Gershwin, George

orig. Jacob Gershvin

born Sept. 26, 1898, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

died July 11, 1937, Hollywood, Calif.

U.S. composer.

Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he heard jazz performed live from about age six. In his teens he worked as a song plugger (playing piano in Tin Pan Alley to demonstrate sheet music for potential customers), and in 1916 he published his first song. In 1919 his "Swanee" was performed by Al Jolson and achieved extraordinary success. Gershwin's first complete score was for the show La, La Lucille (1919). The bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned from him the hugely successful orchestral work Rhapsody in Blue (1924). It was revolutionary for its incorporation of the jazz idiom (blue notes, syncopated rhythms, onomatopoeic instrumental effects) into a symphonic context. Gershwin's first major Broadway success, Lady, Be Good! (1924), was a collaboration with his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin. They soon established themselves as one of the great teams in Broadway history; their shows included Oh, Kay! (1926), Strike Up the Band (1927), Funny Face (1927), Girl Crazy (1930), and the satire Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize. He also scored several successful films. His most ambitious work was the "folk opera" Porgy and Bess (1935), a collaboration with Ira and novelist DuBose Heyward. Gershwin's classical compositions include a piano concerto (1925) and the tone poem An American in Paris (1928). His early death was the result of a brain tumour.

George Gershwin, working on the score Porgy and Bess (1935).

Pictorial Parade

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▪ American composer

Introduction

original name  Jacob Gershvin  

born September 26, 1898, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

died July 11, 1937, Hollywood, California

 one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions in which he blended, in varying degrees, the techniques and forms of classical music with the stylistic nuances and techniques of popular music and jazz.

Early career and influences

      Gershwin was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Although his family and friends were not musically inclined, Gershwin developed an early interest in music through his exposure to the popular and classical compositions he heard at school and in penny arcades. He began his musical education at age 11, when his family bought a second-hand upright piano, ostensibly so that George's older sibling, Ira (Gershwin, Ira), could learn the instrument. When George surprised everyone with his fluid playing of a popular song, which he had taught himself by following the keys on a neighbor's player piano, his parents decided that George would be the family member to receive lessons. He studied piano with the noted instructor Charles Hambitzer, who introduced his young student to the works of the great classical composers. Hambitzer was so impressed with Gershwin's potential that he refused payment for the lessons; as he wrote in a letter to his sister, “I have a new pupil who will make his mark if anybody will. The boy is a genius…”

      Gershwin continued to broaden his musical knowledge and compositional technique throughout his career with such disparate mentors as the idiosyncratic American composers Henry Cowell (Cowell, Henry) and Wallingford Riegger (Riegger, Wallingford), the distinguished traditionalist Edward Kilenyi, and Joseph Schillinger, a musical theorist known for his mathematically grounded approach to composition. After dropping out of school at age 15, Gershwin earned an income by making piano rolls for player pianos and by playing in New York nightclubs. His most important job in this period was his stint as a song plugger (probably the youngest in Tin Pan Alley), demonstrating sheet music for the Jerome Remick music-publishing company. In an era when sheet-music sales determined the popularity of a song, song pluggers such as Gershwin worked long hours pounding out tunes on the piano for potential customers. Although Gershwin's burgeoning creativity was hampered by his three-year stint in “plugger's purgatory” (as Gershwin biographer Isaac Goldberg termed it), it was nevertheless an experience that greatly improved his dexterity and increased his skills at improvisation and transposing. While still in his teens, Gershwin was known as one of the most talented pianists in the New York area and worked as an accompanist for popular singers and as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway musicals. In 1916 he composed his first published song, "When You Want 'Em You Can't Get 'Em (When You've Got 'Em You Don't Want 'Em)," as well as his first solo piano composition, "Rialto Ripples." He began to attract the attention of some Broadway luminaries, and the operetta composer Sigmund Romberg (Romberg, Sigmund) included one of Gershwin's songs in The Passing Show of 1916.

      These early experiences greatly increased Gershwin's knowledge of jazz and popular music. He enjoyed especially the songs of Irving Berlin (Berlin, Irving) and Jerome Kern (Kern, Jerome)—referring to Berlin as “America's Franz Schubert” and stating that Kern was “the first composer who made me conscious that most popular music was of inferior quality, and that musical comedy was made of better material”—and he was inspired by their work to compose for the Broadway stage. In 1919 entertainer Al Jolson (Jolson, Al) performed the Gershwin song "Swanee" in the musical Sinbad; it became an enormous success, selling more than two million recordings and a million copies of sheet music, and making Gershwin an overnight celebrity. That same year, La, La Lucille, the first show for which Gershwin composed the entire score, premiered; its most popular songs included "The Best of Everything," "Nobody but You," and "Tee-Oodle-Um-Bum-Bo." Also in 1919, Gershwin composed his first “serious” work, the Lullaby for string quartet. A study in harmony that Gershwin composed as an exercise for Kilenyi, Lullaby's delicate beauty transcends its academic origins. Ira Gershwin published the work several years after George's death, and it has gone on to become a favourite with string quartets and with symphony orchestras, for which it was subsequently scored.

