George Gershwin was one of leading American composers in the first part of the twentieth century.
About the Composer, Arranger, Librettists, and Lyricists
born Brooklyn, New York September 26, 1898; died Hollywood, California July 11, 1937
His compositional career began in Tin Pan Alley, progressed through the theatres of Broadway and the concert halls of the United States, and ended in the starry heights of Hollywood in its glory years.
He created a body of work, both popular and classical, that is still widely performed and admired today.
Early on, Gershwin had absorbed jazz into his musical idiom, which, together with the influence of African American music, was to enrich his stage and concert works. His first piece purely for the concert hall, Rhapsody in Blue, was written to show that jazz-based material could sustain long stretches of music. Its success with audiences and critics alike lifted Gershwin’s reputation to celebrity status.
In the 1930s, he and his brother and closest artistic collaborator, Ira, spent time in Hollywood, writing for film musicals, and Gershwin also invested considerable energy into studying with a succession of teachers including the highly respected American composer, Henry Cowell. Gershwin was a friend of the composer Arnold Schoenberg (they were Hollywood neighbors), who spoke highly of his gifts, and the two often played tennis together.
Further concert works emerged, including a Piano Concerto (for himself as soloist) and An American in Paris, alongside musical comedies.
In the mid 1930s, Gershwin composed what he regarded as his magnum opus: the ‘American folk opera’ (Gershwin’s billing), Porgy and Bess, a full-length opera set among the community of ‘Catfish Row’, in Charleston, South Carolina. Full of memorable numbers – of which the most famous is ‘Summertime’ – what turned out to be his final, ambitious stage work was a financial failure. Over 80 years later, Porgy and Bess is recognized as his enduring masterpiece for the stage, and a key work in the history of American lyric theatre.
Gershwin was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents who made their home in New York in the 1890s.
Aged 12, he began piano lessons and was soon recognized to possess a remarkable talent. While receiving a thorough grounding in classical music (including lessons in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration), Gershwin was much drawn to the popular music of the day: the works of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, in particular. Hired as a staff composer by one of the leading publishers for the Broadway stage, Gershwin never looked back after publishing his first song in 1918. He was one of the leading figures in Broadway musical theatre throughout the 1920s, relishing the public spotlight and his celebrity status.
By 1930 he had composed more than 20 complete shows, many with lyrics by Ira. Among the best known are Lady, be Good! (1924), Strike Up the Band (1927) and Girl Crazy (1930).
His death, aged 38, following an operation for a suspected brain tumor was an unexpected and shocking blow, the more so when Gershwin was clearly at the height of his powers and on the verge of new directions in his music. Had he lived a normal lifespan, the course of American music might have been very different.
West Coast jazz arranger and composer Russ Garcia was born April 12, 1916, in Oakland, CA. A product of San Francisco State University, he later studied composition under Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco before mounting a professional career as an arranger, collaborating with bandleaders Horace Heidt and Al Donahue.
After settling in Los Angeles, Garcia worked as a composer and conductor on the Ronald Reagan-hosted radio show This Is America. After the program ended, he tenured for two years as a staff arranger with NBC Radio, followed by a stint teaching at Hollywood's Westlake School of Music, where his students included jazzmen Bill Holman, Bob Graettinger, and Gene Puerling. (Garcia later transformed his curriculum into a book, The Professional Arranger.) With 1946's My Dog Shep, Garcia began composing and arranging for feature films. Henry Mancini later tapped him to work on The Glenn Miller Story, resulting in a 15-year tenure at Universal Pictures alongside Pete Rugolo and Benny Carter. In later years Garcia also toiled for Warner Bros. and Disney, working on projects including George Pal's sci-fi classic The Time Machine as well as television series like Rawhide and The Virginian; he also freelanced behind vocalists Anita O'Day and Frances Faye, and by the mid-'50s was also a regular on West Coast jazz dates, eventually forming his own combo, the Wigville Band, featuring Charlie Mariano, Jimmy Giuffre, and brothers Pete and Conte Candoli. In 1957 Garcia also served as arranger and musical director on Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald's classic Porgy and Bess sessions. However, his most memorable work falls outside the jazz sphere altogether: while the AAMCO release Sounds in the Night remains one of the most beautiful and mysterious vocal ensemble recordings ever released, 1959's Fantastica is Garcia's masterpiece, a quintessential space age pop LP that brilliantly imagines the music of other planets and realms.
