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Music has long tamed, as well as inflamed, many a boy’s spirit and soul. Here, in a brief account, is the discovery of music by one of America’s greatest composers. We see how music enchanted, infused, and calmed a soul. It straightened out a life and gave our country a gift. It’s a wonderful story. Only one question remains—when he does what he does, is Gershwin playing or working?*
In 1893, the New York Times described the Lower East Side of the city as the “eyesore of New York.” To the patrician editors at the newspaper, that part of the city teemed with Slavic and Jewish immigrants, many of whom spoke no English and had no job, and often crowded in filthy and dangerous tenement buildings, specifically constructed by slumlords to house the mass of foreigners now swelling the city. Two million immigrants of Russian and Jewish background had come to the United States from Russia in the 1890s, many fleeing the threat of pogroms in their native land. But a better life hardly seemed to be the case for what amounted to one-fourth of the city’s population.
But for all the quotidian hardscrabble circumstances that most residents of the Lower East side experienced, the neighborhood could not suppress the enterprising spirit and tireless work ethic of the millions of residents who lived there. One of these residents was Moshe Gershowitz, who had arrived in America in 1890, having lost the address of his uncle, his only contact in America, and whose only meal that first day was bought with his winnings in a card game. Though Gershowitz wasn’t tenement-poor, he was by no means rich, working a succession of dozens of odd jobs when he could find work, and moving his family more than twenty-five times over the years in search of a suitable place to call home after being evicted from the last one.
In 1898, the same year they earned their citizenship, Moshe and his wife, Rose, a fellow immigrant, had their second of four children, Yakob. Although teachers remembered him as “a nice lad—modest and retiring,” Yakob Gershovitz (renamed George Gershwin to assimilate into American culture) was a troublemaking boy more interested in mischief than in music. By Gershwin’s own account, as a youngster roaming the streets of New York “music never really interested me, and I really like to spend my time with the boys, making somewhat of a nuisance of myself in the streets.” He liked to fight, break windows, set fires, and steal food from street vendors. Moshe himself predicted that George would “grow up to be a bum.”
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But one day, young George became entranced.
“I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through Rubenstein’s Melody in F . . . To this day I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself standing outside that arcade on 125th St., standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.”
Gershwin became almost instantly smitten by music. Some time around 1908, he heard a schoolmate’s violin recital of Dvorak’s Humoresque—“a flashing revelation of beauty,” he recalled—and never looked back. That very day, Gershwin, in the pouring rain, raced over to the home of the performer, a boy named Max Rosen, and waited more than an hour for him to come home. Max’s first advice for George was discouraging—he encouraged him to forget about music because he had no real talent. In spite of Rosen’s doubts, Gershwin and Rosen became fast friends, bonding over their mutual love of music. George also began to keep a scrapbook of musical ideas and articles.
A little later, Gershwin began to play the piano whenever he could, mostly banging around on an old player piano at a friend’s home. It is easy to picture a young boy, perhaps scuffed and dirty from playing in the street, earnestly asking to play the keyboard, knowing he must play well, knowing that too much dissonance from his still-clumsy fingers might cause him to lose his precious privileges in a guest’s home. Gershwin’s desire for access to the piano caused him to develop more social graces—courtesy, not overstaying one’s welcome, and punctuality.
In addition, George began running errands for a local piano store in exchange for some secret practice time. Even at a young age, the canvas of roaring, ascendant, hopeful New York became the emotional touchstone for Gershwin’s music. He said, “I was becoming acquainted with that which later I was to interpret—the soul of the American people. Having been born in New York and grown up among New Yorkers, I have heard the voice of that soul. It spoke to me on the streets, in school, at the theater. In the chorus of city sounds I heard it.” This included the nascent sounds of jazz, which had started to emerge from Harlem. George was playing a lot.
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By 1910, the Gershwin family had prospered enough to afford a piano, intending it for George’s brother, Ira, a studied and serious boy, unlike his rabble-rousing brother. But as soon as the piano got into the apartment, eleven-year-old George proceeded to lower the stool and tickle the ivories, to the delight and absolute shock of the entire family. Nobody had known about his musical forays. It was quickly decided that George would become the one taking lessons, “with no argument from me,” remembered Ira.
Soon enough the piano completed George’s life change. “Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad one. It took the piano to tone me down. It made me more serious. I was a changed person six months after I took it up,” he said.
Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, recognized the intoxicating effects of music and Gershwin’s experience mirrored almost exactly what the old Athenian already knew: “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace.”
In spite of George’s talents, the Gershwin parents were generally uninterested in his pursuit. “Whatever I know about music, I’ve wrenched out for myself. I had no parents to stand over me and encourage me in the little tunes I used to make up. No one ever urged me on by telling me that Mozart was a great composer when he was 11,” Gershwin said. His self-motivation is a testament to his determination to become a great musician—a quality inspired by music itself!
Gershwin was undeterred in his enthusiasm and started taking lessons. Around 1913, his teacher, Charles Hambitzer, wrote: “I have a new pupil who will make his mark in music if anybody will. The boy is a genius, without a doubt; he’s just crazy about music and can’t wait until it’s time to take his lesson. No watching the clock for this boy! He wants to go in for the modern stuff, jazz and whatnot. But I’m not going to let him for awhile. I’ll see that he gets a firm foundation in the standard music first.”
At fifteen, Gershwin dropped out of school to be a songwriter full time. He eventually became bored writing popular songs for others and studied several more years with talented teachers.
Although dropping out of school was often a necessity in earlier times, it was classic Gershwin to take up new challenges. “In person my brother was a good deal like his music: vibrant, dynamic, honest, and if I may, charming,” Ira said. “Although most of it was devoted to the piano and his music, it was a continual source of amazement to me that he found time to engage in so many other activities. He was a fine painter, a good golfer, a discerning and courageous art collector, an excellent photographer, a wonderful dancer. George lived fast, moved fast, studied hard, and learned fast.”
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For Gershwin, the ideas of play and work became indistinguishable from each other. Gershwin was completely immersed in his music, so much so that he never married. His sister described him as “lonely inside himself.” His commitment to his craft is admirable, but such fervent devotion can have a downside.
Eventually Gershwin went on to become one of the most respected composers of the twentieth century, known for his compositional techniques and fusion of jazz sounds with classical forms. His 1924 composition Rhapsody in Blue is considered a landmark work, a fitting ode to the struggles and triumphs of early twentieth-century America that Gershwin lived through. The dreamlike yet epic themes of the composition largely come from Gershwin’s own experience in those environs—from the Lower East Side to the most ornate concert halls in the world, Gershwin lived the American dream. Gershwin captured another element of America with his highly original 1935 work Porgy and Bess, an African American love story set in the 1920s in South Carolina. Gershwin described it as “an American folk opera.”
Gershwin later reflected on the link between his music and his country: “True music must repeat the thought and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.”
* This article relies heavily on quotations taken from Howard Pollack, George Gershwin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).