Happy 125th Birthday to George Gershwin. The American pianist whose compositions spanned popular, jazz and classical genres.
https://youtu.be/5HMBniu9Evg?si=x2ODY1XhBDnVckcJ
https://youtu.be/FHmu7tUhRVA?si=W1MZL_caMwz474x2
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/mastertalent/detail/102427/Gersh…
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/george-gershwin-about-the-comp…
He was born Jacob Gershowitz, on 26 September 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrants. As a boy, he could play popular and classical works on his brother Ira's piano by ear. In 1913 he quit school to study music and began composing for Tin Pan Alley; by 1919 he had his first hit "Swanee" and his first Broadway show "La, La, Lucille." In less than three weeks in 1924, he composed "Rhapsody in Blue," originally for Paul Whiteman's relatively small swing band and later orchestrated by Ferde Grofé. "Concerto in F" followed the next year, and his musical success "Oh, Kay!" (which included "Someone to Watch Over Me") the year after that. Success continued: "Funny Face" (1927), the tone poem "American in Paris" (1928), "Girl Crazy" (1929), "Of Thee I Sing" (1931 the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize), and the first true American opera: "Porgy and Bess" (1935). He moved to Hollywood where his songs were performed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In 1937 he fell in love with Paulette Goddard, then married to Charlie Chaplin. He was heartbroken that she would not leave her husband for him. When he fell ill, that June, it was written off as stress. A month later he died of a brain tumor, five hours after a failed surgical attempt to remove it. Funerals were held in both Hollywood and New York.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan stephan@cc.wwu.edu
So here’s the rest of the transcultural story. Deutsche Welle TV 🇩🇪 was showing people celebrating Gershwin’s birthday all over Germany, and they featured Lana del Rey’s rendition of “Summertime” which I thoroughly enjoyed.
But this got me a-cogitating. Is Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess a cultural appropriation of his?
Justin Davidson a post-modernist, classical music critic says: “True, the only depiction of African-American life [Porgy and Bess] that makes it to the opera stage with any regularity was written by three white guys.”
This makes me think also of the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet which this season at the Met is directed by Carrie Cracknell, an English director.
Hmmm 🤔. A Bizet opera inspired by a novella about Spanish Gypsy life written by French author Prosper Mérimée, who might have been indirectly influenced by Alexander Pushkin, a Russian who wrote a narrative poem entitled The Gypsies that Mérimée would translate into French. 🧐 Hmmm? Or else Mérimée might have been influenced by George Borrows’s The Zincali, an Englishman’s account of the Romanis of Spain. Transcultural influences are pretty much unavoidable in our artistic world.
So then my thoughts went to another culture. Maybe I don’t care for Hemingway’s portrayal of Cuban culture because at one time the salient, representative narrator of Cuban Culture was a white man who liked bullfighting and thought Cubans could only be mini Spaniards and who had racist leanings in a culture where Santiago, his fisherman, would have had some aspects of the Mandinga or the Carabali cultures. Like Gershwin, maybe Hemingway couldn’t quite understand everything.
The white, southerner DuBose Heyward, whose novel Porgy inspired Gershwin, represented the African Americans in a somewhat realistic way —that is if his novel is opposed to stereotypical portrayals found in southern minstrelsy and antebellum narratives, etc.
Nowadays some of us academics —me included— see our current culture as not yet becoming a melting pot but as a mixed salad from which a few of the ingredients, including some of the white croutons, wish to be left out.
Nonetheless, I do love both Porgy … and The Old Man …. They’re both period icons whose meaning is constantly shifting as they are recast by succeeding generations, and when they’re taught or performed, their literary or musical histories should be all-inclusive —warts, etc.
By the way, that is exactly what the Metropolitan Opera did when it opened the 2021 season with Porgy and Bess. Thusly, creating a lot of healthy and hopeful discussions in some academic circles within fields of the study of whiteness and blackness.
Sadly, misunderstanding the need for historical or literary perspectives, political repercussions against healthy discussions have manifested themselves in States such as Florida as “anti-woke” laws which are forbidding —under penalty of law— this type of discussion in classroom settings.
Gershwin became a revolutionary thinker when he stipulated that only black actors be cast for black characters, who, ironically, had to perform in segregated venues. Hemingway’s vision of Cuba is totally interesting to me not only for what he portrays, but also because of what he omits, and Carmen is still my favorite opera about Spanish gypsies. What if Shakespeare had made the same stipulation for Othello, the Moor?
The Professor