A SONGWRITER AND PIANIST who became an honored composer, George Gershwin (1898–1937) brought a blend of originality and musicianship unique to America’s musical landscape. His success, embracing both popular and classical spheres, has made him a figure well known to posterity. Over the years his biographers, some two dozen strong, have served him well.
Their effort began with scholar Isaac Goldberg’s study of Gershwin’s life and music, published in 1931 on the composer’s thirty-third birthday. Goldberg wrote knowledgeably about a matchlessly talented young pianist and composer whose parents and siblings—especially Ira Gershwin, elder brother and collaborator—played key roles in the author’s portrait of George. In 1973, marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of George’s birth, two consequential biographies appeared. The Gershwins by Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon—a scholar and a pianist, respectively—appeared in a coffee-table-book format, mixing historical narrative, personal comments and recollections, and photographs plus lists of data relevant to the authors’ research. Both men knew Ira Gershwin first-hand, and their story was grounded in what he could reveal to them. George, who had died in 1937, is portrayed here within America’s culture of artistry and entertainment, and a number of the Gershwins’ friends and contemporaries are quoted generously. Another book from that anniversary, The Gershwin Years, by Edward Jablonski and Lawrence Stewart, a biographer and an academic collaborator, also relied heavily on the accumulation of material in Ira Gershwin’s Beverly Hills abode. Their book, too, was filled generously with pictures and facsimiles of documents. More recently, by 2005 musicologist Howard Pollack had researched George Gershwin: His Life and Work rigorously, producing a singular account of a prominent American composer’s music and its history, and of his artistic accomplishments. Pollack’s impressive tome covers its subject’s work in detail, while mostly steering clear of the life Gershwin led as a force in America’s cultural landscape.
These books stand as a substantial core in a roster of biographies with varied qualities. Thanks in part to them, and to the efforts of other writers, Gershwin’s achievements are well known today. Most of all, the verve and panache of his music has won a place for it in the world’s soundscape. But what justifies the appearance of a new Gershwin biography now, eighty-two years after his death? The answer lies in the perspective of the story told here: an academic scholar’s account of Gershwin’s life in music during the composer’s own time.
Who is that author, and how did this book come to be written?
THE AUTHOR of Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music has specialized in the study of America’s music. Growing up in Detroit in a family that encouraged piano lessons, and where public schools offered instrumental instruction and organized ensembles, I spent much of my youth making music. Though awkward at the keyboard, I took lessons for several years from a piano teacher whose tutelege, grounded in European masters from Bach to Schumann, guided me through the variety and challenge of a pianistic zone that my technique could negotiate, more or less. As a saxophonist in bands and orchestras, too, I played pieces ranging from marches and dance music to classical overtures and tone poems. During those years, I also sang in school choruses and a church choir: groups where singers—sopranos aside—learn the satisfactions of making harmony. At the same time, thanks to the phonograph, I learned that jazz was the music I was most drawn to hear and to perform. Playing sax for several years with friends in a jazz-based quintet opened the door for me to the art of improvising. And thanks to a diligent leader who fashioned an infrastructure for us, we played for dances and other functions for pay. In retrospect, it could be said that my youthful years were lived to a soundtrack of music from Bach to Brubeck: an aural spectrum rich in moments that could bring a tickle to the spine and a lump to the throat.
I began college in 1953 with engineering in my sights to prepare for a life in the family’s foundry business. But by the second year, stepping up my listening, and finding plenty of music-making on the University of Michigan campus, I discovered plenty to engage with, especially classical concert-going. Soon my saxes—alto and tenor—were consigned to the closet, for Ann Arbor already had enough decent sax players to handle the work available. (In those days jazz music was verboten in the halls of the university’s School of Music.)
By my third year in college I knew I was a musician at heart, if far from a skilled maker of music. So I looked into a transfer to the School of Music. I learned that the curricula most appealing to me were for budding composers and performers, neither of whose skills fit my capacities. That year found me accepting an invitation to conduct a group of friends in a choral competition, but the university offered no program in conducting. A course of study in music literature, history, and criticism was also described in the catalogue. That approach struck a note appealing to a reader of books about the composers and the music that I was learning to love. But the program gave no hint of a postgraduate future. And with three siblings in the Crawford family to be schooled after me, that option wouldn’t fly. Thus the field of music education, training music teachers for elementary and high schools, proved to be my sole sensible option. That curriculum included two years of courses in both music history and music theory, plus participation in an ensemble, but little else that intrigued me. Nevertheless, I’d never been schooled in either of the “core” subjects required, and the music education program would lead to a job. So I applied to transfer from Engineering to the School of Music and was accepted as a music education major.
