Entertainment
Music History Monday: An American in Paris
In this episode of Music History Monday, Bob Greenberg explores the legacy of George Gershwin's iconic work, 'An American in Paris,' coinciding with its London premiere on August 26, 19...
Music History Monday: An American in Paris
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Welcome to Music History Monday for August 26th, 2024.
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I'm Bob Greenberg, and the title for today's podcast is an American in Paris.
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If you haven't already, please consider joining me on my subscription site at patreon.com slash Robert Greenberg Music.
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We mark the London premiere on August 26th, 1952, 72 years ago today, of the film, An American in Paris.
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With music by George Gershwin, 1898 to 1937, directed by Vincent Manelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Carroll, and Oscar Levant,
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the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture.
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While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4th, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it.
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George Gershwin's programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.
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Here's how we're going to proceed.
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Today's Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin's An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute work for orchestra composed in 1928.
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Tomorrow's Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on and excerpting four of its musical numbers.
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Statement.
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George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States.
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His death at the age of 38 of a brain tumor should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert at 31, Mozart at 35, and Chopin at 39.
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He was born Jacob Gershowitz, though his birth certificate reads Jacob Gershwin, the child of Russian Jewish immigrants on September 26th, 1898.
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He was born at home in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
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In 1963, a Browns plaque commemorating Gershwin's birth was affixed to the building.
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By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times.
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The plaque was stolen, it's still missing an action, and the building vandalized.
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It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.
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Rarely, as a major composer began his life in an artistically less promising manner.
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Tall, athletic, and charismatic. Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime.
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By his own admission, he cared nothing from music until he was ten.
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When George's parents, Morris, and Rose bought his elder brother, Ira, a piano.
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But it was George who attacked the thing with an intensity and procosity that really shocked everyone.
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While his piano studies included the so-called classics, Gershwin was from the beginning, drawn to ragtime.
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He quickly developed into a formidable ragtime piano player.
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At the age of 15, he nailed down his first job as a song plugger for the New York Music Publishing House of Jerome H. Remick for $15 a week.
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A plugger was a sort of human jukebox who played a firm's songs for prospective sheet music buyers.
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To be a decent plugger, you needed stamina and the ability to improvise and play in as many different styles as there were songs.
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The House of Remick was located, along with most of the other sheet music publishers, on East 14th Street in Lower Manhattan.
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The street was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley by the journalist Monroe Rosenfeld, 1861 to 1918,
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because of the cacophony created by hundreds of pluggers simultaneously beating the boogers out of hundreds of beat-up upright pianos.
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It was natural, but Gershwin tri- his own hand at writing ragtime and songs, and he scored his first success with a rag entitled, Realtto Ripples in 1917.
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In 1920, the 22-year-old Gershwin hit the top of the charts when the great Vauda Villion Al Jolson, 1886 to 1950, performed and recorded Gershwin's song, Swany, which was written with the lyricist Irving Caesar in 1919.
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George Gershwin was want to call his friend and personal hero Irving Berlin, America's Frowns Schubert.
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Much as I hate to disagree with my Strogurshwin, in this case I must, because in my humble opinion as a songwriter, George Gershwin was America's Frowns Schubert.
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That's because, again, in my opinion, Gershwin's songs capture the jazzy, exuberant and sophisticated spirit of urban America between the Wars, better than any other music by any other composer.
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Gershwin catches the Composing Bug.
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In 1923, the 25-year-old George Gershwin was asked by the Society Band Leader Paul Whiteman, 1890 to 1967, to write a serious concert work in the jazz idiom for piano and jazz band.
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Gershwin rightly hesitated. Writing songs was one thing, but having had no training in composition, counterpoint or orchestration, there was no reason to believe that he could compose such a work.
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He had put the offer entirely out of his mind when, to his horror, a notice appeared in the New York newspapers that announced he was working on just such a piece.
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His back to the wall, Gershwin quickly wrote Rhapsody in Blue, which was then arranged for piano and jazz band by Whiteman's orchestrator, Faire de Grafé.
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The Rhapsody received its premiere with Paul Whiteman conducting his band and Gershwin at the piano at New York's Aoleon Hall on February 12, 1924.
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Rhapsody in Blue is a medley of great tunes linked by some shockingly pedestrian transitions.
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Don't get me wrong, we should all love the Rhapsody, but from a purely technical point of view, it might very well be the shoddest piece of music in the concert repertoire, making even Chikovsky's compositionally appalling 1812 overture look slick by comparison.
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It's flaws aside. Gershwin himself later admitted that at the time he wrote Rhapsody in Blue, he hardly knew more about composition than one could find, quote, in a 10-cent manual, unquote,
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Gershwin still was bitten by the concert-composing bug at exactly the time when the American arts community was coming to believe that ragtime and jazz were indeed America's classical music.
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In the audience, at the Rhapsody's premiere was the conductor Walter Damrosh, 1862 to 1950.
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Damrosh was a pro. He was the music director and conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, which soon merged with the New York Philharmonic, and he instantly recognized Gershwin's potential as a real composer.
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Consequently, on February 13, 1924, the day after the Rhapsody received its premiere, Damrosh offered Gershwin a commission to compose a full-scale multi-movement piano concerto.
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Gershwin knew he had a lot to learn and that he had to learn it quickly.
