Gingerbread and Spinach

There have never been any great women composers, and few even moderately good ones. Biggest female name in music was the late Frenchwoman Cecile Chaminade. A composer who does not mind being called the American Chaminade is a plump little blonde woman, nearing 50, who is known on concert programs as Mana-Zucca. Last week Mana-Zucca finished her 1,000th composition, a children's musical play called The Gingerbread House. Then, instead of letting well enough alone, she wrote her 1,100st, a song entitled Music I Heard With You.

Mana-Zucca was born Mana Zuckerman, in New York City. She was musically prodigious. Her pressagents claim that, on her third birthday, she furiously demolished a toy piano because it had no F sharp and she could not play The Last Rose of Slimmer on it. Mana-Zucca made her debut as a pianist at eight with the New York Symphony under Dr. Walter Damrosch. Year later she published her first composition.

Mana-Zucca's most famed song, a favorite of lusty singers like Baritone John Charles Thomas, is I Love Life (so I want to live and drink of life's fullness, take all it can give ...'). This she wrote in 40 minutes, to a lyric by her husband, Bond Broker Irwin Cassel. whom she married after his 46th proposal. They have a son, Marwin (portmanteau for Mana-Irwin) Cassel, 15, whom Mana-Zucca calls "my best composition."

Author of such vocal successes as The Big Brown Bear Went Woof; J'Ever--Hm? I Did! Bitty Buzz; Rachem; Nichavo, Mana-Zucca has also written orchestral pieces, a piano concerto, a raft of piano pieces. Four top-notch publishers-- Schirmer, Presser, Fischer, Church--snap up her output, which is steady. Songs & snatches come to her at the piano, in her garden in Miami, where she spends seven months a year, or at her dining table. Soon to be published is another Mana-Zucca work: Spinach and 'Leven Other Funny Children's Songs. Said Mana-Zucca last week: "I'm a great believer in putting humor in music."

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