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Oct 5, 2020 · George Gershwin (1898-1937) by Georg Predota October 5th, 2020. George Gershwin, 1934. It has been said that the total royalties George Gershwin accrued from performances of “Summertime” from his opera Porgy and Bess are equivalent to the Argentine national debt. Whether there is any truth to that anecdote or not, Gershwin was filthy rich ...
- At age 15, Gershwin dropped out of school and took a job as a pianist and song plugger for Tin Pan Alley, a collection of music publishers and songwriters in New York City.
- Gershwin especially liked parties and dated many glamorous women. He even proposed to one but he never married, he said he was too busy. Here is one of George Gershwin’s most famous quote: “Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?”
- Gershwin began his hobby of painting and he got quite good at it. He became more serious about it as he went along. His last oil portrait was of his good friend, Arnold Schoenberg.
- Schoenberg and Gershwin got along very well, they used to play tennis weekly at Gershwin’s Beverly Hills court. He even asked Schoenberg for composition lessons but Schoenberg refused by saying: “I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you’re such a good Gershwin already.”
The piano teacher who took 14-year-old Gershwin on as a pupil believed that the boy was a genius. Leaving school at age fifteen, Gershwin took a job as a piano player in “Tin Pan Alley,” and was soon considered one of the finest there. Gershwin’s first big hit, Swanee, was composed in 10 minutes on a bus.
- Overview
- Early career and influences
- Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin made piano rolls for player pianos, played the piano in nightclubs, demonstrated sheet music for a music publishing company, and worked as an accompanist and a Broadway rehearsal pianist. He thereafter made a living writing (with his lyricist brother Ira) popular songs and Broadway musicals and composing important and popular jazz-influenced classical compositions.
How did George Gershwin die?
George Gershwin died of a brain tumour at the age of 38.
What did George Gershwin compose?
With his lyricist brother Ira, George Gershwin composed numerous popular songs (such as “Embraceable You” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), entire Broadway musicals, and the folk opera Porgy and Bess. He wrote several important and popular chamber and orchestral works that were admired by classical composers, including Maurice Ravel and Sergey Prokofiev.
Why is George Gershwin important?
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, 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 and Wallingford Riegger, 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 included one of Gershwin’s songs in The Passing Show of 1916.
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Composers & Their Music
These early experiences greatly increased Gershwin’s knowledge of jazz and popular music. He enjoyed especially the songs of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern—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 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.
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, 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.
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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.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- George Gershwin Was Not His Given Name. Indeed, the name George Gershwin is known worldwide — it’s synonymous with great American music. However, it may surprise some to know that this was not his birth name.
- He Had Humble Origins. Gershwin was the second of four children in a working-class family of Russian Jewish immigrants. His parents were Morris and Rose, and his siblings were Ira, Arthur, and the young sister, Frances.
- He Had No Formal Training. George Gershwin is known as one of the greatest composers in American history. That’s why it may come as a surprise to many that he had no formal training in music theory or composition.
- Gershwin Was A Piano Prodigy. As we mentioned above, when George Gershwin was still a child, his parents bought his brother a piano. Yet it was George who took to the instrument like a moth to a flame.
Apr 27, 2012 · In the 1920s, it wasn't uncommon for the Gershwin brothers — composer George and lyricist Ira — to have two shows on Broadway at once. This season, it's happening again. As Jeff Lunden reports.
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George Gershwin (/ ˈɡɜːrʃ.wɪn /; born Jacob Gershwine; September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist whose compositions spanned popular, jazz and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), the songs "Swanee" (1919) and ...
