George Gershwin
The Brooklyn pianist who built a bridge between the songs of Tin Pan Alley and the symphonies of the concert hall
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- FamilyIra Gershwin
His brother, two years older, and his lifelong partner, who wrote the lyrics for most of his Broadway and Hollywood songs.
- TeacherCharles Hambitzer
The piano teacher who first recognized his gift, teaching the fourteen-year-old boy Chopin·Liszt·Debussy.
- PatronagePaul Whiteman
He remembered 'Blue Monday', then commissioned 'Rhapsody in Blue' and conducted its premiere.
- FriendshipKay Swift
His lover and musical companion for nearly a decade, taking down and organizing his scores.
- InfluenceMaurice Ravel
Met him in New York in 1928, admired his talent, and wrote him a letter of introduction to Boulanger.
- FriendshipArnold Schoenberg
His tennis partner in the Hollywood years; after Gershwin's death he wrote a eulogy saying 'music was the very air he breathed.'
I. The boy from Brooklyn · 1898–1913 (age 0–15)
(Birth) He was born in September 1898 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Morris, and his mother, Rose, were Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg, Russia, and the family name was originally Gershowitz. He had a brother, Ira, two years his senior, and after him came a younger brother, Arthur, and the youngest, a sister, Frances. His father switched businesses often, running restaurants, a bakery, a Turkish bath and a pool hall, and each time the family moved between Manhattan and Brooklyn. (The street) Young George preferred the street to books. He was a boy who roller-skated and got into fights with the neighborhood kids. But his ears were open. He later recalled that at about six he stood rooted to the spot as Rubinstein's 'Melody in F' poured from a player piano in a penny arcade, and that at about ten, hearing a violinist his own age, Maxie Rosenzweig, play Dvořák's 'Humoresque' in the school auditorium, he first awoke to music. (Piano) In 1910 his mother brought home a secondhand piano so that Ira could take lessons. But once it was in the house, it was George who lifted the lid and played a popular song. He had taught himself in secret, copying the movement of the keys on a player piano at a friend's house. After passing through a few neighborhood teachers, at about fourteen he met the pianist Charles Hambitzer. (Foundations) Hambitzer taught him Chopin, Liszt and Debussy and took him to concerts. In a letter to his sister he wrote that the boy was unmistakably a genius, that he wanted to plunge into new music like jazz, but that for the time being he would have him lay a firm foundation in standard music first. His mother, Rose, hoped her son would settle into a steady profession. The classical foundation and the popular songs of the street, the two pillars that would one day hold up Gershwin's music, were raised side by side in these years.
II. Tin Pan Alley · 1914–1923 (age 16–25)
(Song plugger) In 1914, at fifteen, Gershwin quit the High School of Commerce and went to work at Remick's, a publisher on 'Tin Pan Alley', Manhattan's sheet-music row. He was a 'song plugger', sitting at the shop piano, playing new songs for customers and selling the sheet music. He earned 15 dollars a week. Playing other people's songs all day, he got the grammar of popular song into his fingers, and he made extra money recording piano rolls for player pianos. (Swanee) He wanted to sell his own songs, but the firm wasn't interested. In 1917 he left Remick's and bided his time as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway. In 1919 'Swanee', written with the lyricist Irving Caesar, became a huge hit when Al Jolson, the most popular singer of the day, took it up. His royalties in the first year are said to have come to around $10,000. It was the first real money ever to land in the hands of an immigrant family's second son who had been earning 15 dollars a week. (Study) That same year he staged his first Broadway musical, 'La La Lucille', and for five years from 1920 he wrote songs for the revue 'George White's Scandals'. Even as he made money, he never stopped learning. After his teacher Hambitzer died young in 1918, he studied harmony and orchestration with Edward Kilenyi. In 1922 he put 'Blue Monday', a one-act opera set in Harlem, into the 'Scandals', but it was dropped after opening night. It was a failure, but Paul Whiteman, who led the orchestra that night, kept the work in mind. (Brothers) Around this time Ira was writing lyrics under the pen name 'Arthur Francis', made by joining the names of their two younger siblings. He is said to have wanted to avoid trading on his already famous brother's name. The bookish, introverted elder brother and the sociable younger one, forever at the piano, had very different temperaments, but they would soon become the most famous brother team on Broadway.
The song that first brought money and a name to the twenty-one-year-old Gershwin, fresh from his days as a song plugger. The popular-song instincts he honed on Tin Pan Alley are all there.
