George Gershwin

An American Composer Who is Writing Notable Music in the Jazz Idiom

CARL VAN VECHTEN

I CANNOT recall the time when I did not feel an instinctive interest in American popular music. Before I could play a note on the piano I was humming or whistling such tunes as Down Went McGinty and The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. A little later, the execrable, sentimental ballads of the early nineties. Two Little Girls in Blue, After the Bally and Daisy Bell were tried on my piano along with two-hand arrangements of the symphonies of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. When At a Georgia Campmeeting and Whistling Rufus appeared in 1899, 1 appreciated this indication of a modest advance in the public taste. It is worthy of note that Debussy's sensibility to ragtime progressed no farther. His Golliwogg's Cakewalk is an exact replica of the nai've rhythmic form employed in these pieces.

On the other hand, I gave a real welcome to Cole and Johnson's Under the Bamboo Tree, which I admire to this day. I further enjoyed the primeval syncopations of Bill Bailey, Ain't It a Shame?, Ma Blushin' Rosie, All Coons Look Alike to Me, When You Ain't Got No Money You Needn't Come Around, Hiawatha, and Bon-Bon Buddy, but when I heard Alexander's Ragtime Band (1911) I shouted.

HERE, at last, was real American music, music of such vitality that it made the Grieg-Schumann-Wagner dilutions of MacDowell sound a little thin, and the saccharine bars of Narcissus and Ophelia, so much pseudoChaminade concocted in an American backparlour, while it completely routed the socalled art music of the professors. At the time, however, I was serving as assistant to Richard Aldrich, the music critic of the New York Times. In other words, I was a person of no importance whatever. Had I spoken, I should not have been heard.

Several years later, however, Irving Berlin's masterpiece having been succeeded by other popular airs worthy of attention, such as Everybody's Doing It, The Gaby Glide, Ragging the Scale, and Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, I wrote a paper, entitled The Great American Composer, published in Vanity Fair for April 1917, in which I outlined the reasons for my belief that it was out of American popular music that American art music would grow, just as the idiosyncratic national .me of so much Biuropean art music has evolved from the national folksong. Nearly seven years passed before my prophecy was realized, but on February 12, 1924, a date which many of us will remember henceforth as commemorative of another event of importance besides the birth of our most famous president, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was performed for the first time by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra with the composer at the piano.

There is, however, an historical prelude to the Rhapsody. In the spring of 1923, Eva Gauthier, indefatigable in her search for novelties, asked me to suggest additions to her autumn program. "Why not a group of American songs?" I urged. Her face betrayed her lack of interest. "Jazz," I particularized. Her expression brightened. Meeting this singer again in September, on her return from Paris, she informed me that Maurice Ravel had offered her the same sapient advice. She had, indeed, determined to adopt the idea and requested me to recommend a musician who might serve as her accompanist and guide in this venture. But one name fell from my lips, that of George Gershwin, whose compositions I admired and with whose skill as a pianist I was acquainted. The experiment was eventually made, Mmc. Gauthier singing the jazz group on her program between a cluster of songs by Paul Hindemith and Bela Bartok on the one hand, and an air from Schonberg's Gurrelieder on the other. This recital, given at Town Hall on November 1, 1923, marked George Gershwin's initial appearance as a performer on the serious concert stage.

The occasion did not pass uncelebrated. Newspapers and magazines commented at length on the phenomenon. Jazz, at last, it seemed, had come into its own. Presently, Paul Whiteman, weary of conducting for dancers more ready to appreciate a rigid tempo than variety in orchestration or the superlative tone quality of his band, had a pendent inspiration: he would give a concert to demonstrate the growth that jazz had made under ears too careless and indolent to distinguish the fine scoring and the intricate harmonic and rhvthmic features of the new music from the haphazard, improvised performances of a few years earlier. His second idea was even more noteworthy: he commissioned George Gershwin to write a composition to be included in his first concert program.

