Eva Gauthier Sang Vernon Duke’s Songs First

It is disappointing not to have brought back from that momentous November night in 1923 at Aeolian Hall a recording of Eva Gauthier with George Gershwin accompanying her on the piano.  Innocent Ingenue Baby, Stairway to Paradise and Swanee seem lost to us forever.  The last morsel left to us of Eva seems to be Panis Angelicus (Angels’ Bread).  Through the hiss and tumble of the 78 rmp, we hear the clear articulation of a highly trained recitalist accompanied by a small orchestra, not a solo pianist.  Perhaps now it would be better to give up seeking for an original 20s soprano-with-just-piano.  It would be better to close the curtains; to shut out distractions; to turn on a strong light; to narrow the enquiry and to ask the search engine for a scholar, a musicologist perhaps, who documents facts and describes the conditions in which classically trained singers and Russian composer-pianists lived, in New York city, in the 1920s.

For it is a perennial puzzle why Tin Pan Alley-Broadway musics have been challenged by “serious” music circles as to their artistic validity.  What conditions were present so that a Conservatory trained Russian emigré (Vernon Duke) and a Tin Pan Alley Alban Berg admirer (George Gershwin) could advance?  I asked myself; for songs–melody, lyric, harmony and rhythm, human bodies, acoustic instruments–are not fixed like foundations of houses (stones in the ground).  Songs are something like clouds, appearing and untouchable, somehow felt, passing, first an apple, an Eiffle tower, a locomotive train and so forth.

I went, therefore, to the new Google Chrome browser and typed in “Eva Gauthier, Vernon Duke, the International Composers Guild,” remembering that Vernon Duke wrote that Eva had “sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild.”  We THINK George Gershwin first heard his music here and that Eva introduced them after the concert.  We imagine without knowing. We know one thing: Just as Eva Gauthier introduced Vernon Duke’s songs for the ICG in New York, so she sang George Gershwin’s at Aeolian Hall.  Not everyone discredited the maverick move on Gauthier’s part.  Henry T. Parker, a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript, wrote, “[George Gershwin] is the beginning of the age of sophisticated jazz.” And in Google Books and Question, we find a priceless reference, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s by Carol J. Oja.  Clicking there on “International Composers Guild,” we read that it was spun off from the League of Composers and founded by—goodness!—Edgard Varèse.  Just dropping into the chapter entitled “Crossing Over George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman and the Modernists,” one learns that Gershwin himself felt in 1926 that the word “jazz” had ceased to have any definite meaning.

So if we could not bring back something of Eva’s singing and George’s playing from that Aeolian night, we do have one golden document of Vernon Duke, pianist-composer, accompanying a Russian-school trained singer, Luba Tcheresky, on one of his songs, Ages Ago.  It is the portrait of a mature Vernon Duke and a little known soprano Tcheresky in her independently released recording, In this Life –  A Celebration Honoring Vernon Duke’s Centennial (CD Baby/2003).

Vernon Duke at the piano with Luba Tcheresky singing his song, Ages Ago