A PIANO IN THE HOUSE, AND ELSEWHERE
WHEN GEORGE GERSHWIN first became known to the public, he referred to himself as a native New Yorker. As his fame grew, however, he made it a point to specify Brooklyn, across the East River from the borough of Manhattan. And that is where Jacob Gershwine was born, on September 26, 1898, twenty months after Ira. The family’s Brooklyn address was 242 Snediker Avenue, and sixty years later Ira was able to reach back in memory to that time.1 “We must have lived there . . . two or three years because I was old enough to be aware of the two-story house with trees on each side, and a fenced-in yard where grapes grew; and to remember that until I was five I wore starched dresses and long golden curls. Not sissy, this. My mother told me years later it had been quite the style for little boys.”
Six weeks after George’s birth, Morris left his $35-a-week job in the shoe trade and embarked on a career in business, moving his family back to the Lower East Side as part owner of a Turkish bath at Broome and the Bowery. “We now lived on Christie Street,” Ira continued,
where I went to kindergarten (short pants, no curls), which was most likely in 1901. Then we moved to a flat at Forsyth and Delancey. . . . Several schools later, I found myself uptown in one on 125th Street. The Turkish bath, no bonanza, had been given up by my father and Uncle Harry for a restaurant on Third Avenue near 129th, a block or so from the Harlem River. . . . At the age of nine [1905–06] I was back again at P.S. 20, because the Harlem restaurant had been given up for one on Forsyth, between Hester and Grand Streets.2
When questioned about his own personal history, George would begin with a musical epiphany he had at age six, when the family lived in Harlem. “I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through Rubinstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside that arcade on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, standing there barefoot and in overalls, drinking it all in avidly.”3 Another such moment occurred some years later, while attending Public School 25 on the Lower East Side. In this case, George heard a schoolmate at an assembly—Maxie Rosenzweig, later Max Rosen—play Dvorˇák’s “Humoresque” on the violin. Struck by the beauty of what he had heard, George sought out the young musician, and the boys became friends.4 Before he met Maxie, George thought that “there was something radically wrong with youngsters who went in for music. To scrape away at the fiddle, to wear out one’s fingers on piano keys, was to be a ‘little Maggie,’ a sissy.” 5 By making friends with a violin-playing boy, George was also making room for music in his own consciousness.
These two memories stand out in contrast with the rest of what we can learn about Gershwin’s pre-piano boyhood. Ira, a self-defined introvert who liked to stay home and read, remembered George as his opposite: always outside playing, getting into fights and known to come home with a black eye. Yip Harburg, a schoolmate and lifelong friend of Ira’s, identified ethnic rivalry as a driving force in the lives of youngsters who grew up on the Lower East Side.
When I was about seven, we moved to Eleventh Street and Avenue C, a sort of borderline between the Irish and the Italians that was just becoming Jewish. Among the kids there was plenty of friction. The enmity was supposedly residential—block by block—but we Jews were always aware that the goyim were after us. Since they came in gangs we formed gangs too. We fought the 14th Streeters who were Italian, we fought the Irish—and both of them fought the Jews.
In neighborhoods like these, Yiddish-speaking parents and their English-speaking offspring were likely to drift apart. “The street, not the home, was your life,” Harburg recalled. To be a street kid meant to grow up in an urban world ruled by a sense of danger, and by peer pressure.6 Because of that pressure, boys, at least, were not encouraged to like or take much interest in school.
Both Ira and Harburg remembered the day the new family piano was delivered in 1912—startlingly, George already knew how to play it. In their telling, the change is instantaneous: a street urchin sits down at the piano and is magically transformed into a musical prodigy, like a frog turned into a prince. (George explained that he had been “fooling around” on a player piano at a schoolmate’s house.)7 The surprise for Ira was not just that George could play but that his playing was good enough to sound like vaudeville. Given the importance of this tale in Ira’s memories, it is worth noting that George himself never told any such story.
