George Gershwin brought American popular music into the concert
hall, writing as well a wealth of standard popular songs.
Predominantly accompanied by lyrics by his brother Ira, these
remain unsurpassed in the twentieth century for melodic invention
and memorability.
Gershwin was born to poor Jewish parents m Manhattan, and had
little exposure to music in his childhood. Initially self-taught
as a pianist, he had piano and music theory lessons, but never
became fluent at reading music. In 1914 Gershwin left school to
work for Remick's, a Tin Pan Alley publisher. He was soon having
his own songs published and in 1919 wrote his first musical, La
La Lucille. This was also the year of his first big hit, the
song "Swanee", which became hugely popular in a recording by Al
Jolson.
Gershwin's aspirations towards serious composition were never
far from the surface. In 1919 he wrote Lullaby for string
quartet; a one-act jazz opera, Blue Monday blues, followed
in 1922. But when the bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned
Rhapsody in blue in 1924, Gershwin came of age as a concert
composer. Gershwin himself was the first soloist in this brilliant
conception, a one-movement concerto for piano and jazz band.
Whiteman entrusted the work's orchestration, however, to his
arranger, Ferde Grofe, owing to Gershwin's lack of experience with
instrumentation. Like all of the composer's large-scale works,
Rhapsody in blue can be criticized for its rather primitive
sense of structure; but this has never stopped an adoring public
from warming to its haunting melodies and the effective brilliance
of its piano writing. One of the work's most famous features, the
opening glissando for clarinet, was m fact an afterthought:
Gershwin had originally written a 17-note scale, but when the
band's clarinettist played a glissando in rehearsal as a joke, the
composer so liked the effect that he incorporated it into the
score.
Following the success of Rhapsody in blue, Gershwin was
commissioned to write further large concert works: the Piano concerto in F,
from 1925, and An American in Paris from 1928. He
continued to compose songs, and from 1924 the lyrics for almost all of them were written by his brother Ira, whose deft
and witty words contributed to making the brothers one of the most
successful songwriting teams on Broadway, responsible for such
works as Girl
crazy and Strike up the band, recently revived on CD in authentic
editions. With a fortune by now matching his fame, Gershwin began
in the late 1920s to collect paintings by artists such as Braque
and Chagall; he also devoted more and more time to painting his
own pictures.
Between 1934 and 1935 Gershwin fulfilled a long-standing
ambition to compose a Negro folk opera. The result was Porgy
and Bess, written m part while Gershwin was living on the
island near Charleston, South Carolina, where the opera is set:
songs such as "Summertime" and "I got plenty of nuttin" were
influenced by the speech and music of the local black community.
In 1937 Gershwin started to experience spells of dizziness; in
July of that year he died, tragically young, of a brain tumour.
The synthesis of jazz and serious music he achieved not only is
remarkable in its own right but also stands as a unique reflection
of American society between the wars.
