June 2008

Yet, however stimulating it is to think that we are beginning to hear the actual playing of Jacob Gershovitz, the ten year old George Gershwin, at Max Rosen’s (Maxie Rosenzweig’s?) pianola—starting, stopping, starting again—in the year 1908, it has to be admitted that to listen to these early piano rolls of the five, ten, fifteen years of Gershwin’s recording career, is a bit funny, fun, strange and portentous all at the same time. The pounding, driving rhythms of the ragtime inflected melodies seem to dance with happy-go-luck-insistence until we demand an explanation, some benevolence of meaning to seal them for us. It comes in the form of song, of course, but a song that came before George himself. And before that particular method of preserving song for posterity, the piano roll. Sheet music only boomed after 1892 when Charles K. Harris published a happy and sad waltz called “After the Ball.” This song sold over two million copies of sheet music within the first few years it was released in the Tin Pan Alley era. Unprecedented in American musical culture, songs, sheet music, and those who could play the songs to showcase them—the song pluggers—were in business.

Scholars like Mark Booth in his book, The Experience of Songs, can expound upon the details of why this song is the forerunner of all American pop songs in such elements: the story, the story-within-a-song, sad story with happy melody, the way the melody emphasizes the lyric and unforgettable expertise of the chorus. Just reciting the refrain out loud with no melody easily reveals that some of those facts:

After the ball is over
After the break of morn

After the dancers’ leaving
After the stars are gone

Many a heart is aching
If you could read them all

Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball

The verse continues 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, its um pah pah pulse accompanying the story of a man who accuses his girlfriend of kissing another man at a dance, when in fact it was her brother. This man, now elderly, only finds out the truth upon her death. Our character’s massive false projection would become a subliminal soundtrack to many American family outings in the park years later where John Phillip Sousa bands lightly played it as background music.

This song and American music publishing houses set the imagination of the public singing and dancing everywhere, in homes, in theaters, in saloons, in parks, just about everywhere a song could be sung. “Tin Pan Alley” was a phrase that described the din of ten thousand pianos clashing like garbage can cymbal-lids in one New York City neighborhood. Every door had a song to sell.

Here below is a video of Charles K. Harris singing this song many years later, probably in the late 1920s, perhaps just at the time when George Gershwin was finishing his piano roll career.

Charles K. Harris - “After The Ball”

But let us follow ten year old George to his friend, Max Rosen, at his violin recital in case we can pick up there something authentic and genuine, without a scratchy 78 rmp sound, that will make this Tin Pan Alley-pre-Follies epoc more familiar to us. George seemed to have been enthralled by Max’s playing and the music itself. Perhaps in his neighbor’s house, there was another instrument—a player piano. During the first decade or so it seems that 2.5 million player pianos were sold and sitting in the living rooms of the American people. The player piano was the equivalent to the home theater and karaoke machines in bars and restaurants of today.

George began to teach himself the piano by slowly pumping the foot pedals that pulled the paper roll with holes in it, causing the piano keys to go down. George slowed the roll down and imitated the movements of the keys with his fingers. His very first memory, at the age of 6, of a player piano appears to be in relation to Anton Rubenstein’s composition, Melody in F. Here by the great good fortune of Artis Wodehouse’s deep scholarship, we have George Gershwin’s actual words:

“I stood outside a penny arcade listening to an automatic piano leaping through [Anton] Rubenstein’s Melody in F. The peculiar jumps in the music held me rooted. To this very day, I can’t hear the tune without picturing myself outside the arcade on 125th Street, standing there in barefoot and overalls, drinking it all in avidly.”

Piano rolls were made at this time to help the sale of the booming sheet music industry. Rosters included performances of classical music giants like Anton Rubenstein, Gustav Mahler, Edvard Grieg, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Claude Debussy, Sergei Prokofieff, Paderewski, Josef Lhevinne, Josef Hoffman and Vladimir Horowitz as well as the vaudeville-Tin Pan Alley-composers: Scott Joplin, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Eubie Blake. Because, too, the newly arrived eastern European immigration population was so large, special “world music” collections were produced of Hungarian, Polish and Yiddish melodies.

Artis Wodehouse not only gave us some of George’s actual words but she first hand re-created for the digital recording age George Gershwin’s actual playing recorded on the piano rolls called Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls. Below is a video from YouTube of George Gershwin’s song, “Kickin’ the Clouds Away” from Wodehouse’s amazing work.

“Kickin’ the clouds Away” on Weber Duo- Art Pianola

Our last post began, “What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin?” And in attempting to answer that question, we find only another question. What was the life of an ordinary Russian Jewish immigrant in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century? Perhaps the letters of Moishe, Rosa, Ira or George would be of help? Now, being in the mountains of Southern Brazil with only an internet connection at hand, I could not find much after typing in Google, “letters of George Gershwin” and “letters of Ira Gershwin,” enter. My query only yielded the fact that Moishe and Rosa bought a piano for their first son, Ira (Israel). But it wasn’t Ira who had much interest in the piano. His younger brother, George (Jacob), began to tinker with it.

And why did Moishe and Rosa, ten years or so now in a new country after fleeing the dangers of revolution in Russia, buy a piano? Another Google search and we find that after the Civil War, twenty-five thousand new pianos were sold every year and that five hundred thousand children were studying the piano in 1887. Why this need for pianos? Tin Pan Alley. More than just a neighborhood in New York City, located on West 28^th Street, Tin Pan Alley was an era of songwriting in American Popular Music.