As soon as the Gershwins had their piano and George had decisively taken it over, a Miss Green, who lived nearby, was engaged as his teacher. Once he had learned what Miss Green had to teach him, he moved on to another neighborhood teacher, and then to yet another.8 At that point, Gershwin crossed paths with a musician named Goldfarb, who impressed him by playing “with great gusto and with a barrel of gestures.” Learning that Goldfarb’s teacher, one Von Zerly, had led operetta and a band in Hungary, Gershwin signed on as Von Zerly’s student, at the “stiff price” of $1.50 an hour. Rather than assigning exercises and little piano pieces, the teacher started him out on excerpts from grand operas; in six months, George was tackling the Overture to William Tell. Whatever their musical delights, arrangements like these were not standard fare for a novice seeking to establish a solid piano technique.9
As 1912 came to an end, the erstwhile street kid was behaving like a true lover of music. George started a scrapbook of articles about musicians that he clipped from newspapers and magazines, and programs from concerts he heard. During the three-month period from December 1912 to March 1913, the fourteen-year-old attended eight concerts in various New York venues, enthusiastically embracing orchestral and chamber works by Beethoven, Handel, Liszt, Mascagni, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Rubinstein, Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Tchaikovsky—Joseph Lhevinne playing the Piano Concerto No. 1—and Wagner, and piano works by Bach/Liszt, Balakirev, Brahms, Chopin, Godowsky, Grieg, Liszt, and Schumann, among others. With music in his ears, Gershwin began to consciously cultivate a habit of intensive listening in his earliest teens. “I listened not only with my ears,” he explained to Goldberg, “but with my nerves, my mind, my heart. I had listened so earnestly that I became saturated with the music. . . . Then I went home and listened in memory. I sat at the piano and repeated the motifs.”10
At this moment, however—most likely late in 1912 or early in 1913—George stood on the brink of another breakthrough. Through Jack Miller, a young pianist who played with a community ensemble called the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra, he began lessons with Miller’s accomplished teacher, Charles Hambitzer. George remembered vividly the first time he played for Hambitzer. “I rubbed my fingers and dived into the Overture to William Tell. Hambitzer said nothing until I had finished. ‘Listen,’ he finally spoke, getting up from his chair. ‘Let’s hunt out that guy and shoot him—and not with an apple on his head, either!’ ”11
By all accounts an extraordinary musician, Hambitzer is remembered today only because he was Gershwin’s teacher. Yet he turned out to be unusually well suited to introduce the gifted youngster to the world of music in which he would make his way.12 Born of Russian ancestry, probably in 1881, Hambitzer grew up in a midwestern city, Milwaukee, known for its German heritage. He became a versatile composer, player of several orchestral instruments, teacher of some of them, and a stalwart in the pit of Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre.
After moving to New York in 1908, Hambitzer joined the orchestra at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, led by Joseph Knecht—playing viola, oboe, bassoon, cello, and organ, but never piano there, according to his student Nathaniel Shilkret. Hambitzer’s friend Edward Kilenyi, soon to be Gershwin’s harmony teacher, described the Milwaukeean as a talented musician who wore his accomplishments lightly: “On his viola or cello, in his jolly way, he could play concertos as if performing a trick, to the pleasure of his colleagues.” Shilkret remembered a colleague challenging Hambitzer to show that he actually knew how to play the piano. After pleading that he was out of practice, Hambitzer sat down and performed one piece after another. “He could play any number we suggested. He was the most natural pianist I ever heard—barring no one—and his memory was phenomenal. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt. . . . Pieces just poured out of him flawlessly.”13
Though endowed with talent, technique, generosity, and good humor, Hambitzer managed only spotty success in his life and career. An early marriage into which a dishonest woman supposedly lured him was followed by a second, happier one that produced a child, but ended with his wife’s early death from tuberculosis. His operetta The Love Wager was performed on a road tour but never produced on Broadway. As for why Hambitzer’s pianistic career failed to thrive, Shilkret believed that he simply had no interest in concertizing. Yet as word got around of Hambitzer’s abilities at the piano and interest in teaching, he became “the busiest teacher in New York.”14 He died of tuberculosis in 1917 or 1918, at age thirty-seven.15
