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George Gershwin
1898-1937
A pioneer who absorbed the jazzy inflections of popular music in Harlem’s black clubs and took them to the white audiences of Broadway and into the concert hall.
Life and Music
• Born Jacob Gershvin on 26 September 1898 to poor Jewish immigrants, he grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He frequently skipped school and felt inadequate beside his smarter, better-behaved older brother Ira – except when it came to girls.
• There was no music in Gershwin’s family, but when he was 12, they bought a piano and immediately it was clear that he had a remarkable natural talent.
• In 1914, Gershwin got a job as a song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley. With no radios or gramophones, sheet music publishers pushed their popular songs by having someone play them in shops, over and over again. Endless hours at the piano perfected his technique, but the swaggering young man knew he could write better songs using the new sounds he was hearing in the black music clubs.
• By his early 20s, Gershwin was much in demand. Having formed a permanent song-writing team with his lyricist brother Ira, he was writing two shows a year for Broadway, and his fame spread to London.
• But he wasn’t content to be a song-basher and followed classical music closely. When Paul Whiteman’s band organised An Experiment in Modern Music at New York’s Aeolian Hall in February 1924 – an all-day marathon of new pieces intended to show that America’s fledgling ‘jazz’ idiom had a place in serious music – Gershwin contributed Rhapsody in Blue.
• Gershwin’s ability to write a great tune was never in doubt, but his classical craft was. He didn’t orchestrate the Rhapsody – that job was done by Whiteman’s orchestrator Ferde Grofé from Gershwin’s piano sketches. The idea for the opening whoop on the clarinet, rather than a normal scale, wasn’t Gershwin’s either, but came from clarinettist Ross Gorman. For his Piano concerto the next year, he still needed help, but was working hard at learning orchestration.
• By the time An American in Paris was finished in 1928, Gershwin had mastered the art of orchestration.
• By the early 1930s, Gershwin could do no wrong. He was established as a popular composer, and as a conductor and performer of his works to packed houses. He mixed with composers including Prokofiev, Poulenc and Ravel (Ravel’s jazz-tinged Piano Concerto in G clearly owes more than a drink to Gershwin). Arnold Schoenberg became a close friend and hailed Gershwin’s distinctive melodic and harmonic idiom as ‘something entirely new’.
• Gershwin’s masterpiece Porgy and Bess is the first notable American opera. Based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, it took Gershwin 20 months to complete, nearly half of which was taken up with the orchestration. The steady stream of hit numbers includes ‘Summertime’, ‘I got plenty o’ nuttin’’ and ‘It ain’t necessarily so’.
• Gershwin’s boyish features and extraordinary charisma gave him the aura of a Hollywood star. He was always surrounded by admiring women – even when he was composing.
• Monopolising every party, he played the piano until the small hours – not that anyone was keen to leave, with such electric entertainment on offer.
• In his mid-30s, Gershwin was plagued by headaches, and puzzled by the smell of burning rubbish that only he seemed to notice. His problem, dismissed as ‘hysteria’ by family and colleagues, who sent him to the psychiatrist rather than the doctor, proved more physical: a brain tumour. He died on 11 July 1937, aged 38.
Did you know?
It seems to be an almost legal requirement for TV and movie producers to use Rhapsody in Blue over all and any footage of New York. Gershwin’s songs have been used in countless films, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, When Harry Met Sally and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Summertime, probably one of the most recorded songs of all time, has appeared in TV ads for Pimms and Galaxy chocolate.