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He took as many orchestration lessons as he could squeeze into his busy theatrical schedule and began sketching out ideas in May of 1925.
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Originally entitled New York Concerto, he completed his fully orchestrated draft on November 10, 1925, and yes, he orchestrated the Concerto himself, which is something anyone who calls themselves a composer must be able to do.
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Gershwin's Concerto in F received its premiere on December 3, 1925 with Walter Damrosh on the podium and Gershwin at the piano.
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From a technical point of view, Gershwin's Concerto in F is only about a gazillion times better than the Rhapsody in Blue, although there are still a few rough spots.
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We pay them no mind because it's a fine piece, one that's about its glorious melodies, its propulsive syncopated, ragtime, and jazz rhythms, its percussive piano writing, and a singular, enjoyable energy that vividly reflects New York City in the 1920s.
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Pretty impressive for a 27-year-old kid composing just his second full-blown concert work, a Brooklynite in Paris.
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In the spring of 1926, George and Ira Gershwin's show, Lady Be Good, was scheduled for performance in London following a brief tryout in Liverpool.
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George journeyed across the pond to Yee Merriold, England for the performances.
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Between the Liverpool and London openings, respectively on March 29th and April 13th, 1926, he took a brief side-trip to Paris, where he stayed with friends, Robert and Mabel Schirmer, from about April 5th to the 10th.
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It was his first visit to that awesome town, and he was properly bold over.
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As a parting gift to his hosts, Gershwin jotted down a bouncing, crackling melody he called, very Parisian.
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On returning home to New York, the city so big they had to name it twice, Gershwin began thinking about composing an orchestral work to commemorate his visit to Paris.
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That work, eventually to be entitled, an American in Paris, was to feature Gershwin's very Parisian melody as its opening theme, but we get ahead of ourselves here.
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George and his brother Ira planned an extended three-month trip to Europe for the spring of 1928, during which Gershwin tended to actually compose his homage at Paris.
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Ira Gershwin described the trip this way.
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Quote, in the spring of 1928, George took his last trip to Europe, with funny face and rosely running in New York and O.K. in London, a vacation was an order, and my sister, my wife, and myself accompanied him.
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I did little other than see sights and drink beer, but George, despite all his social activities, his meetings with many of Europe's important composers, the hours spent with various interviewers and musical activities still found time to work on American in Paris in the hotels we stayed at, unquote.
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The bulk of the Gershwin family's trip was spent in Paris, where George famously fell for the sound of Parisian taxihorns, which he claimed were Paris's most indigenous sound.
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In expedition to the automotive part shops located on the Avenue de la Grande Armee, allowed Gershwin to select and purchase a number of taxihorns, which he brought back with him to the United States, horns that were to be featured in an American in Paris.
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An American in Paris of 1928 was Gershwin's third instrumental concert work after Rhapsody in Blue of 1924, and the Concerto in F of 1925.
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At the end of the year, Gershwin wrote,
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quote, my purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere, unquote.
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Following its premiere, the critics were in agreement that an American in Paris was a better crafted work than Gershwin's Concerto in F, which the critics had declared to be a better crafted work than the Rhapsody in Blue.
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However, after its Carnegie Hall premiere on a program including works by César Frank, Ricard Wagner, and the Belgian composer Guillaume Lacout,
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a number of critics wondered whether an American in Paris belonged on a program with such serious works by such serious composers.
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For Gershwin, such criticism stung.
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At 31, he was still most insecure about his lack of compositional training.
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He responded rather defensively that, quote,
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it's not a Beethoven symphony, you know. It's a humorous piece, nothing solemn about it. It's not intended to draw tears.
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If it pleases symphony audiences as a light jolly piece, a series of impressions musically expressed, it succeeds, unquote.
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An American in Paris does indeed succeed.
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The piece is scribes to no particular pre-existing musical form, but is rather a loose A-B-A-prime structure, but might be described as strolling through the city, A, coping with a bit of homesickness, B,
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and then high spirits having returned continuing the stroll, A-prime.
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Along the way, we hear a wide variety of music that describes both the American and the Parisian locale, busy hustling urban music with taxi horns.
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This would be Gershwin's so-called very Parisian theme.
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Can, can like music, American blues like music, and so forth.
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An American in Paris, ballet.
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The movie, an American in Paris, concludes with a balletic adaptation of Gershwin's score, a ballet featuring Jean Kelly, 1912 to 1996.
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And the 19-year-old French ballerina, Leslie Carroll, born in 1931.
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For our information, at the time it was filmed, that 17-minute ballet sequence was the single most costly production number ever put on film.
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Costing nearly half a million dollars, the equivalent today of over 6,525,720 dollars, it took an entire month to shoot.
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It was shot on 44 different sets built on MGM's huge 67-acre back lot number three.
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Those sets were designed in the styles of different artists associated with the city of Paris, including Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Letrec, Raoul Duffy, Pierre Augustre-Renoir, Maurice-Lutrilo, and Henri-Rousseau.
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And we will talk more about that ballet and MGM's back lot number three in tomorrow's Dr. Bob describes post.
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And now a heartfelt post script.
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This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post.
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I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years since September 5th, 2016, during which I have created over 400 of them.
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It's been a wonderful run, and now it's time for me to return to writing music.
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From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at patreon.com slash Robert Greenberg Music.
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If you are not already part of my Patreon family, I would urge you to consider joining us.
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Thank you.