What we know about Gershwin’s experience with Hambitzer comes chiefly from its beginning. Hambitzer wrote his sister in Milwaukee not long after George’s lessons began: “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!” Though the young genius had his own thoughts about what he wanted to learn, Hambitzer, a classically trained artist with plenty of experience in public entertainment, had a clear view of what he needed to know. “He wants to go in for this modern stuff, jazz and what not,” the teacher wrote his sister. “But I’m not going to let him for a while. I’ll see that he gets a firm foundation in the standard music first.”16
It was Hambitzer who introduced Gershwin to Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy. Gershwin credited his teacher too with making him “harmony-conscious. . . . I was crazy about that man. I went out, in fact, and drummed up ten pupils for him.”17 He learned to play with a loose wrist that allowed for plenty of endurance, which would serve him well during his youthful stints as a song demonstrator and rehearsal pianist. And in Hambitzer he found a teacher who, surely rare in that day, shared his own sense that the goals of learning classical piano technique and exploring modern popular music could be complementary: “I have listened to him playing classics with great rhythmic extemporizing, and I have not discouraged him,” said Hambitzer.17 In that approach lay the heart of the young musician’s lifelong commitment to the musical present. By continually exercising his creative fancy as a performer, Gershwin was affirming his identity as a musical modernist.
During the summer of 1913, fourteen-year-old George landed his first paying job as a musician in the Catskill Mountains, a resort area north of New York City, earning $5 a week.18 Back in the city for the fall, he started another year of school, now at New York’s High School of Commerce. His parents were of different minds about his musical obsession. Morris apparently supported it. Rose, who chose the school, insisted, though, that he also learn accounting.19 But George did not flourish there. Indeed, the only information surviving from his last academic year has to do with music. Barely fifteen, he wrote his first two compositions: a popular song and a “ragged” piano classic—“Ragging the Träumerei,” an embellishment of Schumann’s famous character piece with rhythms from popular music.20 He also gave his first documented public performance, on March 21, 1914, at a meeting of the Finley Society of the City College of New York, a student literary club set up by Ira, now a student at the college. The program lists “George Gershvin” as both player of a piano solo and accompanist for a singer named Charles Rose. (Gershwin revealed in 1931 that the solo was a tango written for the occasion, a piece he could still remember and was even willing to play when he was in the mood.) Two months later, George left school, apparently before the semester was officially over.
As George would later tell Goldberg, he had a friend, Ben Bloom, who introduced him to an older musician named Mose Gumble, of the Jerome H. Remick music-publishing firm. Gumble auditioned the lad in May 1914 and hired him to demonstrate songs for $15 a week.21 Yet by the testimony of Irving Berlin, who knew Ben Bloom in those days, Gershwin’s first job for Remick was not as a pianist but as a delivery boy who helped Bloom haul copies of Remick-published songs to venues around New York for $5 a week.22 During the summer of 1914, George returned to the Catskills, this time playing duets at a hotel with a violinist named Jack Diamond, and again earning $5 a week.23 It is easy to imagine him, newly liberated from formal education in 1914, trading a $5-a-week delivery job that summer for a playing job at the same rate; it is harder to imagine that having become a salaried song demonstrator in May, he temporarily left that new post for an out-of-town summer engagement that paid only one-third as much.24 It appears that in the late summer of 1914, though, Gershwin was hired by Remick’s “professional” department, joining a corps of pianists who labored to promote songs created by staff composers and lyricists. For the next two and a half years, he earned his keep by presiding over a Remick piano room.