As I had been out of the city when Mme. Gauthier gave her revolutionary recital, she very kindly invited me, late in January 1924, to hear a rehearsal of the same program in preparation for her Boston concert. It was at this rehearsal that Gershwin informed me of Whiteman's plan and added, in rather an offhand manner, that he had decided to compose a concerto in fantasia form for piano and jazz band which he proposed to call Rhapsody in Blue. On that day, about four weeks before the date the composition was actually produced, he had only made a few preliminary sketches; he had not yet even found the now famous andantino theme! He played for me, however, the jazz theme announced by full orchestra, accompanied by figurations on the piano, and the ingenious passage, not thematic, which ushers in the finale (omitted from the phonograph record). At the first rehearsal of the program for the concert, the score was not yet ready. At the second rehearsal Gershwin played the Rhapsody twice with the band on a very bad piano. Nevertheless, after hearing that rehearsal, I never entertained a single doubt but that this young man of twenty-five (he was born in Brooklyn, September 26, 1898) had written the very finest piece of serious music that had ever come out of America; moreover, that he had composed the most effective concerto for piano that anybody had written since Tchaikovsky's B flat minor.

ENTHUSIASM rewarded the first performance of the Rhapsody, but general and adequate appreciation of the glamour and vitality of the composition, exhibiting, as it does, a puissant melodic gift in combination with a talent for the invention of striking rhythms and a felicity in the arrangement of form, did not come so rapidly, perhaps, as a ready admiration for the composer's obviously rare skill as pianist. After Gershwin had performed the concerto several times in New York and other cities (Whiteman undertook a preliminary tour with his organization during the spring of 1924), recognition of its superior qualities became more widely diffused; the abridged phonograph disk (even both sides of a twelve-inch disk offer insufficient surface to record the piece in its entirety) added to its fame; and the publication of the score, arranged for two pianos, in December, sealed its triumph. It has since been performed, although seldom with the composer at the piano, at nearly every concert given by the Whiteman Orchestra. Two causes have interfered with more general performances: first, the fact that the work is scored for a jazz band; second, the fact that the piano part is not only of transcendent difficulty but also demands a pianist who understands the spirit of jazz. I have no doubt whatever but that so soon as an arrangement is made for symphony orchestra the Rhapsody will become a part of the repertory of any pianist who can play it. Quite possibly, the work may have its flaws; so, on the other hand, has Tristan und Isolde.

Continued on page 78

Continued, from page 40

The story of this young man's career is worthy of attention. Born in Brooklyn, George Gershwin was brought up on Grand Street in Manhattan. Until he arrived at the age of thirteen he never even thought about music. Shortly after his thirteenth birthday his mother bought a piano, for no other reason than because her sister-in-law had bought one and it seemed a proper thing to do. Once the piano was installed, somebody had to learn to play it and young George was elected. After he had received four months' lessons he already performed sufficiently well so that one of his father's friends advised that he be sent to Europe to study. This advice, fortunately, was not followed. Three neighbourhood teachers, in turn, directed the course of his fingers. Then, by a fortuitous accident, he fell into the hands of a man who gave him his first real reverence for music. This was Charles Hambitzer from whom he received his first lessons in harmony. He was working on the Chopin preludes when this teacher died. Gershwin was as yet unfamiliar with the work of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, or Brahms. A little later, he studied harmony with Edward Kilyeni, but the full course of his instruction with his several teachers occupied less than four years. In the meantime, George had become acquainted with Max Rosen, for whose playing he felt a deep admiration, but Rosen offered him no encouragement. "You will never become a musician. Give up the idea," was the violinist's candid advice.

Very early in his piano lessons he began to dabble in composition. A banal Tango appears to be the earliest preserved example. Ragging the Trdumerei, in 4-4 time, is written down in 2-4 and runs to twenty-one mediocre bars. At this same period—he was about fifteen—he started a song which began in F and wandered into G, from which region George found himself utterly unable to rescue it.