- The march-like rhythm that drives the whole song was aimed at the one-step (a ballroom dance done at a brisk walking pace), then all the rage, as the lyricist Irving Caesar recalled. Tap the beat with your foot as you listen and its character as a dance tune comes through clearly.
- The refrain 'Swanee, how I love ya' is a song of longing for a river and a home in the American South, yet neither composer had ever set foot there. It is intriguing to hear it as the South imagined by New Yorkers.
- In Al Jolson's 1920 recording you can hear how dramatically his way of stretching and gently bending the notes heightens the song. Compare it with later recordings that sing the same song plainly.
III. Rhapsody · 1924–1925 (age 26–27)
(The newspaper) In January 1924 Gershwin opened a newspaper and was startled. The article announced that Paul Whiteman would premiere a 'jazz concerto' by Gershwin at his February concert. There had been talk, but he had never said yes. He had little more than five weeks. On a train to Boston the skeleton of the piece came to him. He later recalled hearing, in the rattle of the rails, 'a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot'. (Premiere) Gershwin wrote the score for two pianos, and Ferde Grofé, the Whiteman band's arranger, adapted it for the band. On February 12, at Aeolian Hall in New York, near the end of a long concert titled 'An Experiment in Modern Music', 'Rhapsody in Blue' rang out. In the audience sat Rachmaninoff and the violinists Heifetz and Kreisler. Gershwin improvised part of the piano solo, which he had not fully written out. The reviews were mixed, but the audience was ecstatic, and the piece carried his name into the concert hall for the first time. (The team) At the end of that year 'Lady, Be Good!', the first musical to bear both his and Ira's names, opened, starring the brother-and-sister team Fred and Adele Astaire. The brothers went on to make a string of hits together, among them 'Oh, Kay!' and 'Funny Face'. Ira supplied lyrics alive with wordplay, George melodies with springing rhythms. (Concerto) The conductor Walter Damrosch, who had been in the Aeolian Hall audience, commissioned a piano concerto for the New York Symphony. This time Gershwin did the orchestration himself. To check the finished score, he paid out of his own pocket to bring dozens of musicians into a theater for a trial reading. The 'Concerto in F', premiered at Carnegie Hall in December 1925, set the Charleston and the blues within the classical three-movement mold. It was the work of a self-taught pianist determined to master the language of the concert hall on his own.
Written in five weeks, spurred by a single line in a newspaper, the piece is steeped in the rhythm of the Boston train and the noise of New York. With it Gershwin crossed over from songwriter to concert composer.
- The opening, where the clarinet flutters rapidly on a low note (a trill) and then slides all the way up to a high one (a glissando), is the emblem of the piece. The story goes that in rehearsal the clarinetist Ross Gorman stretched the sound out as a joke, and Gershwin liked it enough to keep it.
- The slow, broad melody the strings sing midway through is often called the 'love theme'. Set against the bustling rhythms before it, it sounds like the calm that falls after the city's clamor.
- The 1924 premiere was scored for a jazz band of twenty-odd players; the full orchestral version usually heard today is a later rearrangement by Grofé. Compare the two and the same piece sounds as different as a club and a concert hall.
- Grofé's score marks the piano solo with the instruction 'wait for nod'. It is a trace of the premiere, where Gershwin improvised and the band came in on his signal. In the abridged recordings Gershwin himself made in 1924·1927, you can hear the speed and drive of his playing.
Unlike the 'Rhapsody', whose orchestration he left to someone else, he wrote this one himself from first note to last, refining it with a trial reading he paid for himself. His effort to teach himself classical form shows in its three-movement frame.
- The first movement opens with a pounding of the timpani (pitched percussion shaped like large drums). In his note for the premiere Gershwin himself said that this movement uses the Charleston rhythm. Listen for the short rhythmic motif the bassoon brings in next.
- At the start of the second movement a trumpet fitted with a mute (a stopper that softens the sound and alters its color) plays a slow blues melody. Gershwin described this movement as 'a poetic nocturnal atmosphere, what is often called the American blues'.
- The third movement is, in Gershwin's words, 'an orgy of rhythms'. A figure of rapidly repeated notes drives on from beginning to end, and themes from the earlier movements return.
- Pianists divide sharply over whether to swing the rhythms loosely, like jazz, or play them neatly, like a classical concerto. It is a fine piece for comparing interpretations.
IV. An American in Paris · 1926–1929 (age 28–31)
(Companion) From around 1925 Gershwin grew close to the composer and pianist Kay Swift. She was the wife of the banker James Warburg. Swift was also his musical companion, taking down and organizing his scores, and the story goes that the title of the 1926 musical 'Oh, Kay!' came from her name. The relationship lasted nearly ten years. Swift divorced in 1934, but the two never married, and Gershwin remained single all his life. (Preludes) In December 1926, at a recital, Gershwin himself premiered a group of short new piano pieces. Three of them were published the following year as the 'Three Preludes'. Like Chopin's preludes, they pack blue notes and syncopation into brief spans. (Ravel) In March 1928 a party for Maurice Ravel's fifty-third birthday was held in New York during his American tour, and Gershwin played the piano there. When Gershwin said he wanted to study, Ravel wrote him a letter of introduction to Nadia Boulanger in Paris. In that letter, which survives, Ravel called him a musician of dazzling, captivating gifts, yet asked whether she had the courage to bear the responsibility, since teaching him technique might spoil that talent. Boulanger, too, declined to take him as a pupil. (Travels) That spring Gershwin toured Europe with Ira and his wife and their sister Frances. In Paris he polished 'An American in Paris' and went about the streets buying taxi horns. In Vienna he met Alban Berg and heard his string quartet. Prokofiev, who heard him play in Paris, is said to have admired his pianism but found the concerto's construction loose. 'An American in Paris', premiered in New York in December, held both the thrill of a strange city and a blues of longing for home.
Short piano pieces Gershwin premiered himself in the years he grew close to Kay Swift and longed for Europe. They lay the blues over the tradition of Chopin's preludes.
- No. 1 opens in its first bar with a short motif built on a blue note (a pitch sung slightly flat), and syncopation (a rhythm that stresses the weak part of the beat) drives the piece forward. The score marking reads 'fast, with clear and decisive rhythm'.
- No. 2 is the piece Gershwin called 'a sort of blue lullaby'. Over a left-hand accompaniment that walks at a steady pace in the low register, the right hand sings a slow blues.
- No. 3, true to its marking 'agitated (agitato)', is short and fierce. It shares something of No. 1's rhythm, so the three pieces sound as though they close a single circle.
- More pieces were played at the premiere, but they were pared down to three for publication. Listen to Gershwin's own recording to hear his tempo and sense of rhythm for yourself.
The streets of Paris and the homesickness he felt firsthand on his 1928 European trip became music just as they were. Gershwin put real taxi horns bought in Paris into the score.
- The jaunty walking theme at the opening is, as Gershwin explained in his note, an American tourist strolling the streets of Paris. Follow the footstep rhythms traded between the strings and woodwinds.
- Soon four real taxi horns sound. Gershwin brought the horns back from Paris and marked them A·B·C·D in the score, yet exactly which pitches they should be tuned to is still debated among performers and scholars.
- In the middle section a muted trumpet sings a slow blues. Gershwin described this passage as the moment an American is seized by a sudden fit of homesickness.
- When a brisk, Charleston-like theme arrives later on, the spirits revive, and at the close the blues and the walking theme come together. It sounds as if a foreign city and home were reconciled within a single sound.
V. Porgy and Bess · 1930–1935 (age 32–37)
(Plenty) Even in the depths of the Great Depression, Gershwin's work never dried up. In the 1930 show "Girl Crazy," a newcomer named Ethel Merman sang "I Got Rhythm," and in 1931 the political satire "Of Thee I Sing" became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He lived in a Manhattan penthouse, collected paintings by Rouault, Chagall and Picasso, and painted in oils himself. (Loss) In 1932 his father, Morris, died. That same year he wrote the "Cuban Overture" on rhythms he had brought back from Havana, and began studying composition theory with the music theorist Joseph Schillinger. Plagued by chronic indigestion, which he called his "composer's stomach," he began seeing the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg in 1934. (Charleston) In 1926 he stayed up all night reading DuBose Heyward's novel "Porgy" and then wrote to say he wanted to make it into an opera. It told the story of Porgy, a disabled beggar, and Bess, on Catfish Row, a Black street in Charleston, South Carolina. The contract was not signed until 1933. In the summer of 1934 he stayed on Folly Beach, off the coast of Charleston, listening to the worship and work songs of the Gullah people. Heyward wrote that at one service Gershwin clapped along with the congregation and joined in the "shouting." (Box office) After a tryout in Boston in September 1935, "Porgy and Bess" opened on Broadway in October with a cast of Black singers. Gershwin called the work a "folk opera." Critics were divided over whether it was an opera or a musical, and when it closed after 124 performances it had not recouped its production costs. The work he had labored over longest was never rewarded with success in his lifetime. Only after his death did "Summertime" and its other songs come to be sung far and wide.