The music-publishing district called Tin Pan Alley had been the nation’s chief popular music marketplace since the 1890s. Performers searching for new songs went there to find them. Publishing representatives in turn courted singers and paid them to sing their interpolated songs in shows. A catchy song performed in a musical comedy, variety, or minstrel show was the ultimate “plug” for boosting its popularity, and could trade on the performer’s charisma. When Gershwin went to work for Remick’s, the firm occupied roomy quarters at 219–221 West 46th Street, with the various departments geared to distributing songs as an industrial-style product.25 The departments were: shipping (where Gershwin likely started, as Ben Bloom’s sidekick), band and orchestra (where standard voice-and-keyboard settings were adapted for instrumental ensembles), sales and publicity, slides (where visual images were created to illustrate performances), and the arranging department (where songs were dressed up for a variety of performances, including medleys). The piano rooms in the “professional” department were cubicles in which the pianists pushed numbers created by Remick staff.
As well as being practiced sightreaders, pluggers tried to choose numbers that matched a customer’s talent and personality as well as voice. They learned to teach songs from scratch if necessary, and they worked to inspire clients’ confidence so that they could put them over to an audience. A song demonstrator also had to learn transposition, fitting the key of a song to the singer’s range. Gershwin was expected at the piano every morning at nine. Few, if any, headliners dropped in; instead, “colored people used to come in and get me to play ‘God Send You Back to Me’ in seven keys.”26 But combined with other skills, an infectious sense of rhythm could turn any piano-room session into an artistic encounter. Gershwin’s personality and talent enabled him to master such basics quickly.27
Moreover, by “writing a tune now and then,” as Ira offhandedly put it, the young Gershwin began a lifetime involvement in the enterprise of creating music to entertain listeners. He quickly learned that the industry’s creative standards stood well within his capabilities, and he kept writing songs after the Remick firm—which drew a clear distinction between its staff of pluggers and songwriters—rejected his first attempts.28
Not long after he joined Remick’s, he realized that there was something special about the work of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.29 The “martial rhythms” of Berlin’s 1911 hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” got into his blood during those years, or perhaps even before. As for Kern, in the spring of 1915 Gershwin had an epiphany at an aunt’s wedding, after hearing the orchestra play two songs from The Girl from Utah—“You’re Here and I’m Here” and “They’ll Never Believe Me.” Kern, said Gershwin, “was the first composer who made me conscious that most popular music was of inferior quality and that musical-comedy music was made of better material.” As a result of this experience, “I paid him the tribute of frank imitation and many things I wrote at this period sounded as though Kern had written them himself.”30
Reports from those who knew Gershwin during his early years on Tin Pan Alley describe an idealistic young man who was learning that the art of music could be an encompassing, exacting master. One such report comes from Harry Ruby, later a leading Broadway and Hollywood songwriter, but then a song plugger with the publisher Harry Von Tilzer. It seems that in a competitive push, some time before Gershwin’s nineteenth birthday, various publishers sent their pluggers to Atlantic City. One evening, with the day’s work finished, they gathered at a restaurant on the Boardwalk to talk shop. Ruby was struck by George’s eagerness, “his intense enthusiasm for his work, his passionate interest in every phase of the popular-music business.” When Gershwin “spoke of the artistic mission of popular music, we thought he was going highfalutin’. The height of artistic achievement to us was a ‘pop’ song that sold lots of copies, and we just didn’t understand what he was talking about.” His view of music “was a completely different musical world from ours, and we did not completely understand it at the time, though we all reacted to it instinctively. I am also sure we were all jealous of him too.”31
More evidence comes from Irving Caesar, who became a successful lyricist on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and met Gershwin after he began dropping in at the Remick office. “There was nothing modest about him . . . he had self-confidence, and rightly so. . . . When George sat down at the piano, there was no one who could move you as George would. . . . It was very difficult to put your finger on his talent because it lapsed over into the serious field.”32 George liked having him around, Caesar said, because “he wanted his tunes wedded to words,” adding that in those days composers on Tin Pan Alley outnumbered lyricists by far.33 “I used to make up titles just to have him sit down and go up and down the keys and see what he could strike from them, and he could work wonders. I wrote very fast and he wrote very fast. . . . George wrote with chords. His chordation was so interesting, so modern and remarkable, and out of his chordation came the melodies.”34 Between 1916 and 1923, the two men collaborated often on songs, from an unpublished antimilitary number, “When Armies Disband” (1916), to “Swanee” (1919), their first big hit.35
But of all the acquaintances Gershwin made at the Remick firm, none had more direct professional significance than Fred Astaire, who wrote about their early meetings in his autobiography. Astaire and his sister Adele, natives of Omaha, Nebraska, formed a song-and-dance act as child performers in vaudeville, traveling the circuit with their mother as early as the century’s first decade. Later, when in New York, Fred made the rounds of music publishers looking for material, and met George at Remick’s in 1915. The two teenagers hit it off, even to the point of comparing some keyboard tricks. “He was amused by my piano playing and often made me play for him,” Astaire recalled. “I had a sort of knocked-out slap left hand technique and the beat pleased him. He’d often stop me and say, ‘Wait a minute, Freddie, do that one again.’ ” But beyond their mutual involvement with show business and the piano, the two shared a dream. “I told George how my sister and I longed to get into musical comedy. He in turn wanted to write one. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could write a musical show and you could be in it?’ ”36 The two youngsters could not have known how “great” great could be.
