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He composed perhaps the country’s most iconic orchestral work, Rhapsody in Blue (1924), as well as the signature American opera, Porgy and Bess (1935) and he wrote the music to songs that are as indelible as any written in the era of Tin Pan Alley: “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So” (from Porgy and Bess), “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Embraceable You,” “The Man I Love,” “Love Walked In,” “Strike Up the Band,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “S’Wonderful,” “How Long Has This Been Going On?” and on and on, many penned for hit shows on Broadway. Well, those great singers only enhanced the greatness of Rodgers’ tunes, whether he liked it or not.Photos courtesy of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts.ĭespite his abbreviated life, George Gershwin (1898–1937) - born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz in 1898, in Brooklyn - crafted an epochal body of work, encompassing not only a group of compositions but also a stylistic imprint as influential as that of any other American composer. Similarly, I have read that Richard Rodgers used to get annoyed when great singers like Sinatra and Mel Torme would take liberties with his melodies. Which just goes to show something or other, I’m not quite sure what – I guess that music is always a collaboration, and once something’s out there, it’s fair game for others to mold and often improve on, whether the composer likes it or not.
#George gershwin compositions movie
Well, I’ve heard various orchestral versions, some of them conducted by the maestro himself, and I’ve never heard one that comes close to the movie version, in my humble opinion. (I haven’t seen or heard the new one yet.) I was quite surprised to read in a biography of Leonard Bernstein that the orchestrator (I guess it was Irwin Kostel?) surprised Bernstein at a party by playing the soundtrack – it was the first time Bernstein heard the finished product, and supposedly, he didn’t like it at all.
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Just an aside – one of the albums I most loved growing up (still do) was the movie soundtrack of West Side Story.
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But maybe we would all be better off if we just sat back, listened, and perhaps even enjoyed music after it has traveled its complex path from the composer’s mind to our ears.” It’s fun to categorize and rate music and musicians, but in the end, I completely agree with what you wrote at the end: “I am all for purism. I found your article in response to a Google search about whether Gershwin scored his own music, and I found it quite interesting – so thank you! For this reason alone, the Gershwins stipulated that P & B should never be staged by other than a Black company, a triumph of principle over pragmatism. For those detractors, and there have been a number, both black and white, who level the charge of racial stereotyping, it should be pointed out that P & B is not representation of a generalised African-American community, but of a specific coastal community among whom George and Ira Gershwin lived, worked, listened to their stories and songs, and learned their dialect.
#George gershwin compositions professional
Yes, Gershwin orchestrated the opera over a space of 20 months in 1933-4, and his is the score used for all professional productions up to our own time.
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Given the diversity of influences acting on a 20th century composer compared to the relative monoculture that nurtured a Mozart or a Schubert, one can only speculate what treasures were still in him when he went under the anaesthetic, never to re-emerge, on July 11, 1937. Lenson’s opening statement: George Gershwin’s birth and death dates were 1898 to 1937, which means that, like Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Chopin, Purcell, Carl-Maria von Weber, Coleridge-Taylor and Charlie Parker, he didn’t even make it to 40. First a tedious but necessary correction to Mr.