By the time I won a bachelor’s degree in music ed, followed by a master’s in music literature, history, and criticism in 1959, I had figured out that my future lay in a field called musicology: the scholarly and historical study of music. The Michigan graduate school offered both human and institutional assets in that field that enabled me to find a course to a future that I never could have anticipated.
AMONG THE TEACHERS in the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School were two scholars, both inveterate lovers of music, whose varied approaches left me with enough freedom to lead to an unorthodox path. Prof. Hans T. David, German-born and -educated, and known for his writings on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, brought to his students a deep understanding of Western music history from the Renaissance through the time of Haydn and Mozart. In seminars, leading us through the workings of master composers, he preached that the quality of our musical knowledge would depend on our command of language, both oral and written. Professor David’s English, not his mother tongue, was clear, nimble, and unpretentious. And the literary models he recommended to his students—the King James Version of the Bible, and the New Yorker magazine—urged us to steer our written voices toward economy, power, and grace rather than academic formality. (The first paper I wrote for Professsor David earned a B-minus, with copious comments in green ink citing lapses in the writer’s self-scrutiny.)
I also had the good fortune to work with Prof. H. Wiley Hitchcock of the School of Music. A veteran of World War II and an accomplished musician, Hitchcock dispensed clear, learned, and often inspired teaching. His research centered on French and Italian Baroque vocal music. The courses he taught centered on realms of Western music history outside the core of the school’s curriculum: music of the medieval and Renaissance eras, twentieth-century classical music, and a one-semester survey of music in the United States. Beyond the scope of his classroom assignments, Professor Hitchcock also convened an informal group of students (the “Camerata”), who gathered to sing and play, for our own pleasure and edification, music from lesser-known repertories, from the 1500s to the present.
Beyond life-changing encounters with Professors David and Hitchcock, the environment I discovered at Michigan included an asset of another kind: one that opened for me an unexpected door in the hall of musicology. The William L. Clements Library, a scholarly hideaway devoted to early Americana, had been built on the campus in 1923, and by the latter 1950s had collected a substantial amount of printed musical material and music. Much of that material pertained to American Protestant sacred music-making, grounded in British practices of congregational singing.
To explain: by the 1760s books of psalm and hymn tunes were being compiled and printed in North America’s British colonies, chiefly for the use of “singing schools.” These gatherings, led by “singing masters,” taught fundamental vocal technique and introduced the “scholars” to musical notation: both skills put to use in the worship of God. By 1770 tunebooks from local presses were adding to the British repertory fresh psalm and hymn tunes composed by local musicians, most notably William Billings, a Boston tanner by trade. The Clements Library’s shelves, I soon discovered, held dozens of American tunebooks of eighteenth-century vintage.
As a student drawn to choral conducting—a master’s “thesis” I wrote had centered on Handel’s oratorios—I’d given little thought to what in that realm might be the subject of the Ph.D. dissertation I would need to write. But at this moment a message from Professor Hitchcock reported that the Clements Library had recently acquired a sizable collection of documents pertaining to an American musician: Andrew Law, a singing master from Connecticut. Figuring that it might interest me, he suggested that I check out the new acquisition.
What I discovered on my visit to the Clements manuscript reading room were hundreds of letters, written to and by Andrew Law (1749–1821), a prolific singing master of the latter 1700s and early 1800s. Not a composer himself, Law had taught choral singing and compiled sacred tunebooks to serve classes of singers that he had assembled. He was a devout Christian and an educated man (Rhode Island College, Class of 1775) who had devoted his life, I learned, to peddling his wares as he taught the art of singing sacred music from the printed page.
During my academic life so far I had felt no particular inclination to study American music as a field distinct from the legacy of European music-making, where the roots of musicology lay. Nor did music as plain as the New Englanders’ psalm and hymn tunes hold particular artistic attraction for me. But the Clements Library’s Andrew Law Papers, I realized, comprised a vast collection of materials documenting a career carried on in a historic American domain ripe for musicological study. Law’s correspondence, memorabilia, and printed output held the key to observing an “early” American musician at work in a tradition whose norms and accomplishments, I was learning, had won only meager scrutiny from scholars.
Thus Professor Hitchcock’s heads-up message marked a decisive turn in my academic path: the moment when a scholar-in-the-making chooses the subject of his or her Ph.D. dissertation. By now a married man with a family to feed, and feeling lucky to have encountered the Law Papers on local turf, I sensed after a week or so in the Clements Library’s archive that the musical life and output of Andrew Law, Connecticut singing master, could be the subject of my dissertation.
Reflecting more than half a century later on how I came to be a musicological Americanist—a breed rare in 1961—I’ve come across a statement that embodies my process’s faith in a blend of luck and intuition. The statement is said to have emerged from the brain of a professional athlete: Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, a nonpareil catcher for the New York Yankees baseball team during the post–World War II era. Over the years, Berra won a reputation as a sage of sorts: a maker of remarks you can’t forget. (One example was the plaintive question he posed about the situation of a batter preparing to face a hard-throwing pitcher: “How can I think and hit at the same time?”) Recalling the confidence I had felt during my first days with the Andrew Law Papers in the summer of 1961, I remembered that Berra had also voiced a faux axiom guaranteed to draw a smile and a shrug from a fan like me, whenever I thought about the academic choice I had made so cavalierly. But nowadays, when I recall the snap decision that might then have seemed to turn me away from the artistic riches of my chosen discipline’s core in Europe, I’ve come to grasp the spirit of that professional about-face by channeling another nostrum from the arsenal of Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
WORK ON MY PH.D. dissertation began with gathering information in the Law Papers’ documents, while serving as a teaching assistant in courses taught by School of Music faculty. By 1963 I’d made my way through the Law manuscripts, integrated his printed material into the chronology I was assembling, and begun to write the story of Andrew Law’s life and work. Professor David had declined an invitation to serve on my dissertation committee, but his advice that savoir-faire as a writer would enhance a scholar’s authority had made me a believer. And Professor Hitchcock had moved eastward by then, settling in eventually at the City University of New York, to become a leading figure in the study of American music. I was hired to teach music history classes for undergraduates in the School of Music, and I also took over Hitchcock’s American music class. My dissertation on Andrew Law was completed by the summer of 1965.
During that year a political decision was made in Washington, D.C., that proved fortunate for the course I was taking. The U.S. Congress passed legislation enacted “to promote progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts in the United States.” To meet this goal two grant-making agencies were created: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The latter’s enrichment of financial support for scholarly work in the humanities proved also to be an investment in the study of music in America, and in American music. Between 1965 and the Bicentennial of the American Revolution in 1976, interest in American music rose steadily in the field of musicology, as both experienced scholars and new ones found academic opportunity in fresh forays into music made in the United States. The notion of funding for such ventures now had a government agency on its side. Indeed, I wondered at the time if that shift in attitude had anything to do with Northwestern University Press’s publication of my dissertation as Andrew Law: American Psalmodist (1968).
As my research on Protestant church music during the 1700s and early 1800s continued, that field and other strains of early American music-making were winning more attention from graduate students. And the years approaching the Bicentennial celebration in 1976 brought a surge of scholarly interest to the study of American composers, past and present.
Dominant among composers “discovered” in this moment was Charles Ives. Born in 1874 in Connecticut, schooled in composition at Yale College, and successful as a businessman who had fashioned, more or less in obscurity, a flow of compositions in a uniquely American style, his music now came to the fore. As Ives’s own hundredth birthday drew nigh, he was studied and lauded as an idiosyncratic and luminary figure: a radical maker of American artistry.
A fresh generation of American composers followed. Born around the turn of a new century, many among them sought training in Europe, finding varied ways to sustain careers on America’s musical scene when they returned. As twentieth-century artists, they were touched by varied manifestations of modernism. Beyond composing and tending to their musical output, these artists also exercised their talents as performers; some took on varied teaching opportunities, while others wrote and lectured about their music and that of their contemporaries. As for vernacular music outside the church, musicologically trained scholars and students came forward who performed or fancied band music, blues music, jazz music, rock and roll, or other varied emanations of this country’s entertainment industry. For them, America was now offering a near-boundless arena in which scholarly curiosity was free to roam.
GEORGE GERSHWIN, born in New York in 1898, belonged to that generation: a composer whose command of the realm of melody, success in popular songwriting, assimilation of a jazz-based idiom from black pianistic colleagues, and passion for learning about his art enabled him to stand apart from his contemporaries. Bringing to his work a compositional voice appealing to listeners on both sides of the purported classical/popular divide, Gershwin was a unique figure on the Amrican scene. But as the teacher of a one-semester course on America’s music, I was slow to perceive him as a major figure in that history. I believed in his talent, for jazz musicians, whose imagination and skills I esteemed, included Gershwin songs in their repertory of “standards.” Which I took to mean that he had composed melodies and harmonic plans good enough to invite solo improvisors and arrangers to invent their own versions of his music. Nevertheless, and for whatever reason, I was slow to warm up to his “classical” triumphs: the Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925), and Porgy and Bess (1935).
The incident that brought Gershwin into my purview in 1972 was a strike by African American students at the University of Michigan, insisting that their numbers on campus be boosted substantially. Faculty members sought ways to support their cause. And the School of Music faculty decided to convene a panel on the subject of black American music. I volunteered to participate, but time was short. As I looked for a subject it occurred to me that Porgy and Bess, America’s best-known opera, was a tale about African Americans, and sung by them. What did it mean, I wondered, that an acclaimed folk opera about black people was the work of a white Southern novelist, Dubose Heyward, and a white Jewish songwriter from New York, George Gershwin?
As noted, time was short, and a title for my talk was needed. Learning that questions had been raised in the past about the legitimacy of white creators of black characters in studies of Porgy and Bess, I concocted a flashy title referring to one of the opera’s most famous songs. Hinting (unjustifiedly) that racial argument would loom large in my remarks, though I had yet to think that matter through, I decided to title my talk “It Ain’t Necessarily Soul: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as Symbol.” It was no problem to find enough information about the opera to justify my place on the panel, for Porgy and Bess offers compelling stories on many levels. And the talk I gave was well enough received. In fact, requests for encore readings followed, which I accepted, but only after further research had strengthened my grasp of the subject.
This event taught me that, unlike my experience with early American psalmody, if George Gershwin was announced as the subject of an academic talk, an audience was likely to appear, primed for enjoyment. Nevertheless, through the rest of the 1970s and 1980s the core of my scholarly effort continued to abide in the fields of early New England sacred music. That endeavor culminated in an 798-page tome—Early American Sacred Imprints (1698–1810): A Bibliography, by Allen P. Britton, Irving Lowens, and Richard Crawford (Worcester, MA, 1990)—plus an edition of the 101 favorite psalm and hymn tunes of that era. But once the music-making of George Gershwin had visited my atelier, so to speak, I discovered that the more I listened, and the more I learned about him and his music, the greater the respect I gained for the public’s opinion of both. And I was being asked for more articles related to him, including the George Gershwin entry in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1987).
In 1985, delivering a series of six Bloch Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley under the heading The American Musical Landscape, I decided to assign one of those lectures to Gershwin. To outline the historical sweep from the 1700s into the 1900s, I had devoted four of those lectures to the work of American composers prominent in their time: in the 1700s William Billings; in the 1800s George Frederick Root; and in the 1900s Duke Ellington, before closing the series with a song by Gershwin. The song I chose, “I Got Rhythm,” from the Broadway musical comedy Girl Crazy (1930), had come to be a favorite of jazz musicians, who had also transformed it into a thirty-two-bar improvisatory structure (“Rhythm Changes”), minus the Gershwin brothers’ words and melody. When the Bloch Lectures appeared in print as The American Musical Landscape (1992), the piece on George Gershwin’s music-making served as the book’s last chapter. Nine years later, initiated by the publisher, America’s Musical Life: A History (2001), appeared in print, enabling me to chronicle in forty chapters what I had learned about five centuries of music-making in America.
IN 2003 I retired from the classroom, having decided, in the wake of writing a historical panorama, that my next project would center on George Gershwin, the American composer whose life in music had come to intrigue me the most. Perhaps the notion of adding another Gershwin biography to a roster already well served would make that choice seem redundant. But I figured that the breadth of my experience of America’s music would help to guide me, once I knew more about what had made my subject’s musical talents tick. So, as with Andrew Law decades ago, I compiled a chronology of George Gershwin’s life and work. Reporting the full contents of the documents available—letters and notes, articles and reviews, contracts and other written items—my chronology, together with evidence from biographies already accessible, provided a more than ample supply of data to mull over as I studied and savored the sound of Gershwin’s music.
The making of the chronology led me to understand that, in the course of telling the story of George Gershwin’s life in music-making, my assignment would center on tracing the path he had discovered to claim his unique place on the Western world’s musical stage. How had Gershwin marshaled his talents to compose music so successful at engaging both “the many and the few”?
WHILE COMPLETING this Introduction I grew increasingly mindful of a source that, had I recognized its import earlier, might have brought the theme of collaboration to the surface of my story more emphatically. That source, helpful even so, had been given to me as a gift during the 1960s. I had visited it during the 1980s for reference. But I’d found no reason to dig further into its contents then; for, light on narrrative, it’s an anthology of versified lyrics. More specifically, Lyrics on Several Occasions (1959) consists of a selection of song lyrics, with the author’s comments about each one. And who was the author? The title page, cast in the antique mode of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain, reveals that fact, and a good deal more, if the reader takes the time to pay attention:
A Selection of Stage & Screen Lyrics Written for Sundry Situations; And Now Arranged in Arbitrary Categories. To Which Have Been Added Many Informative Annotations & Disquisitions On Their Why & Wherefore, Their Whom-For, Their How; And Matters Associative.
By IRA GERSHWIN GENT.
Here, then, was a book by Ira Gershwin about his own work, written long after the death of George, who had composed much of the music for which Ira had written the words. In fact, I had already quoted Ira’s book in The American Musical Landscape, explaining how the song “I Got Rhythm” had been made. (In that entry Ira described the difficulty he’d faced while seeking the best rhyme scheme for a harmonized melody fashioned by George. And he was able to cite more than one of the attempts he had tried out and then abandoned.) As a Gershwin biographer-to-be by 2003, I knew that a figure as famous as George would require thorough and meticulous research, which my chronology would underlie. But the heart of a biography depends, too, on how effectively the subject’s persona can be revealed. And on that front I figured that it would be impossible to find a witness of George Gershwin’s talent and modus operandi more observant and reliable than Ira Gershwin, his elder brother and regular collaborator.
Lyrics on Many Occasions, the only book Ira Gershwin ever wrote, was published twenty-two years after the death of George, who had composed the music for sixty-nine of the 104 songs that Ira had chosen. (Other composers who worked with Ira after George died include Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Jerome Kern, Harry Warren, and Kurt Weill.) After a three-page Foreword announcing the half-dozen subjects to be represented comes the table of contents. Here the titles of the songs are listed, divided into groups according to their subject matter. The 104 entries follow, with full texts of the numbers the author has written. Each is then introduced by its associations: the show in which the song first appeared and its date, its composer, the number’s style or tempo direction, and the names of the original performers, plus a line or two indicating the background or situation in which the number is sung. Almost all the entries conclude with data pertaining to the song, ranging from a few lines to as many as three or four pages. Collectively, Ira’s book amounts to a storehouse of insightful essays, each with its own emphasis and flavor, and showing a lyricist at work with his brother, or with one of five other leading composers.
Ira’s Foreword comes to an end with a graceful postscript, marking with a gentle twist the gap between his craft and that of a poet:
P.S. Since most of the lyrics in this lodgment were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.
And the text concludes, in Ira’s one-page Afterword, with songful forces competing with each other. In fact, this definition has been borrowed from the Encyclopedia Britannica, for Ira had discovered “no better way to conclude what much of his book has been about”:
SONG is the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third. The relation and balance of the two arts is a problem that has to be resolved anew in every song that is composed.
Finally, written from the heart as well as the brain, the last two paragraphs of Ira’s text, revisiting his own collaboration with DuBose Heyward on numbers for Porgy and Bess, dwell on Ira’s awe for George’s preternatural talents. “These many years,” he writes, “and I can still shake my head in wonder at the reservoir of musical inventiveness, resourcefulness, and craftsmanship George could dip into.”
He takes two simple quatrains of DuBose’s, studies the lines, and in a little while a lullaby called “Summertime” emerges—delicate and wistful, yet destined to be sung over and over again.
And later on, “out of the libretto’s dialogue,” he continues, George “takes Bess’s straight, unrhymed speech” and finds music that enables him to transform these words into “a rhythmic aria.”
Ira Gershwin’s last paragraph revisits the standard layman’s query about whether, in any given song, the words or the music came first. Limiting that question’s relevance to the experience of the Gershwin brothers, here, minus the examples he cited, is Ira’s reply:
If I have stumbled into the field of the musicologist without being a musician, all I’m trying to say is that George could be as original and distinctive when musicalizing words . . . as when composing music which later will require words. . . . Regardless of which procedure was used, the resultant compositions sang so naturally that I doubt if any listener, lacking the mentions in this note, could tell which came first—the words or the music.
In describing the work of George, the exacting wordsmith Ira avoids the word “genius.” But his testimony offers a revelation that his brother and collaborator owned a genius for breathing life, as well as sound, into the words that Ira had chosen.