George Gershwin

George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist who moved easily between Broadway songs and the concert stage. Self-taught in the sounds of Tin Pan Alley and jazz, he wrote hit musicals alongside works like Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris that brought blues harmony and jazz rhythm into orchestral music. His opera Porgy and Bess remains a landmark of American stage music. He died young, but his tunes, from "I Got Rhythm" to "Summertime," are still instantly recognizable today.

Gershwin's orchestral music runs on the rhythms and harmonies of 1920s jazz and blues, wrapped in the coloring of a full symphony orchestra. Clarinets slide and swoop, muted trumpets growl, and syncopated rhythms, notes falling just off the expected beat, drive the music forward. A Gershwin piece often opens with a bold, tune-first gesture, like the famous clarinet glissando that opens Rhapsody in Blue, and unfolds through a series of contrasting melodies rather than strict classical development. Pieces run from a few minutes for a song to fifteen or twenty for the bigger orchestral works. Endings tend to be big and confident, often circling back to the opening tune. Even his purely orchestral works keep the catchiness and harmonic bite of his Broadway songs, so a listener will often recognize the same bluesy, wide-interval melodic style whether the piece was written for a nightclub band or a symphony orchestra.

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1898, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He left school as a teenager to work as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, playing other people's sheet music for hours a day in a Manhattan store, and absorbed popular song from the inside before he ever wrote his own hits.

By his early twenties he had a Broadway career going alongside his brother Ira, who wrote lyrics for most of his songs. Shows like Lady, Be Good! and Girl Crazy made him one of the most successful theater composers in New York. In 1924 he crossed into the concert world with Rhapsody in Blue, written quickly for a bandleader's jazz concert and premiered with Gershwin himself at the piano. Its success led to further orchestral works, including the Piano Concerto in F and An American in Paris, and eventually to his most ambitious project, the opera Porgy and Bess, premiered in 1935 and set among Black residents of a Charleston tenement.

Gershwin moved to Hollywood in the mid-1930s to write film scores while continuing to compose for the concert hall. He died in 1937 in Los Angeles, at age 38, from a brain tumor. He had been composing steadily up to the end, and his sudden death cut short a career still visibly expanding in ambition.