After arranging for Stan Kenton's Neophonic Orchestra, in 1966 Garcia turned his back on his career, selling his home and possessions and with wife Gina setting sail for the Pacific Ocean, determined to bring the message of the Baha'i faith to the remote islands of the Pacific Rim. The Garcias ultimately settled in New Zealand, and he returned to music infrequently in the years to follow.
Bio by Jason Ankeny for All Music Guide
DuBose Heyward
Edwin DuBose Heyward (1885-1940), was an American novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his novel Porgy, that inspired the play, folk opera, and film, Porgy and Bess. Born into an aristocratic Charleston, South Carolina family, Heyward grew up proud but poor. Over time, the “southern gentleman” became a liberal, based upon his exposure to and admiration for the African American men he came to know while working as a young man on the Charleston docks. Already a recognized poet, he was invited to summer at the MacDowell Colony where he met Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, a native of Ohio and a student in George Pierce Baker’s playwriting workshop at Harvard. The two would later be married.
During a second fellowship at MacDowell, DuBose shared excerpts with his fellow colonists from his new novel, Porgy. He hoped that the book, about a crippled black street-beggar, and set on a waterfront ghetto in Charleston called Catfish Row, would do well commercially and help him support his family as a full-time writer. “We all agreed that the story was atrocious,” one resident recalled, “and that he and Dorothy and Jennifer (their daughter) would be wiser to starve for poetry.” Despite the chilly reception, Heyward completed the novel and published it the following year (1925).
Dorothy, already a successful Broadway playwright, immediately saw Porgy’s dramatic potential and convinced her husband to collaborate with her on a stage play. The first Broadway production with an all African American cast, Porgy ran for 367 performances (1927-28) and earned the Heywards a Pulitzer Prize. There is speculation over how much Dorothy contributed to her husband’s writing, especially in the lyrics for Porgy and Bess, the opera that appeared based on the same story in 1935. Porgy and Bess had music by George Gershwin and a libretto by Heyward and Ira Gershwin. In 1959 it appeared as a successful motion picture.
The Heywards collaborated on another play set on Catfish Row, Mamba’s Daughter’s (1929). DuBose’s legacy also includes three volumes of poetry and essays, the novels Angel (1926), Peter Ashley (1932), and Star-Spangled Virgin (1939), a popular children’s book The Country Bunny and Little Gold Shoes (1939) and the screenplay for Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1939), starring Paul Robeson. Heyward also founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the oldest such society in the United States.
Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns Heyward
Born June 6, 1890, Wooster, Ohio; died November 19, 1961, New York, New York
Wrote under: Dorothy Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns
Although best known for two plays written in collaboration with her husband, Dorothy Kuhns Heyward established herself as a dramatist and novelist in her own right. Her commitment to writing for the stage began shortly after her marriage, when Nancy Ann (1924), a prize-winning play she wrote for George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop, was produced on Broadway. Instructed to write about what she knew, Heyward filled the three-act comedy with "aunts, debuts, and theatrical waiting rooms."
Heyward attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., Columbia University, and Radcliffe College, where she took the famous Harvard playwriting course. On the strength of her writing for this class, she was invited to the MacDowell Colony for Artists in Petersboro, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1922. There she met her future husband, who was also spending his first summer at the colony. During the following year, Heyward toured as a chorus girl in a musical to gain firsthand experience in the theater.
Similarities of taste, temperament, and appearance were frequently noted in Heyward and her husband by their acquaintances: both were tall, slender, fair, brown-eyed, and fragile-looking. DuBose Heyward was an insurance salesman who had published two volumes of poetry; Heyward persuaded him to become a full-time writer, and they went to live in a cabin in the Great Smokies. Drawing upon his youthful experience as a cotton checker among the Gullah-speaking blacks on the waterfront of his native Charleston, South Carolina, DuBose wrote his first novel, Porgy (1925).
