George Gershwin
Chorus 3B George Gershwin- 1898-1937 His name is full of memories and nostalgic imaginings of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, flappers, musicals tumbling forth in glorious profusion from his creative, fertile imagination. Gershwin represented all this and so much more: his serious compositions, which confounded the critics at first performances, remain highly popular in the concert repertoire, and his stage and film songs continue to be jazz and vocal standards. Gershwin's music was his personal digestion of European, jazz, and black styles, characterized by melodies at once catchy and beautiful, along with wonderfully complex rhythmic patterns. He was a bundle of energy, a school dropout at fifteen whose wrote the enormously successful Swanee at nineteen, gregarious man with an ego the size of a ballroom who helped promote the careers of other musicians such as Vernon Duke, Oscar Levant, and Arnold Schoenberg. He loved nothing more than parties and playing sports where he could (and did) monopolize the evening at the piano, playing and singing his own works for the friends who liked him.
George Gershwin (named Jacob Gershovitz at his birth September 26, 1898) was the second of four children born to Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russians who had immigrated to New York and married in America. George's older (by two years) brother Ira was to be the musician in the family but George, who had discovered music at six listening to a piano roll of Rubinstein's Melodie in F and was overwhelmed at nine hearing a friend playing the violin, appropriated the piano his mother purchased when he was twelve and he was given piano lessons. In 1912 he began studying with Charles Hambitzer, undoubtedly the strongest influence on the young student, who introduced him to the music of Debussy and Ravel, the early works of Arnold Schoenberg, and the classical piano literature. Gershwin admired Irving Berlin, and among his earliest musical heroes were...
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