The Gershwins - when American music found a voice of its own

From left: Oscar Fried, conductor; Eva Gauthier, singer; Maurice Ravel at piano; Manoah Leide-Tedesco, composer-conductor; George Gershwin

New York, 1928. Wiki

Israel Ira Gershowitz (1896-1983) and brother Jacob George (1898-1937) were born in New York. Their parents, Moishe and Rose from Odessa, at first changed their surname to Gershvin, then Gershwin. The parents had bought a piano for lessons for Ira, but it was George who spent more time playing it. Younger sister Frances was the first sibling to make a living through her musical tal­ents and youngest brother Arthur also became a composer of songs, musicals and piano works.

George learned Debussy, Liszt and Chopin for four years of formal ed­uc­ation; the rest of his education was picked up in the concert halls of Russian composers, at Broadway revues, in the Yiddish theatres and in Harlem clubs. Note the emotion­al clarinet solo that opened Rhapsody in Blue and in the Hebraic tinge of Ger­shwin melodies eg The Man I Love and Summertime.

The young lads frequented the Yiddish theatres in New York’s Lower East Side. In 1915, a Yiddish Theatre star in­vited George Gershwin and composer Sholem Secunda to cooperate on a Yid­dish op­er­et­ta but it didn’t happen. Later, when he was already a successful popular song writer, George signed a con­tr­act with the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera based on Ansky's Dybbuk. And he planned studying Jewish music professionally in Europe.

By 1916 George began composing and demonstrating songs in Tin Pan Alley in Manhatten. By 1921 Ira also became involved in the music business, being signed up to write the music for his next show, Two Little Girls in Blue, produced by Abraham Erlanger. Luckily Ira’s lyrics were well received.

  

Ira writing lyrics and George writing music

Early 1930s, Weiner

The brothers loved the jazz clubs in Harlem, listening to the pianists and feeling the freedom of expression that jazz music allowed. They’d also heard the freedom that a cantor in synagogue had, and created their new, integrated American sound. In c1921 George and Ira had written a tune they frequently sang and played at parties. Called Mischa, Yascha, Toscha, Sascha, it celebrated that names of 4 famous Russian Jewish violinists: Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, Tos­cha Seidel and Sascha Jacobsen.

The parents’ musical and cultural inf­l­uence on the brothers remain­ed strong. So if jazz rhythm drove George's music, the composer's Jewish Russian influenced the melodic contours and orchestral colours of his work. In effect, Gershwin bridged jazz of the New World and Yiddish melody of the Old World in a music that epitomised its era. George's music and Ira's lyrics seemed to crystallise the Roaring '20s and '30s era when American music found a voice of its own, via the jazz, theatrical and symphonic worlds.

It was not until 1924 that Ira and George Gershwin got together to write the music for their first Broadway hit Lady, Be Good! Soon their combined talents became one of the most influential for­ces in the history of American Musical Theatre critics; it was then that the American musical found its native idiom. They worked with play­wrights George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and help­ed raise popular musical theatre to a new level.

The play Primrose (1924), took Gershwin to Britain. He sailed the Atlantic along with 7 finished tunes, written in the style of classic Edwardian romps. George not only wrote the music, he also orchestrated three tunes himself. Primrose saw 255 perf­orm­ances in London’s West End and more in Melb­ourne and Sydney. But the great American comp­oser's show never appeared in the USA. Ditto some of George’s other early Broadway shows; many parts of Half Past Eight (1918), Dangerous Maid (1921), Our Nell (1922) and The Rainbow (1923) dis­app­eared.

These newly honed orchestration skills helped George write pieces that eventually cemented his place of fame. In the 1920s he moved to Paris to study with composer Nadia Boul­anger, and it was there he wrote his ode to the city An Am­er­ican in Paris 1924.

After returning to New York, the brothers co-wrote the music for many shows and films, including The Man I Love, Fascinating Rhythm (1924), Someone to Watch Over Me (1926), I Got Rhythm (1930) and They Can’t Take That Away from Me (1931). The brothers collab­orated on the score for the Broadway show, Of Thee I Sing (1931).

George & Ira wrote Porgy and Bess with DuBose Heyward, incl the aria Summertime (1934). Init­ial­ly a commercial fail­ure when it was first performed in Bos­ton in Sept 1935, Porgy and Bess became one of the most important inter-war American operas. George could­n’t expect the Metropolitan Opera to stage Porgy and Bess, given how difficult it was to assemble a new cast of black singers. So the opera opened on Broadway instead. 

Todd Duncan as Porgy; Anne Brown as Bess
debut at Alvin Theatre, on Broadway, 1935.

 George’s work cleverly mixed elements of jazz and African‐American spirit­ual music from the south. He actually created a truly Amer­ic­an sound! George wrote continuously, and even when he moved to Holly­wood in 1936, he composed film scores. George kept working all his very short life, but died from a brain tumour in 1937 at 38.

Following George’s death, Ira stopped writing for 3 years. He may have been depressed, but he eventually teamed up with accomp­lished composers like Jerome Kern (Cov­er Girl) and Kurt Weill (Lady in the Dark). And he con­tinued to write the lyrics for film scores and Broadway shows.

Ira’s book, Lyrics on Several Occasions 1959, was a collection of his lyrics, accomp­anied by his annot­at­ions. Plus Ira recorded the det­ails of his broth­er’s legacy, consigned to the Library of Congress. Ira died in 1983. 

Modern Times
In 1982 crates holding handwritten scores, linked to George Gershwin etc, were discov­er­ed in a New Jersey warehouse. Many of the manu­scripts contained lost or unpublished songs that had not been performed in decades, including c70 Gershwin tunes. And there was a gala concert held at Carnegie Hall to celebrate the Ira’s centennial in Dec 1996.

You may like to read Edward Jablonski’s book Gershwin: A Biography, 1988