Rhapsody in Blue

      During the next few years, Gershwin contributed songs to various Broadway shows and revues. From 1920 to 1924 he composed scores for the annual productions of George White's Scandals, the popular variety revue, producing such standards as "(I'll Build a) Stairway to Paradise" and "Somebody Loves Me." For the Scandals production of 1922, Gershwin convinced producer White to incorporate a one-act jazz opera. This work, Blue Monday (later reworked and retitled as 135th Street), was poorly received and was removed from the show after one performance. Bandleader Paul Whiteman (Whiteman, Paul), who had conducted the pit orchestra for the show, was nevertheless impressed by the piece. He and Gershwin shared the common goal of bringing respectability to jazz music, which in 1922 was still being regarded, as evidenced in a New York American editorial, as “degrading, pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music.” To this end, in late 1923 Whiteman asked Gershwin to compose a piece for an upcoming concert—entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music”—at New York's Aeolian Concert Hall. Legend has it that Gershwin forgot about the request until early January 1924, when he read a newspaper article announcing that the Whiteman concert on February 12 would feature a major new Gershwin composition. Writing at a furious pace in order to meet the deadline, Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue, perhaps his best-known work, in three weeks' time.

      Owing to the haste in which it was written, Rhapsody in Blue was somewhat unfinished at its premiere. Gershwin improvised much of the piano solo during the performance, and conductor Whiteman had to rely on a nod from Gershwin to cue the orchestra at the end of the solo. Nevertheless, the piece was a resounding success and brought Gershwin worldwide fame. The revolutionary work incorporated trademarks of the jazz idiom (blue notes, syncopated rhythms, onomatopoeic instrumental effects) into a symphonic context. Gershwin himself later reflected on the work:

There had been so much chatter about the limitations of jazz, not to speak of the manifest misunderstandings of its function. Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow…No set plan was in my mind, no structure to which my music would conform. The Rhapsody, you see, began as a purpose, not a plan.

      The work, arranged by Ferde Grofé (composer of the Grand Canyon Suite) for either symphony orchestra or jazz band, is perhaps the most-performed and most-recorded orchestral composition of the 20th century. It is the only one of Gershwin's major works that Gershwin himself did not orchestrate.

Popular songs

      For the remainder of his career, Gershwin devoted himself to both popular songs and orchestral compositions. His Broadway shows from the 1920s and '30s featured numerous songs that became standards: "Fascinating Rhythm," "Oh, Lady Be Good," "Sweet and Low-Down," "Do, Do, Do," "Someone to Watch over Me," "Strike Up the Band," "The Man I Love," "'S Wonderful," "I've Got a Crush on You," "Bidin' My Time," "Embraceable You," "But Not for Me," "Of Thee I Sing," and "Isn't It a Pity." He also composed several songs for Hollywood films, such as "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They All Laughed," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," "A Foggy Day," "Nice Work if You Can Get It," "Love Walked In," and "Love Is Here to Stay." His lyricist for nearly all of these tunes was his older brother, Ira, whose glib, witty lyrics—often punctuated with slang, puns, and wordplay—received nearly as much acclaim as George's compositions. The Gershwin brothers comprised a somewhat unique songwriting partnership in that George's melodies usually came first—a reverse of the process employed by most composing teams. (When asked by interviewers, “Which comes first, the words or the music?”, Ira's standard response was, “The contract.”) So facile was George's musical imagination that quality songs were often composed within a few minutes of improvisation; other times, he dipped into his notebooks of song sketches that he accumulated over time (he once said, “I have more tunes in my head than I could put down on paper in a hundred years”) and embellished an old melody he had labeled “g.t.” (for “good tune”). Ira would then spend a week or more fitting words to the tune, polishing each line (to the extent that he was nicknamed “The Jeweller” by other songwriters) until he was satisfied. Songwriter Arthur Schwartz regarded Ira's efforts to be “a truly phenomenal feat, when one considers he was required to be brilliant within the most confining rhythms and accents.”

      One of the Gershwins' best-known collaborations, "I Got Rhythm," was introduced by Ethel Merman (Merman, Ethel) in the musical Girl Crazy (1930). The following year, Gershwin scored a lengthy, elaborate piano arrangement of the song, and in late 1933 he arranged the piece into a set of variations for piano and orchestra; “I Got Rhythm” Variations has since become one of Gershwin's most-performed orchestral works. In addition, the 32-bar structure of "I Got Rhythm" has become the second-most frequently used harmonic progression in jazz improvisation, next to that of the traditional 12-bar blues.