Heyward suggested a dramatization of Porgy, but DuBose was already working on his second novel, Angel (1926). Letting him think she was writing a mystery story, Heyward alone prepared a rough draft of the play, which he then helped to polish for production. For both of their collaborative dramatizations, Heyward supplied the technical knowledge of theater while her husband contributed his sense of local color and poetic language. Porgy, produced by the Theatre Guild, opened October 10, 1927 for a run of 217 performances; the following season, a revival ran for 137 performances. The folk-opera version, Porgy and Bess, was scored by George Gershwin and adapted by DuBose and Ira Gershwin in 1935.
Bio by Felicia Hardison Londré for Encyclopedia.com
Ira Gershwin was born in New York City, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, on December 6, 1896. The older brother of George Gershwin, he attended Townsend Harris High School in New York City where one of his closest friends and fellow students was E.Y. “Yip” Harburg. The two worked together writing lyrics and Ira started his career in 1918 under the pen name of Arthur Francis. It was not until 1924 that Ira and George began a collaboration that would prove one of the most successful and prolific in history.
Their first collaborations were for Broadway: Lady, Be Good! (1924, including "Fascinating Rhythm" and, although it was cut from the show, "The Man I Love"), Tip Toes (1925, including "Sweet and Low Down"), Oh Kay! (1926, including "Clap Yo' Hands," "Do-Do-Do," "Maybe," and "Someone To Watch Over Me"), Funny Face (1927, including '"S Wonderful"), Rosalie (1928, including "How Long Has This Been Going On"), Show Girl (1929, including "Liza"), Strike Up the Band (1930, including "I've Got A Crush On You" and "Soon"), Girl Crazy (1930, including "But Not For Me," "Embraceable You," "Bidin' My Time," and "I Got Rhythm"), Delicious (1931, including "Blah Blah Blah"), Of Thee I Sing (1931, the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize and which included "Of Thee I Sing," "Love Is Sweeping The Country," and "Who Cares").
In 1931, the two brothers headed to Hollywood producing a score for Fox studios, Delicious, starring Janet Gaynor. They returned to New York again working on Broadway producing Pardon My English (1933, including "Isn't It A Pity" and "Lorelei") and Let 'Em Eat Cake (1933, including “Mine”).
In 1935, Ira, in collaboration with Dubose Heyward, wrote the words to George Gershwin's music for Porgy and Bess, a work that straddles the world of opera and Broadway and includes such classic songs as "Summertime," "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," "It Ain’t Necessarily So" and "I Got Plenty O'nuttin." Many consider it the greatest American opera written to date.
In 1937, Ira and George accepted a contract from RKO and headed back to Hollywood. Among the movies they wrote scores for were Shall We Dance (1937, which included such classic songs as "They All Laughed," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," and "They Can't Take That Away From Me"), A Damsel in Distress (1937, included "Things Are Looking Up," "A Foggy Day," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," and "I Can't Be Bothered Now").
While working on the score for the Goldwyn Follies of 1938, George Gershwin died from an inoperable brain tumor. Ira never got over the loss of his brother, and he is said to have never again believed in God. The score they were in the midst of produced such incredible standards as "Love Walked In" and "Love Is Here To Stay."
After George's premature death, Ira Gershwin continued to be active as a lyricist, creating classic songs with many of best composers of the day, including Kurt Weill ("The Saga of Jenny" from Lady in the Dark, 1941), Jerome Kern (“Long Ago and Far Away" from Cover Girl, 1944), and Harold Arlen ("The Man That Got Away" from A Star is Born, 1954).
Ira retired at the age 58. In 1964, Ira added lyrics to three of his brother George's unfinished works. Ira Gershwin died in Beverly Hills, California on August 17, 1983. On Dec. 6, 1996, Ira was the first lyricist to be honored by a special tribute performance on the centennial observance of his birth, in New York's Carnegie Hall.