In November 1915, Gershwin began a new exercise for skills he had been developing at Remick’s. Crossing the river to East Orange, New Jersey, he appeared at the studio of the Standard Music Roll Company to make the first of many rolls for player piano in which he was involved over the next decade. By 1926, some 140 Gershwin performances had been issued in this form, starting at $5 per roll, or $35 for six.37 By all indications, Gershwin thought of piano rolls as work for hire, in which not much of his artistic self was invested. Yet the rolls identify music that he came to know as a young professional, as well as examples of his own music as he chose to present it in those years. Like the older harmonium or reed organ, the player piano was air-powered, relying on the vacuum created when foot-operated pedals pushed air out of the player mechanism. The agent determining the sound was a roll of paper with perforations that corresponded to musical notation, scrolled through the mechanism at a steady speed. When passed over a “tracker bar”—a metal device with a hole for each note on the keyboard—the perforations were “read” in a way that, through air pressure, responded to every hole with a musical sound of the specified pitch and duration.38 Gershwin’s job was to sketch out at the keyboard musical “maps” of performances, indicating when keys and pedal were depressed and released, which company personnel then turned into finished products.
Gershwin’s early piano rolls preserve in mechanical facsimile a gifted player’s rendering of Tin Pan Alley performance style in the mid-1910s. By the time George was born in 1898, the African American–influenced style called ragtime was already making an impact on the music of Tin Pan Alley, and Broadway as well. Its signal traits included a rock-solid beat, foursquare phrase structure, and pervasive syncopation. When played on a piano, as notated in sheet music, rhythmic and harmonic duties are assigned to the left hand, with the right hand playing the melody, usually syncopated and often supported by harmonic filling-in. Many of Gershwin’s piano rolls from 1915–17 reflect ragtime’s influence, as can be heard in five numbers reconstructed and issued on CD in the early 1990s: “Kangaroo Hop,” by Melville Morris (January 1916); “Chinese Blues,” by Oscar Gardner and Fred Moore (May 1916); “Arrah Go On I’m Gonna Go Back to Oregon,” by Bert Grant, Sam Lewis, and Joe Young (May 1916); “Pastime Rag No. 3,” by Artie Matthews (June 1916); and “Rialto Ripples,” by Gershwin and Will Donaldson (September 1916).39 To a modern ear, the general impression left by this sound is of a sophisticated, lighthearted music with a measured, sometimes herky-jerky way of moving that reflects the mechanized quality of the instrument.
But there was a true advantage to the medium: the illusion of a midregister third hand. Between the boom-chuck pattern in the bass and the busy treble melody, the Gershwin piano roll adds a conjunct line in quarter notes that knits the registers together in a three-part texture. Once his songs began to appear in print, some of them also boasted midregister melodies (playable by a two-handed pianist) that filled out the texture and harmony in a similar way. Here was a young song-seller from Remick’s who was already playing with countermelody.