      Gershwin's piano score for "I Got Rhythm" was part of a larger project begun in 1931, George Gershwin's Songbook. A collection of Gershwin's personal favourites among his many hit tunes, it featured the composer's own adaptations designed “for the above-average pianist.” Offering valuable insight into Gershwin's use of rhythm and harmony, as well as his own piano style, the Songbook selections have become concert staples for several noted pianists throughout the years and have occasionally been adapted into full orchestra arrangements.

Other works for orchestra

      In 1925 Gershwin was commissioned by the Symphony Society of New York to write a concerto, prompting the composer to comment, “This showed great confidence on their part as I had never written anything for symphony before…I started to write the concerto in London, after buying four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form actually was!” The resulting work, Concerto in F (1925), was Gershwin's lengthiest composition and was divided into three traditional concerto movements. The first movement loosely follows a sonata structure of exposition, development, and recapitulation, and it appropriates themes and rhythms from the popular "Charleston." The second movement—the “high water mark of [Gershwin's] talent,” according to conductor Walter Damrosch, who conducted the work's premiere performance—is a slow, meditative adaptation of blues progressions, and the third movement—“an orgy of rhythms,” according to Gershwin—introduces new themes and returns, rondo-like, to the themes of the first. Although not as well received at the time as Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F eventually came to be regarded as one of Gershwin's most important works as well as perhaps the most popular American piano concerto.

      An American in Paris (1928), Gershwin's second-most famous orchestral composition, was inspired by the composer's trips to Paris throughout the 1920s. His stated intention with the work was to “portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere”; for this purpose, Gershwin incorporated such touches of verisimilitude as real French taxi horns. It is this piece that perhaps best represents Gershwin's employment of both jazz and classical forms. The harmonic structure of An American in Paris is rooted in blues traditions (particularly the "Homesick Blues" middle section), and soloists are often required to bend, slide, and growl certain notes and passages, in the style of jazz musicians of the 1920s. The melodies that are repeated and embellished throughout the work, however, are never subject to alteration—the antithesis of the jazz philosophy that regards melody as a mere loose outline for imaginative decoration. With its varied rhythms and free structure (“Five sections held together more or less by intuition,” according to one critic), An American in Paris seemed more balletic than symphonic and, indeed, the piece gained its most lasting fame 23 years after its premiere, when it was used by Gene Kelly (Kelly, Gene) for the closing ballet sequence of the classic, eponymous film musical in 1951.

      Gershwin's other major orchestral compositions have grown in stature and popularity throughout the years. His Second Rhapsody (1931) began life under the working titles “Manhattan Rhapsody” and “Rhapsody in Rivets” and was featured, in embryonic form, as incidental music in the film Delicious (1931). Perhaps the most experimental of Gershwin's major works, it has been praised as his most perfect composition in terms of structure and orchestration. Gershwin's Cuban Overture (1932), which he stated was inspired by “two hysterical weeks in Cuba where no sleep was had,” employed rhumba rhythms and such percussion instruments as claves, maracas, bongo drums, and gourds, all of which were generally unknown at the time in the United States. It is a work frequently revived by symphony conductors, who find its brash, festival-like mood to be a rousing concert-opener.

Porgy and Bess

 Throughout his career, Gershwin had major successes on Broadway with shows such as Lady, Be Good! (1924), Oh, Kay! (1926), Strike Up the Band (1930), Girl Crazy (1930), and, especially, the daring political satire Of Thee I Sing (1931), for which Ira and librettists George S. Kaufman (Kaufman, George S.) and Morrie Ryskind shared a Pulitzer Prize. (Rules of the Pulitzer committee at the time did not allow for composers to share in a drama award. Ira objected that George was not a corecipient, but George insisted that the rules be obeyed. In protest, Ira hung his Pulitzer certificate in his bathroom.) These shows, smash hits in their time, are (save for Gershwin's music) largely forgotten today; ironically, his most enduring and respected Broadway work, Porgy and Bess, was lukewarmly received upon its premiere in 1935. Gershwin's “American Folk Opera” was inspired by the DuBose Heyward (Heyward, DuBose) novel Porgy (1925) and featured a libretto and lyrics by Ira and the husband-wife team of DuBose and Dorothy Heyward. In preparation for the show, Gershwin spent time in the rural South, studying firsthand the music and lifestyle of impoverished African Americans. Theatre critics received the premiere production enthusiastically, but highbrow music critics were derisive, distressed that “lowly” popular music should be incorporated into an opera structure. Black audiences throughout the years have criticized the work for its condescending depiction of stereotyped characters and for Gershwin's inauthentic appropriation of black musical forms. Nevertheless, Gershwin's music—including such standards as "Summertime," "It Ain't Necessarily So," "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," and "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" —transcended early criticism to attain a revered niche in the musical world, largely because it successfully amalgamates various musical cultures to evoke something uniquely American and wholly Gershwin. Porgy and Bess received overdue recognition in the years 1952–54 when the U.S. State Department selected it to represent the United States on an international tour, during which it became the first opera by an American composer to be performed at the La Scala opera house in Milan. While it still raises political issues, contemporary attitudes towards the work are reflected in a statement by Grace Bumbry, who portrayed Bess in the Metropolitan Opera's widely praised revival in 1985: “I resented the role at first, possibly because I really didn't know the score, and I think because of the racial aspect. I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come too far to regress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it really was a piece of Americana, of American history.” Many now consider the score from Porgy and Bess to be Gershwin's greatest masterpiece.