A "folk opera" written after hearing the worship and songs of the Gullah people firsthand on Folly Beach. It failed at the box office in his lifetime but is now counted among Gershwin's signature works.
- The moment the curtain rises comes "Summertime," the lullaby the fisherman's wife Clara sings to her baby. Beneath the peaceful words lies the shadow of a minor key, as though foreshadowing the hard lives of the people of Catfish Row.
- In Porgy and Bess's duet "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," listen for the moment when the two voices, after trading lines, intertwine into one. It is counted the most lyrical passage in the opera.
- "It Ain't Necessarily So," sung by the peddler Sportin' Life, is a song that mocks Bible stories, and Ira's lyrics are especially witty. The uneasy, sliding melody betrays the character's shadiness.
- Between the songs run passages sung as if spoken (recitative), showing that the work was conceived not as a musical but as an opera. Productions differ greatly in how much of this they keep, so compare complete recordings with recordings of highlights.
VI. The last year in Hollywood · 1936–1937 (age 38–39)
(The West) In the summer of 1936 the Gershwin brothers signed with the studio RKO and moved to Beverly Hills, California. For the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film "Shall We Dance" he wrote "They Can't Take That Away from Me" and "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," and then, for "A Damsel in Distress," "A Foggy Day." The pay was good, but he often told those around him that he wanted to write operas and symphonies again. (Tennis) Living there was Arnold Schoenberg, who had fled the Nazis into exile. The two played tennis regularly on the court at Gershwin's house, and Gershwin painted Schoenberg's portrait. The pioneer of music that had abandoned tonality and the composer from Broadway made very different music, but they respected each other. (Symptoms) In February 1937, while playing the "Concerto in F" with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he suffered a momentary blackout that cost him a few bars, and smelled burning rubber. Afterward the headaches and dizziness grew more frequent and his hands grew clumsy. Hospital tests in June found no cause, and those around him put it down to overwork or neurosis. (Death) On July 9 he collapsed and fell into a coma. It was a brain tumor. The neurosurgeon Howard Naffziger operated, but Gershwin died on the morning of July 11, 1937, at the age of thirty-eight. He left no will, and his estate went to his mother, Rose. "Love Is Here to Stay," considered the last song of his lifetime, was used the following year in the film "The Goldwyn Follies." In his memorial tribute Schoenberg wrote that "music was to him the air he breathed."
A song written for the Astaire film "Shall We Dance" after the move to Hollywood. The only Academy Award nomination Gershwin ever received was announced after his death.
- Ira's lyric lists small habits one by one, like the way you wear your hat or the way you sip your tea, and says that "they can't take that away." The melody, which repeats the same note several times before rising slightly, resembles a calm, matter-of-fact way of speaking.
- In the film Astaire sings the song to Ginger Rogers on a fog-bound ferry deck, but they do not dance. Only in the 1949 film "The Barkleys of Broadway" did the two finally dance to it.
- It was nominated for the 1937 Academy Award for Best Original Song but did not win. Since then countless jazz singers have taken it up and it has become a standard (a classic played again and again), so compare Astaire's original with the jazz singers' recordings.