IN HIS TIME and ours, Gershwin has often been portrayed in group settings, usually as the center of attention. Recognized before age thirty as a famous musician and man about town, he was seen by cultural commentators as part of a postwar “Jazz Age” generation that was putting its stamp on the American scene. And he showed every sign of savoring his niche in the social circles of New York City. A standard trope of Gershwin biography holds that when he attended a gathering and the room included a piano, he would surely be asked to play it. There is no record of him resisting any such invitation.
Less often noted is that his custom of blending sociability with artistry seems to date back to his Tin Pan Alley years—the fruit of a social connection that began in the workplace. While still in his middle teens, George befriended Russian-born Herman Paley, a senior colleague at Remick’s, who had studied composition with Edward MacDowell at Columbia University, harmony and theory with Edward Kilenyi, and piano with Charles Hambitzer.40 Paley invited George into a group of friends and relatives who gathered regularly at his apartment on 112th Street and Seventh Avenue, not far from the Gershwin residence at 108 West 111th Street. The group welcomed the young man warmly, offering him friendship and the attention of a sophisticated, intellectually lively company. In 1917, George introduced Ira to Herman’s younger brother Lou, an English teacher who in 1918–19 would write lyrics for a number of George’s songs. It was through Lou’s girlfriend—and wife from 1920 on—Emily Strunsky, a student of German literature at Hunter College, that Ira would meet his future wife, Emily’s sister Leonore.
George blossomed in the Paley circle. “The atmosphere was different than at George’s parents’,” explained Emily Paley, “and he liked that—he breathed in the surroundings and atmosphere,” which she described as “very easy, full of young people and music and literature.” It may have been in that environment that his custom of entertaining at the piano first took root, maybe as early as 1915. Some years later, after Lou and Emily married and moved downtown to Greenwich Village, they held regular Saturday night gatherings that often included George and sessions at the keyboard. “This was during Prohibition and we served tea, cookies and lichee nuts and played Twenty Questions.” Among the purported regulars over the years were songwriters (Milton Ager, Phil Charig, Vernon Duke, Vincent Youmans), playwrights (S. N. Behrman, Morrie Ryskind), lyricists (Irving Caesar, Buddy DeSylva, Howard Dietz), comedians (Groucho and Harpo Marx, Fanny Brice, said to be “a good friend” of the Strunsky sisters), Oscar Levant, and classical pianist and critic Samuel Chotzinoff.41 Behrman “knew from the first Saturday night at the Paleys’ that I was having the best time I’d ever had in my life.” Drawn together by age, common interests, and heritage—most were Jewish—the regulars and their friends made up a group akin to a salon.
At informal gatherings like these, George showed an uncanny gift for sitting down at the piano and pouring out a continuous flow of music whose appeal seems to have been nearly universal. Mabel Pleshette, a niece of the Paley brothers and herself a pianist whom George had recruited as a Hambitzer student, was a frequent witness to such moments. She recognized that spontaneity was what made George’s playing special. “When he sat down at the piano, he not only played what was written—he was improvising all the time. George could make the piano laugh, he could make it sad, he could make it do anything. And when he made it laugh he chuckled and you would chuckle with him. You just had to laugh. I never saw such piano playing, such an approach.”42 The Paleys’ belief in his genius, and the unconditional friendship they offered, surely fed Gershwin’s confidence, and would benefit all three as long as he lived.
