copyist

To support himself in New York, he served as an assistant and copyist for the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, who paid the young man $20 a week and gave him lessons in orchestration.

It could be a student, imitator, copyist, colleague or competitor.

Having no resources within himself, he was compelled to be the copyist of many, and being such, he was forever the victim of inconsistency; and of consequence he was an object of contempt, and was held as such even by his slaves.

As Elizabeth Hawes, a sketcher turned journalist turned designer who went to Paris in the 1920s as a “copyist” — a patternmaker hired to copy French designs to be sold in the American market — wrote in her classic memoir-treatise, “Fashion Is Spinach,” one of the greatest achievements of the French was to convince the world that their clothing design was the only real clothing design, their savoir-faire intrinsic to the essence of chic.

Either way, I thought it was a work of beauty and genius, especially after getting to study the music up close as I proofread parts of the score for the show’s copyist.