Lesser-known stories
(Name) The name on his birth certificate was not "George" but "Jacob Gershwine." The family called him George from the start, and the spelling of the family surname changed several times after they immigrated. Since it was a name he never used in his life, the fact survived only in biographers' footnotes. (Pulitzer) When "Of Thee I Sing" won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1932, the list of winners named only the librettists George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and the lyricist Ira. The drama prize at the time honored the writing of a play, so the music was not under consideration. This omission of the composer at the heart of the work was long forgotten, until it came back into view in 1998, the centenary of his birth, when the Pulitzer board awarded Gershwin a special citation. (Patronage) His friendship with Schoenberg is usually told only through the tennis anecdote. Yet Gershwin is known to have paid for the Kolisch Quartet to record Schoenberg's string quartets. A popular composer spent his own money to preserve on record the music of an exiled colleague, but this episode, overshadowed by the image of the "genius of popular music," is seldom mentioned. (Search) In July 1937 those around him tried to entrust the operation to Walter Dandy, regarded as the finest neurosurgeon of the day. He was out yachting on Chesapeake Bay, and newspapers of the time reported that, with the government's help, naval vessels set out to find him. But the patient's condition was so urgent that the operation began without waiting for Dandy. His sudden death was such big news that this commotion in his final days is little remembered.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Rhapsody (gwangsigok)
(Meaning of the word) From the Greek rhapsōidia, a song in which an ancient bard "stitched together" many verses. The Chinese-character term gwangsigok (狂詩曲) means a piece (曲) like an unbridled (狂) poem (詩). (In music) A single-movement piece that freely strings together several themes without being bound by a fixed form. Like Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsodies," it often weaves in folk melodies, and sudden shifts of mood are its hallmark. Think of a medley at a talent show, where several songs are sung one after another. But a rhapsody is not simply spliced together; it is shaped so that it flows like a single story. (Elsewhere) In everyday English, rhapsody is also used to mean "ecstatic praise."
Blue note
(Meaning of the word) In English, blue can also mean "melancholy." The note gets its name because it is heard in the blues, the sorrowful songs of Black Americans. (In music) Certain notes of the major scale (mainly the third and the seventh) sung or played a little less than a semitone flat, or a full semitone flat. A lonely color seeps into the bright major key, giving blues and jazz their distinctive feel. It is like the way a sad song at karaoke sounds more plaintive when you bend a note slightly downward. (Elsewhere) It is also the name of a famous New York jazz club and of a jazz record label.
Syncopation (danggimeum)
(Meaning of the word) From the Greek synkopē, meaning "to cut off, to shorten." The Korean term danggimeum ('pulled note') means a note whose accent has been "pulled forward." (In music) A rhythm that places the stress not on the strong beat, where the weight would normally fall, but on a weak beat or between beats. The beat slips out of expectation and the body starts to bounce; it is the heart of jazz and of Gershwin's music. Clap "boom-chick, boom-chick," then deliberately clap the "chick" half a beat early and loud, and the sudden lift you feel is syncopation. (Elsewhere) In medicine, the English word syncope means "fainting," a brief loss of consciousness.
Glissando
(Meaning of the word) Made by adding an Italian ending to the French glisser (to slide). (In music) A technique of gliding from one note to another without breaking up the notes in between. On the piano the fingers sweep along the keys; on the trombone, strings or clarinet the pitch is smoothly drawn up or down. It is like going down a slide in one smooth rush instead of stepping down it one stair at a time. The clarinet at the opening of "Rhapsody in Blue" is the most famous example.
Concerto
(Meaning of the word) The Chinese-character term hyeopjugok (協奏曲) means a piece (曲) played (奏) together (協). The Latin root of its Western name, concerto, is concertare, which can also mean "to contend," so the name already holds the character of this music, in which soloist and orchestra trade phrases as if competing. (In music) A piece in which a single solo instrument, such as the piano or violin, plays together with an orchestra, usually in three movements: fast-slow-fast. The soloist shows off dazzling technique, while the orchestra supports and at times opposes. It resembles a soccer match in which one brilliant striker and the whole team pass the ball back and forth to build the game.
Orchestral arrangement (orchestration)
(Meaning of the word) Orchestra originally referred to the semicircular space in front of the stage in an ancient Greek theater, where the chorus danced. The word comes from the Greek for "to dance." (In music) The work of transferring a piece written for piano or the like to the orchestra, deciding which melody goes to which instrument and who accompanies when, and writing it all out in a score. The same melody feels completely different depending on whether a violin or a trumpet sings it. It is like a group project, where you decide who does the research, who gives the presentation and who makes the visuals. Divide the roles well and the same content shines far brighter. (Elsewhere) In information technology, automatically coordinating·managing many servers and programs so that they run together is called orchestration.
Prelude (jeonjugok)
(Meaning of the word) The Chinese-character term jeonjugok (前奏曲) means a piece (曲) played (奏) before (前). Its Western name, prelude, likewise comes from the Latin for "to play beforehand." (In music) Originally a short piece placed before a main work, a fugue or an opera to set the mood. Since Chopin, it can also mean a short, self-contained piano piece with no main work to follow. Think of the warm-up before the main game in gym class. The prelude was originally the warm-up, but the preludes of Chopin and Gershwin turned the warm-up alone into a splendid performance.