And East 28^th Street wasn’t the only source for songs in New York City, so was Manhattan’s Bowery and Second Avenue, the center of the Russian-Yiddish Theater. This professional theater started in 1876 in Eastern Europe and was re-established in New York when a wave of immigrants arrived in their new home after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1892, the New York Yiddish Theater presented a Jewish version of King Lear to rave reviews.

American’s racial and religious melting pot was also a musical melting pot. Ragtime, stride and blues mixed with Bach and Beethoven along with Yiddish music. Though George Gershwin or Irving Berlin (Israel Baline) never composed for the Yiddish stage, Russian Yiddish melodies were a spring source for their compositions. Hollywood composer Bernard Hermann remembers a worried George Gershwin saying that his “Summertime,” the operatic centerpiece of Porgy and Bess, sounded “too Yiddish.” Jack Gottlieb in his book, Funny it Doesn’t Sound Jewish, finds powerful similarities in both the melody and lyrics between an old Yiddish lullaby, “Lu, Lu, Lulink” and “Summertime.”

What, we ask, was the life of an ordinary man or woman in the time of Ira and George Gershwin? Of Vernon Duke? To answer such questions as well as those raised last week in this web log, perhaps we might parse an answer by examining the lyrics of Ira Gershwin himself. Perhaps the first clue lies in the opening lyrics of Ira Gershwin’s “I Can’t Get Started”:

I’ve been around the world in a plane /
Settled revolutions ….

All three of these young men had been affected by a series of military conflicts in Russia. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia forced Vladmir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), educated at the Kiev Conservatory as a music student of Reinhold Gliere and Marian Dombrovsky, to flee to Istanbul, Turkey. In 1921, he and his mother arrived in New York where he became a protégé of—George Gershwin. An earlier revolution in Russia which began with the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 led to the birth of these two Gershwin brothers in Brooklyn, New York, 1896 and 1898 respectively. And too, all three Russia descendents, now Americans, George and Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, were masters of song and lyric which console sadness and return torment for joy.

But since Ira and George were first to arrive in the Lower East Side, how did it all really begin, way back in the old country? With a love story, it seems.

Jacob and Israel Gershovitz’s parents had dated in St. Petersburg, Russia in the late 19th century. Their mother, Rose Bruskin, was the daughter of a furrier and their father, Moishe Gershovitz, was the son of Yakov Gershovitz, an inventor who had completed his twenty-five years of compulsory military service. About Yakov, George is thought to have said, “The only creative ancestry that I have seems to have been my father’s father who, he tells me, was an inventor. His ingenuity had something to do with Czar’s guns.” They met when Rose was 15 and Moishe, 19. But shortly after they met, Rose’s father decided to move his furrier business to New York.

Rose’s father was one of many thousands of Russian emigrants to the United States somewhere around the late 1880s. In 1881, the assassination was blamed on the Russian Jewish population and so began a series of massacres, known as “pograms” in Russia, meaning “to demolish violently.” Immigration records show that between 1820 and 1920, over 3,250,000 emigrated from Russian to the United States. And too, Moishe Gershovitz, required by law to serve in the military for twenty-five years, left St. Petersburg in 1892 to propose to Rose.

As soon as Moishe arrived, he began searching for Rose Bruskin, already somewhere in New York City. But first he had to find his uncle, a tailor named Greenstein. He knew where Rose was. Moishe, now “Morris,” not only found Rose, but he married her on July 21, 1895. They lived above Simpson’s Pawnshop at the corner of Hester Street and Eldrige Street when they had their first child, Israel Gershovitz, (Ira Gershwin) on December 6, 1896. Two years later, Jacob Gershovitz or George Gershovitz was born. To seem more American, they changed their Russian last name from Gershovitz to Gershwin.

And if we ask why we go further back in this particular period of Early Broadway and Blues/Jazz Music than in any other, the answer is no doubt that Tin Pan Alley-Follies-Vaudeville-Broadway play narratives, for all their beauty and glamour, were a very imperfect medium, an over-idealized medium from our view now. It is true that they were almost perfectly capable of fulfilling one of the chief offices of the lyric which is to make people sing, simply and naturally, about ordinary daily life. And yes, Ira Gershwin’s lyrics to “I Can’t Get Started” dramatize the age old girl-doesn’t-want-boy even though boy is the perfect boy (Oxford grad., very well off, well connected, etc.). Even more, our narrator lists, in classical list form, flying a plane, conquering Spain, surveying the North pole, starring in Metro-Goldwyn, out-golfing any pro, mingling with all the movie idols of the day as well as political figures—as we will see—Clarke Gable, Greta Garbo, Count Basie, Robert Taylor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Leontyne Price. And though the lyrics are fabulously easy to sing in the shower, we know s/he still doesn’t get the girl/boy. And why does Vernon Duke’s music make him/her seem so upbeat about it? So almost, well, elated?

One question spawns many more: Wasn’t Ira Gershwin, THE George Gershwin’s brother? Why was Vernon Duke composing music with Ira Gershwin? Who was Vernon Duke anyway? How did he meet Ira Gershwin? And just what were these Follies, Ziegfeld and Goldwyn?