Aftermath and assessment

      Gershwin was known as a gregarious man whose huge ego was tempered by a genuinely magnetic personality. He loved his work and approached every assignment with enthusiasm, never suffering from “composer's block.” Throughout the first half of 1937, Gershwin began experiencing severe headaches and brief memory blackouts, although medical tests showed him to be in good health. By July, Gershwin exhibited impaired motor skills and drastic weight loss, and he required assistance in walking. He lapsed into a coma on July 9, and a spinal tap revealed the presence of a brain tumor. Gershwin never regained consciousness and died during surgery two days later. He was at the peak of his powers with several unrealized projects ahead of him (among them, some sketches for a new string quartet and a new symphony, a proposed ballet score, and musical comedy collaborations with George S. Kaufman and DuBose Heyward). His death stunned the nation, whose collective feelings can be summed up in a famous statement from novelist John O'Hara (O'Hara, John): “George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to.”

      Ira Gershwin, so devastated that he could not work for more than a year after George's death, became the keeper of his brother's legacy. In later years, he supervised the release of several unpublished Gershwin compositions, including several works for piano, the Lullaby for string quartet, and the Catfish Row Suite from Porgy and Bess (a work cobbled together after the show had closed and now considered to be the last orchestral work to be composed and scored by Gershwin). Ira also put lyrics to tunes from George's notebooks, creating “new” Gershwin songs for the films The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) and Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). He had continued success with other collaborators, including Kurt Weill (Weill, Kurt), Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen (Arlen, Harold).

      Gershwin's music remains a subject of debate among prominent international conductors, composers, and music scholars, some of whom find his works for orchestra to be naively structured, little more than catchy melodies strung together by the barest of musical links. In 1954, Leonard Bernstein (Bernstein, Leonard) summed up the feelings of many classical musicians, saying, “The themes are terrific—inspired, God-given. I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. But if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.” Nevertheless, Gershwin's accomplishments are considerable: he ranks (along with Irving Berlin, Cole Porter (Porter, Cole), and Richard Rodgers (Rodgers, Richard)) as one of the four greatest composers for the American musical theatre, as well as the only popular composer of the 20th century to have made a significant and lasting dent in the classical music world. He had great admirers in the classical field, including such luminaries as Arturo Toscanini (Toscanini, Arturo), Fritz Reiner (Reiner, Fritz), Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg, Arnold), Maurice Ravel (Ravel, Maurice), Sergey Prokofiev (Prokofiev, Sergey), and Alban Berg (Berg, Alban), all of whom cited Gershwin's genius for melody and harmony. His orchestral works, now performed by most of the world's prestigious symphony orchestras, have attained a status for which Gershwin longed during his lifetime. Aaron Copland (Copland, Aaron) and Charles Ives (Ives, Charles) may rival Gershwin for the title of “great American composer,” but their works tend to be admired, whereas Gershwin's are beloved. As the noted musicologist Hans Keller stated, “Gershwin is a genius, in fact, whose style hides the wealth and complexity of his invention. There are indeed weak spots, but who cares about them when there is greatness?”

Additional Reading

Charles Schwartz, Gershwin: His Life and Music (1973, reprinted 1979); Ean Wood, George Gershwin: His Life & Music (1996); Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (1987, reissued 1990); Rodney Greenberg, George Gershwin (1998); and Joan Peyser, The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin (1993, reissued 1998), are among the better Gershwin biographies. The songwriting partnership of the Gershwin brothers is examined in Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart, The Gershwin Years: George and Ira (1996; originally published as The Gershwin Years, 1958); and in Deena Rosenberg, Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (1991, reissued 1997). Essays by noted Gershwin scholars are collected in Gregory R. Suriano (ed.), Gershwin in His Time: A Biographical Scrapbook, 1919–1937 (1998); and in Wayne Schneider (ed.), The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin (1999). The history and musical structure of Gershwin's best-known orchestral work are explored in David Schiff, Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (1997).

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