The Inter-War Years: George Gershwin

George Gershwin 

Born 1898, Brooklyn, New York

Died 1937, Hollywood, California

George Gershwin was an American composer of musicals, films, jazz and classical music, and was a virtuoso pianist. He received his first serious piano instruction from the age of fourteen from Charles Hambitzer who introduced and taught to him the works of the great classical composers, and who saw a future of greatness for his student. He also studied composition with Rubin Goldmark (also remembered as the teacher of Aaron Copland), and Henry Cowell. 

Gershwin’s first employment was as a song-plugger (a musician who would demonstrate sheet music as a form of advertising to sell said music) for a music-publishing company called Jerome Remick. This was based in ‘Tin Pan Alley’ a city district of New York where composers and publishers of popular music would conduct their business.

A few years later at age 18, Gershwin worked for Aeolian Company and Standard Music Rolls arranging and recording piano rolls. He produced dozens of rolls, many under pseudonyms. Around this time he was also briefly involved with ‘vaudeville’, a type of talent show comprised of many unrelated acts.

Through the war years, Gershwin collaborated with people including songwriter William Daly, lyricist Buddy DeSylva and his brother Ira Gershwin on various Broadway musicals, musical comedies, and a one-act jazz opera called Blue Monday (regarded as a forerunner to his major work Porgy and Bess).

In the post war years ‘classical’ composers such as Ravel, Stravinsky and Shoenberg had dabbled in jazz composition, with Gershwin doing something similar from the ‘other’ side, a composer known for his popular songs and Broadway shows. Gershwin wanted to bring respectability to jazz, as in the early 1920’s it was still not respected as a musical genre, and was considered limited. He soon composed Rhapsody in Blue for piano and jazz band, and the piano concerto in F a year later.

In the late 20’s and into the 30’s, Gershwin was approached by film studios such as Fox Film Corporation and RKO Pictures to produce film scores. 

In 1935 came Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess. It was widely regarded by critics as another American classic, but was a failure at the box office. It is now however considered part of the standard operatic repertoire, and performed the world over.

Gershwin’s unique style can be neatly summed up:

‘…his orchestral and piano compositions in which he blended, in varying degrees, the techniques and forms of classical music with the stylistic nuances and techniques of popular music and jazz.’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica)