![]() ![]() George Gershwin (named Jacob Gershovitz at his birth September 26, 1898) was the second of four children born to Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russians who had immigrated to New York and married in America. He loved nothing more than parties where he could (and did) monopolize the evening at the piano, playing and singing his own works for the friends who adored him. He never experienced a dry spell or the composer's equivalent of writer's block, and he was equally adept at composing music to which words were added or fitting music to book and lyrics already written, as he did in Porgy and Bess. He was a bundle of energy, a school dropout at fifteen whose wrote the enormously successful Swanee at nineteen, a playboy who rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous of two continents, a natural athlete, a painter of considerable talent, a generous, gregarious man with an ego the size of a ballroom who helped promote the careers of other musicians such as Vernon Duke, Oscar Levant, and Arnold Schoenberg. Gershwin's music was his personal digestion of European, jazz, and black styles, characterized by melodies at once catchy and beautiful, accentuated by wonderfully complex rhythmic patterns. Gershwin represented all this, of course, and so much more: his serious compositions, which confounded the critics at first performances, remain highly popular in the concert repertoire, and his stage and film songs continue to be jazz and vocal standards. George Gershwin! His name conjures memories and nostalgic imaginings of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, flappers, musicals tumbling forth in glorious profusion from his creative, fertile imagination.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |