyme.  “I don’t like that part,” he gets back at the composer, “it sounds like ‘Waiting at the Church.’”

“How’s this, then?” inquires the composer, changing two notes.

“Fine,” says the lyric writer, for the new variation has a hauntingly familiar sound, too elusive to label—­is amazingly catchy.

For hours, perhaps, they go on in this way—­changing a note here, a whole bar there, revising the lyric every few lines, substituting a better rhyme for a bad one, and building the whole song into a close-knit unity.

At last the song is in pretty good shape.  As yet there is no second verse, but the “Boss” is called in and the boys sing him the new song.  “Change ‘dream’ to ’vision’—­it sounds better,” he says; or he may have a dozen suggestions—­perhaps he gives the song a new punch line.  He does his part in building it up, and then the arranger is called in.

With a pad of manuscript music paper, and a flying pencil, he jots down the melody nearly as fast as the composer can pound it out on tne piano.  “Get a ‘lead-sheet’ ready as quick as you can, commands the Boss.  “We’ll try it out tonight.”

“Right!” grunts the arranger, and rushes away to give the melody a touch here and there.  As often as not, he comes back to tell the composer how little that worthy knows about music and to demand that a note be changed or a whole bar recast to make it easier to play, but at last he appears with a “lead-sheet”—­a mere suggestion of the song to be played, with all the discretion the pianist commands—­and the composer, the lyric writer and the “Boss” go across the street to some cabaret and try out the new song.