George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to American classical music audience. The son of poor Jewish immigrants in lower Manhattan, Gershwin was a natural-born pianist and left school at 16 to become a pianist with a Tin-Pan Alley firm, plugging their new songs. He soon commenced writing songs himself, eventually teaming up with his brother Ira as lyricist to become one of the most successful duo of song and musical comedy writers on Broadway. They created a string of immensely successful musicals from Lady be Good in December 1924 to Let ‘em Eat Cake in October 1933. The opening night of a George Gershwin musical comedy was a social and media event with Gershwin himself usually leading the orchestra. 

The performance of his Rhapsody in Blue at the concerts of bandleader Paul Whiteman in 1924 made history. The Concerto in F, however, commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Symphony and premiered in December 1925, was the first large-scale jazz composition in a traditionally classical form. It opened the doorway, but until the last couple of decades, few composers have ventured through it. 

Gershwin composed An American in Paris in 1928 on a commission from the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York. It is a jazz-based tone poem inspired by the composer’s trip to France where he attempted to study with, among others, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. Both declined. Ravel was supposed to have said: “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you are a first-rate Gershwin?” 

The work captures the sound and spirit of post-World-War-I Paris where such American bohemians as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway – and their fictional characters – went to lose (and rediscover) themselves. According to the composer, “The piece is really a rhapsodic ballet, written very freely...to portray the impressions of an American visitor as he strolls around the city...the individual listener can read into the music such episodes as his imagination pictures for him.” But for the program book at the premiere, with Gershwin’s approval, composer Deems Taylor wrote a different scenario involving a detailed description of the tourist’s day adrift in the City of Light, proving that the music came first, the explanation later. To add authenticity to its sound, Gershwin purchased in Paris taxi horns for the New York premiere, which took place on December 13, 1928 under conductor Walter Damrosch. 

Shortly before the premiere, Damrosch cut 120 measures from the score, and music editor F. Campbell Watson prepared a simplified orchestration. This version was in use until 2000, when all cuts were restored, using Gershwin’s original manuscript. 

An American in Paris has had a strong influence on a certain type of American music. Most persistent has been Gershwin’s hustlebustle evocation of busy Parisian life that has been used in so many film scores, TV and advertising as to become iconic “city” music.

Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com