At the age of sixteen, George went to work as a song plugger for Remick, the music publisher, sometimes playing all day for vaudeville acts and until two or three in the morning at cafes. His remuneration was fifteen dollars a week. This irksome routine might have ruined his fingers for future concert playing but Charles Hambitzer had instructed him to play with a "loose wrist," a piece of advice which saved him his "touch". As a matter of fact, this engagement did him a real service inasmuch as it taught him to transpose, no two performers ever being able to negotiate a song in the same key. Further vagaries of fortune led him to accept an opportunity to play the piano for the chorus rehearsals of Ned Wayburn's Miss 1917. It was here that he began to develop variety in his accompaniments, playing each repetition of a refrain in a different manner, a procedure which won encouragement from his employer, as it served to keep up the interest of the girls in their monotonous round of steps. It taught George the trick of lending individuality to the accompaniments of his songs. While he was playing for this chorus, Vivienne Segal sang two of his songs at a Sunday night concert at The Century Theatre. Harry Askins, manager of Miss 1917, was so impressed with these tunes that he brought them to the attention of Max Dreyfus of the firm of T. B. Harms who, immediately recognizing the ability of the young musician, put him under contract. Eight months later Gershwin wrote I Was so Young and You Were so Beautiful and found himself launched as the composer of a song hit.

Launched, but not satisfied. It usually happens that a manufacturer of jazz hits goes so far and no farther. Many popular composers are content to languidly pick tunes out with one finger on the piano, while an expert harmonizer sits by ready to s(tep in. It is not even an infrequent^-occurrence for a man's first success in this field to be his last. Gershw'in apparently determined not only to hold on to his success but to improve upon it. His friends and business associates advised him not to study harmony. He answered them by working with Rubin Goldmark from whom, he assures me, he received invaluable suggestions, especially in regard to form. He was warned that the Rhapsody in Blue would kill interest in his lighter music. It has had the opposite effect, as he instinctively felt that it would have.

I first became acquainted with Gershwin's music through his Swanee, written in 1919 for the revue which opened the Capitol Theatre. With I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, written for the fourth of George White's Scandals, I completely capitulated to his amazing talent and nominated him to head my list of jazz composers. In this vein he has added to his fame with the Yankee Doodle Blues, The Nashville Nightingale, Do It Again, I Won't Say I Will, Somebody Loves Me, and the present ubiquitous Fascinating Rhythm.

The time has not come, of course, to appraise the fellow's work. One can only predict his future in terms of his brief past. His career up to date, it will be observed, has been a steady crescendo of interest. What he will do in the future depends on no one but George Gershwin, but it is fairly evident that ample opportunity will be offered him to do many things that he ought not to do. He is unusually prolific in melodic ideas; his gift for rhythmic expression is almost unique; he has a classical sense of form. His gay music throbs with a pulse, a beat, a glamorous vitality rare in the work of any composer, and already he has the power to build up a thrilling climax, as two or three passages in the Rhapsody prove. Even his popular music is never banal. There is always something—if it is only two bars, as is the case in Rose of Madrid—to capture the attention of even a jaded listener. Tenderness and passion are as yet only potential attributes of his published music—it might be stated in passing that these are the two qualities that Stravinsky lacks—but some of Gershwin's finest inspirations have not as yet been either published or publicly performed. It is probable that the production of his twenty-four piano preludes and his tone-poem for symphony orchestra, tentatively entitled Black Belt, will award him a still higher rank in the army of contemporary composers.

Continued on page 84

Continued front page 78

Ernest Newman has remarked, in reference to jazz, that there are no such things as movements, there are only composers. Obviously, quite true. Nevertheless, I am just as certain that the Rhapsody came out of the jazz movement in America as I am that Weber's Der Freischiitz came out of the German folksong. Negro spirituals, Broadway, and jazz are Gershwin's musical god-parents. Whatever he does, or however far he goes in the future, I hope that these influences will beneficently pursue him.