REMICK’S REJECTED his first songwriting efforts, but Gershwin was not an easy person to discourage. When he and a collaborator, Murray Roth, finished a song they judged worthy, called “When You Want ’Em, You Can’t Get ’Em (When You Got ’Em, You Don’t Want ’Em)” they found another publisher—Harry Von Tilzer, one of the trade’s most influential figures in that decade—who offered a royalty of half a cent per copy.43 While Roth received an advance of $15, Gershwin “waivered an advance, wanting my royalties—glamorous word!—in a lump sum. After some time I went to Von Tilzer and asked him for a little cash on the song. He handed me five dollars. And I never got a cent more from him.”44
Gershwin’s collaboration with Roth not only produced his first published song, but led to his first professional contact with the theater. He and Roth wrote another number, “The Runaway Girl,” that they imagined in the kind of show favored at the Winter Garden Theater: the flagship venue for the brothers Lee and J. J. Shubert, two of Broadway’s leading producers. “After several tries,” Gershwin said,
we got to play the piece for Mr. [Ernest R.] Simmons, of the Shubert office. He was evidently impressed, because he, in turn, had me play it for Sigmund Romberg, who was then the chief composer for the Shuberts. Romberg had me meet him at the Hotel Majestic, where he lived, and suggested that we collaborate on some tunes for the next Winter Garden attraction. I was naturally delighted and excited with this chance to break into Broadway musical society. For several weeks I brought ideas to Romberg, and when the show opened I was represented with one little two-four number called Making of a Girl.45
Born in Hungary and trained in Vienna, Sigmund Romberg had arrived in New York in 1909, where he gained attention as a pianist and orchestra leader in upscale restaurants. By 1914, he was writing scores for the three or four revues the Shuberts produced each year. Romberg wrote much of the music for these shows, but he also farmed some out to others, and kept his ear open for numbers that could be interpolated. “Making of a Girl,” with words by another Shubert stalwart, librettist and lyricist Harold Atteridge, was published by G. Schirmer and interpolated into The Passing Show of 1916, which ran at the Winter Garden from June 22 to October 21.46 This song evidently netted Gershwin about $7 in royalties.
By March 1917, the songs he was playing for Remick customers having begun to “offend” him, Gershwin decided he wanted to write “production music” for Broadway shows, following the lead of Jerome Kern. One reason he found himself at odds with Tin Pan Alley’s anti-intellectual tone lay in his sustained stake in the classics, though no longer as a student of Hambitzer. He had experienced the scramble, excitement, and present-mindedness of Tin Pan Alley, but also the grace of a Kern stage song; the formality and timelessness of the concert hall; the infinite colors of a symphony orchestra’s sound palette; the technical or aesthetic challenges of a piano work by Liszt or Debussy; and the process of study that enables musicians to strengthen their skills. Even as he sold songs to customers, his awareness of music’s scope continued to grow.
Around this time, Gershwin began lessons in harmony with Hungarian-born Edward Kilenyi, on Hambitzer’s recommendation. “The boy is not only talented,” he told Kilenyi, “but is uncommonly serious in his search for knowledge of music. The modesty with which he comes to his piano lessons and the reverence with which he approaches instruction impress me, in fact, touch me.” Kilenyi brought strong credentials to the task. Having begun music studies in his native Hungary, he continued them briefly in Rome with Pietro Mascagni and then at the Cologne Conservatory. Emigrating to the United States, he settled in New York and attended Columbia University, where he was taught by Daniel Gregory Mason.47 He then worked as a private teacher, scholar, violinist, and an orchestra conductor in local theaters. His publications, all from the 1910s, attest to academic seriousness, including a pair of articles on Arnold Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre and another on modern Hungarian music.48 From the mid-1920s on, Kilenyi was based in Hollywood, where he worked in the film industry as a composer and conductor.
While the start of Gershwin’s lessons cannot be dated exactly, Ira’s diary toward the end of March 1917 notes that “Geo. gave up job at Remicks, Sat. 3/17/17 in order to be able to study unhindered by time taken at Remicks.”49 The notion of a song plugger resigning to pursue further musical study would have baffled the denizens of Tin Pan Alley. As Kilenyi got to know his new student, he too was struck by Gershwin’s love for learning, reflected in the young man’s enthusiasm when he grasped an idea that had previously eluded him. When Gershwin wondered whether exercises with figured bass were really necessary, for example, Kilenyi explained that they develop skills in writing music in much the same way that scales prepare one to perform it. And neither of these foundational practices are “meant for public hearing.” Once Gershwin understood that, Kilenyi recalled, he completed the figured bass exercises “carefully and patiently”: evidence, he decided, that the talented young student Hambitzer had sent him was revealing himself as a wise student too.50