George Gershwin

Born: September 26, 1898. Brooklyn, New York Died: July 11, 1937. Hollywood, California - Biography - Musical Examples - Works - Links - 20th Century Composer Index

American composer and pianist. One of the first composers to successfully integrate jazz and popular styles into the classical repertoire. With his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, he was one of the most successful composers of popular songs and stage works.

In the 1910s and 1920s, if you went into a music store to buy sheet music you would likely find a song plugger—a pianist and singer who would perform songs for you in the same way we preview CDs in a record store today. If you had walked into Jerome H. Remick & Company (one of the famous "Tin Pan Alley" companies) in 1915, that song plugger might well have been the young George Gershwin. From this humble beginning, Gershwin went on to become both the best-known composer of popular music and the most popular composer of concert music in America.

Gershwin began studying the piano in 1910—on an instrument bought for his brother Ira. His teacher exposed him to the standard repertoire of the nineteenth century and saw in him real possibilities. But Gershwin dropped out of school at age fifteen to become a song plugger. Within a few years, he had moved to Broadway as a rehearsal pianist. He also began composing songs, and by age twenty he had songs in three Broadway shows. His first full show, La Lucille, premiered before his twenty-first birthday. This was the beginning of a string of popular shows and songs, most written to lyrics by Ira. Many of the songs became "standards" in the repertoires of singers and musicians, and his most famous, "I Got Rhythm," served as a musical template for hundreds of jazz tunes.

All the while, Gershwin had been studying composition, and in 1924 he burst onto the concert scene with his Rhapsody in Blue, a concerto for piano and jazz band. The work, written for Paul Whiteman's band, successfully combined the structure of a standard concert piece with many of the rhythmic and harmonic elements of popular music and jazz. For the next decade, Gershwin created an impressive body of concert works (such as the Concerto in F and An American in Paris) while at the same time creating such great shows as Girl Crazy and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing. His groundbreaking Porgy and Bess was perhaps the logical culmination of these two strands of musical composition—an opera that combined the best of his concert and stage work while exploring new social ground by using the world of African Americans in the South as the basis for the story. The work was finished in 1934, and, tragically, in 1937 Gershwin died of a brain tumor. But in his short life he helped to transform the music of the Broadway stage and at the same time create a uniquely American concert music.

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Musical Examples:

• Gershwin and the Tin-Pan-Alley Tradition--"Swanee" (Al Jolson)
• Gershwin Plays Gershwin: Three Preludes for Piano, No. 1
• Concerto in F-Third Movement (Paul Whiteman's Orchestra)
• Gershwin the Opera Composer: "It Ain't Necessarily So" from Porgy and Bess (Paul Robeson)
• Gershwin and the Popular Song: "I Got Rhythm" (Kate Smith)
• Concerto in F-Third Movement (Paul Whiteman's Orchestra)
• Gershwin and Jazz: "Fascinating Rhythm" (Sarah Vaughan)
• Concerto in F-Third Movement (Orchestral Version)

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Works:

• Orchestral works, including Rhapsody in Blue (1924, for piano and jazz orchestra); Concerto in F (1925); and a tone poem, An American in Paris (1928)
• Piano music, including Three Preludes (1927)
• More than 30 stage works, including Lady, Be Good! (1924), Strike Up the Band (1927), Girl Crazy (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)
• Songs for films, including Shall We Dance (1937) and A Damsel in Distress (1937); songs for shows by other composers; and individually published songs

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Links:

• Classical Net's George Gershwin Page
• The Official George and Ira Gershwin Web Site

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