OPERAS: Blue Monday (1-act item in George White's Scandals 1922 but withdrawn after 1 perf. individuality and an appeal which shows no sign of diminishing. As it is, his mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated gives his mus. ( Rhapsody in Blue was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé, but Gershwin himself scored the later works.) He went for lessons to Henry Cowell and Joseph Schillinger, and there can be little doubt that had he lived longer he would have progressed to considerable symphonic achievement. education and lack of grounding in counterpoint, theory, etc. His larger-scale works, melodically remarkable as might be expected, suffer from his haphazard mus. which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it). folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular mus. His songs contain the essence of NY in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-cent. of 1925 was followed by An American in Paris, a second Rhapsody, the Cuban Overture, and in 1935 by the opera Porgy and Bess which is still the only opera by an Amer. From then until the end of his life he produced larger-scale works alongside the songs (many with words by his elder brother Ira (Israel)) he wrote for musicals and, after 1931, films. In 1924 he enjoyed success in a new genre, that of applying jazz idioms to concert works, when his Rhapsody in Blue for pf. His first outstanding ‘hit’ was the song Swanee (1919), which became assoc. For the next 14 years a Gershwin musical was a feature of NY theatrical life. Wrote his first song in 1916 and his first Broadway musical, La La Lucille, in 1919. In 1914 left school to work as pianist and ‘song plugger’ for Remick, a publisher of popular mus. lessons 1913 from Charles Hambitzer later studied theory and harmony with Rubin Goldmark and Edward Kilenyi for whom he wrote a str. Jewish migrants who went to USA c.1893 (family name Gershovitz). Gershwin, George ( b Brooklyn, NY, 1898 d Hollywood, Calif., 1937).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |