George Gershwin

Self-Portrait with Allen Tanner, circa 1924-28 by Pavel Tchelitchew

Portrait of Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) by Pavel Chenmuyer

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

But by becoming marked as the “new Diaghilev protege merging from out of nowhere Russia via the United States” of the Paris salons, Vernon Duke gained the power to move on notable terms among his kind; and that gain for a young exiled Russian pianist-composer was serious.

To speak of gain while Vernon Duke, basking in the light and sunshine of Diaghilev’s invitation to write a ballet (Zephyr et Flore), and feeling a young man’s mind spreading itself with a luxurious sense of freedom in the world to his remotest past, seems appropriate.  Everything to such a mind was gain.  All experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and reflection, enriching and nourishing.  The utmost we can say, is that he had taken to heart the lessons of his work with George Gershwin, Rubinstein and the Piano Concerto.

Perhaps the most branded upon him was his bucolic Prokokievian sense of melody and chord voicings.  His tendency to lean upon the musical thinking and structures of his Russian peers rings out most happily in homespun Russian joys and sorrows.

Because he also was a prolific diarist, we are now able to see into a window in time to the very moment when this branding must have began.  It might have begun in his home with Allen Tanner and Pavel Tchelitchew at No. 150 Blvd. Montparnasse, as recorded in his autobiography, Passport to Paris, pgs. 109-110:

“Well, let’s hear this music that you came to conquer Paris with,” Tchelitchew said, winking good-naturedly at Tanner. I sailed into the the Concerto with gusto and was rewarded by the astonished faces of my two listeners.

“What’s gotten into you, Dima?” Allen queried, pouting no longer. “This is a really good concerto—a little too much Prokofiev, a bit of undigested Rachmaninoff here and there, but you can write music—of that there is no doubt.”

Pavlik roared with pleasure, then sat down, suddenly pensive: “Yes, you might do…for Beaumont, not for Diaghilev. Diaghilev is too great a snob and wants names. However, the Count de Beaumont is launching a ballet season with Picasso, Massine and Satie, is calling it Soirées de Paris, and we all know him. He may commission a score from you.”

Allen made a face.  “What about Valitchka?” he asked Pavlik.

“Not Valitchka Bolm, surely?” I cut in.

They both laughed.“No, silly—Nouvel, Valitchka Nouvel, Diaghilev’s business manager and business administrator—a man, not a girl. He’s crazy about Allen and who can tell, may take a fancy to you,” went on Tchelitchew. He knows a lot about music, having founded the Contemporary Music Group with Nourok in Russia. Valitchka is a crotchety old boy, but he means well.”

I expressed my delight at the prospect of meeting the the male Valitchka and Allen promised to telephone him in the morning.

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

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

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus

So then, we learn from Vernon Duke that he met George Gershwin through Eva Gauthier, “the fine artist who did so much for new music.  Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them…”  She also was the first one to introduce George Gershwin’s songs in an experimental jazz-classical concert on November 1, 1923 in Aeolian Hall, the Alice Tulley Hall of its time. Her program included Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. It also included a selection of songs from American musical revues by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Walter Donaldson and George Gershwin, accompanied by Gershwin himself, “shy and awkward and earnest at the piano.”

And yet what do we really know of Eva Gauthier, we ask, racing toward the Wikipedia?  Some sites say she was, “the first woman to introduce Jazz and Oriental Music to America,” another, “the first Western classically trained female to study the music of the Orient and Javanese gamelan ensemble,” still another, “high priestess of modern song,” that she “sang with the Sultan’s wives” and “upset the musical establishment.”

H.C. Colles, a music critic for The Times in 1923 wrote, “Eclecticism in the making of a program is an excellent thing, and Miss Eva Gauthier was evidently determined to exploit its excellence to the full in the song recital which she gave last night at Aeolian Hall…Between [the classical pieces], Miss Gauthier offered half a dozen ragtime songs straight from the vaudeville entertainments of Broadway, accompanied by Mr. George Gershwin, one of the ablest exponents of the craft, beginning with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ending with songs by Mr. Gershwin, continued by request of the audience until the singer had to confess that her repertory in this ‘lovely music’ was exhausted…and so the thing was a failure.  It [ragtime and jazz] has developed into all it is capable of.  It has become a thing which captivates people all over the world and hypnotized them into dancing the night away: It is impossible to say why.  But its home is not the concert room.”

However, in viewing some photographs of her, one cannot escape the conviction that the serious face with its expression of royalty and discernment and equine power has stamped itself upon the minds of people who remember Eva Gauthier, so that we wish for the voice to come ringing out at us from the computer screen.

Her grandson, simply known as “Mark” in a review of the online article, “Grand tradition: Eva Gauthier: 1885-1958: Great Canadian Musical Figures of the Past” at Amazon.com in 2006, has left us a personal and pleading reflection:

“Eva Gauthier was my great-grandmother and I obtained this article from another (public) source instead of Amazon. I gave it 3 stars because it is very short and does not even come close to describing my great-grandmother’s rich and interesting history. There’s a lot of other available information about how Eva is credited with giving George Gershwin his start, and that she was very close friends with Maurice Ravel (wrote “Bolero”). I have a photo in my living room featuring Eva, Gershwin, Ravel and others at a birthday party she hosted for Ravel in 1928. Beautiful!”

Ned Rorem, an American composer especially praised for his song settings, has described her as he encountered her in 1957:

“Eva Gauthier, she of the blue hair and endless supply of satin hats, inhabited a tiny flat in the now defunct Hotel Woodward on East Fifty-third, with an upright Knabe, ten crates of scores, and a yapping Pekingese. Mme. Gauthier was four feet ten inches worth of experienced opinion, always precise, sometimes precisely wrong. She was already seventy when I began playing for her coaching sessions in 1957…Debussy had taught her “Yniold” in Pelléas et Mélisande by rote, she claimed.

She also claimed intimacy with Ravel and Gershwin, showing us her programs devoted exclusively to this pair. During those programs she changed garb with each group, involving vast swatches of stuff from Java, where for years she had lived with an importer husband…”

In all these records, except for her grandson, one feels that the recorder, even when he was in her actual presence, kept his distance and caricatured this innovative woman and failed to measure the significance of the cross-continental musical experiments of her early years.  Only her grandson seems to know the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In concert singing, where so much of the personality is subsumed into the song, the absence of a imaginative intelligence is a great lack; and her critics, who have been mostly of the opposite sex, have resented, half consciously perhaps, the great abundance of a quality which has been held to be distasteful, especially in her day.  Eva Gauthier was not unwise; she was not a dabbler; though she did not read music and possessed some inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing simplicity of children.

One feels that to most people now, as to Ned Rorem in 1957, that she was “a fantastic teacher, if ‘teacher’ means one whose enthusiasm is transferable—who leads horses to water and makes them drink. Gauthier’s enthusiasm was for the intelligence of music, and though she couldn’t read music she could talk it…What students sought from Pierre Bernac in Paris and from Maggie Teyte in London—French repertory from someone who knew the words—they could find from the Canadian Gauthier in New York, plus the bonus of native literature… After her death, Jennie Tourel remained the only active singer in New York (the musical center of the world!) equipped to coach Franco-American repertory. Today, no one.”

And if we consider these portraits more closely, we find that they are the records of a daring woman, a woman who had crossed oceans and languages back and forth and from whom issued a desire to make unknown things knowable. We do know about her days of youth; we know that the culture, the philosophy, the fame and the influence were all built upon a strong foundation—she was the daughter of an explorer and astronomer and the niece of Canada’s first French-Canadian Premier.

One of the few remaining recordings of her singing is preserved.

Panis Angelicus by Franz Liszt
(based on a gregorian chant with a very loose paraphrase translation
by the narrator)

Panis angelicus…….The angels’ bread
fit panis hominum…….is our bread
Dat panis coelicus…….heaven’s bread
figuris terminum…….ends all symbols
O res mirabilis!…….O what a miracle!
Manducat Dominum…….our teacher becomes our food
Pauper, servus et humilis…….poor, serving endlessly, and humble.

Eva Gauthier singing Cesar Franck’s Panis Angelicus

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke), Piano Concerto in C (Scott Dunn, piano)

Vladimir Dukelsky (Vernon Duke) became a kind of omni-present shadow to Sergei Prokokiev in the circle of creative geniuses who composed Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, one more refugee in a group of Russian patronage system trained artists in exile. Prokokiev, his childhood friend from their composition class with Reinhold Gliere at the Kiev Conservatory, reviewed the Piano Concerto in C, saying that it was “full of superior melodies, very well designed, harmonically beautiful and not too ‘modernist’.” Igor Stravinsky, had him perform as one of the four pianists, along with Francis Poulenc, George Auric and Vittorio Rieti in the Ballet Russe’s London premiere of his Les Noces. All except Rieti would go on to compose scores for upcoming ballet seasons. His Piano Concerto became his passport into a sub-group known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes, forerunners to Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Aurey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre). Conductor Sergei Koussevitsky introduced his First Symphony on the same program as Prokokiev’s Fiery Angel as if they were companion compositions, reflecting their shared ongoing musical dialogue.

An ocean away, George Gershwin had been enchanted by the second theme of the Piano Concerto in private rehearsals by Dukelsky. Some of the few remaining first hand accounts from someone who knew Gershwin well is preserved here in an article Vernon Duke wrote called, “Gershwin, Schillinger and Dukelsky: Some Reminiscences”:

“I first encountered George Gershwin’s name in 1921 in Constantinople I was then seventeen, just out of a Russia torn by the Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917. In the club run for the Russian refugees by the YMCA, I found some American popular songs—mostly Turkish reprints. Except for Irving Berlin’s All By Myself, with its fine ragtime gait, I was not impressed with the banal syncopations of this music.

Then one day a Turkish edition of a piece bewilderingly entitled Swanee by composer bewilderingly named Gershwin fell into my hands. The dash and drive, the rhythmic vigor, and, above all, the unmistakable musicality of the number made me sit up instantly.

I reached the United States in 1922 and met George in the same year through Eva Gauthier, the fine artist who did so much for new music. Miss Gauthier sang some pretentious and excessively dissonant songs of mine at a concert of the International Composers’ Guild. I don’t remember Gershwin’s reaction to them, but I do remember mine to George’s playing of his tunes. To anyone who has not heard Gershwin play, his piano magic hard to describe.

Gershwin impressed me as a superbly equipped and highly-skilled composer—not just a concocter of commercial jingles. His extraordinary left hand performed miracles in counter-rhythms, shrewd canonic devices, and unexpected harmonic shifts.”

George Gershwin, Swanee from Artis Wodehouses’s Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls)

To listen to Vladimir Dukelsky’s Piano Concerto in C attentively, is to become aware how little one knows about him. It is also to become aware of the gullibility with which we had accepted his more popular incarnation as Vernon Duke. At what moment and by what means this alias version of Sergei Prokokiev’s dear friend and Vladimir Horowitz’s classmate way back at the Kiev Conservatory fades into a montage of Vladimir Dukelsky is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the first performance of the concerto in 1999 as part of the “The Gershwin Circle,” a series of performances which focused on the international impact of American pianism, with George Gershwin and his music as a nucleus, presented by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall.

This composition is Dukelsky-Duke’s ‘lost’ concerto, originally written in 1923 at the request of the rising concert pianist and Aeolian Duo-Art and AMPICO player piano recording artist, Arthur Rubinstein. Perhaps Arthur Rubinstein with his phrase about ‘a one-movement, pianistically grateful, not too cerebral’ piece gave momentum to this 20 year old Russian emigré who was playing the piano in restaurants and conducting and composing for vaudeville and burlesque. Or perhaps it was the phrase ‘go to Paris’ where a premiere would be easier for Rubinstein to stage. Vladimir Dukelsky went to Paris, Arthur Rubinstein did not. The ‘lost’ Piano Concerto in C stayed in its original two-piano score for 76 years until Scott Dunn orchestrated it for its 1999 premiere.

Although, Gershwin left behind him (at the age of 37), more than one thousand popular songs and more explorative musical obras such as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the opera, Porgy and Bess, much of his music was disdained by classical music critics. On the other hand, Hollywood film producers criticized the opera composer as being “too highbrow.” So runs a dialogue about the two Gershwins—Gershwin the jazz and Gershwin the classical; Gershwin the lowbrow and Gershwin the highbrow. And too, brother-lyricist Ira Gershwin was symbiotically tied to the jazz/classical dichotomy. The Gershwin team wrote “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” for their first joint effort, Lady Be Good, in 1924 which also introduced the young brother and sister dancing team, Fred and Adele Astaire.

In that same year, Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky), would go to Paris and write music for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, even though it had been George Gershwin who had told him first, “Don’t be afraid to go lowbrow.”

George Gershwin’s own piano recording of his song, “Swanee”

The aspiring songwriter wrote a song called “Swanee” and recorded it on a piano roll. This song was a take off on Stephen Foster’s 1850s song, “Old Folks at Home” or “Way Down upon the Swanee.” It had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its time. Gershwin’s 1919 song was written in just twelve minutes with lyricist Irving Caesar at Gershwin’s apartment where a ruckus card game was going on. Sixty young women dancing with electric lights in their shoes tapped along with the song at a Capitol Theater revue called Demi-Tasse in October of that year but it got no notice. Though Foster’s song and this one has since raised haunting racial issues, Foster’s intended meaning was no matter how far we may travel or what sadness comes to us in the world, our hearts yearn for the best memories of childhood and the security of family, parents and home. Gershwin’s song made allusions to the “old folks at home” and “down by the Swanee.” But if home is where the heart is, then perhaps there’s likely to be a life-giving river nearby too.

A few weeks after the song’s revue flop, Gershwin played the song at a piano sing along at a party and Al Jolson was there. He put it in his stage show, Sinbad, and recorded it for Columbia. The song sold a million music copies and a million records. Gershwin was just 20 years old.

And so,  though possessing a potentially negative pedigree in his early life—a first generation American, the son of two immigrants, new homes in different parts of town, a high school dropout—George Gershwin’s ascent began. He was a piano accompanist-song demonstrator on Tin Pan Alley; he wrote songs of his own; he collaborated with aspiring lyricists to bring a fuller form to his songs than simple pianistic versions; he was taken into the service of the Standard Music Roll Company and the Aeolian Company to make player piano rolls; he was a part of the technical innovations in recording when the Aeolian, Ampico, and Welte-Mignon companies introduced their unique reproducing systems; he created arrangements for two and four hands, adding all kinds of inner voices, obbligato counterpoints and codas to embellish simple songs; he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway; he wrote the musical, La, La, Lucille, that ran for 104 nights; and we already know that other singers sang his songs, (Al Jolson).

But there was one society in which he was not popular—perhaps only because of a financial-legal agreement that prevented its coming into existence. This hugely gifted young person wanted to write an opera called The Dybbuk, based on a Yiddish play by S. Ansky which documents some of the folk beliefs and stories of Hassidic Jews. However, when Gershwin found that the rights to the play were owned by the Italian composer, Lodovico Rocca, he gave up. This echoed another situation earlier in his life in the time when he was an admirer of the music of Joseph Rumshisky, one of the main composers in the Yiddish Theater scene on Second Avenue on the Lower East Side. Boris Thomashevsky, then the biggest star of this theater, invited Gershwin and to Sholem Secunda collaborate on a Yiddish operetta. Secunda, however, refused to work with an “unproven” song-plugger.

And yet his passion for music (arranging, composing, transcribing, recording) was profound. When he held forth upon stride and ragtime styles, upon the varied harmonies Chopin and Liszt or Debussy had structured; and about what violinist Jascha Heifitz might accomplish, no doubt he created for Vernon Duke—then, a new immigrant to New York—that atmosphere of hope and ardent curiosity, spiced with sound learning that serves to spur the imagination of a young composer-pianist. So it might have been how Vernon saw him (narrator’s creation):

George was the happy of happiest men, and

I, a looker-on of this fusion of angelic and hellish New Country sounds,

An admirer, noting his ardent interest in each situation where

He and music met each other.

Musicians need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle, who warns, who foresees. It must have been pleasurable for Duke to listen as Gershwin talked and then to cease to listen, to let the insistent, confident voice run on, while he slipped from theory to practice and improvised a few riffs of his own making in his head. But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tightly to accommodate the formlessness of life. So when Gershwin ceased to theorize and commandingly began to play in twenty different “American” styles, sight reading this and that, changing keys easily, instantly, there issued forth ceaseless variations of Russian, German, French, English-Irish and Latin and African musical syntaxes from all corners of the world, forging this new American musical language.

He had achieved being a song plugger as he had achieved being a songwriter and collaborator, as he had achieved being a piano roll recording artist and a Broadway composer, as he achieved, it might seem, in everything he undertook. And he had won the friendship of Vernon Duke and the undying devotion of his elder brother, Ira Gershwin.

But you may say, we asked you to speak about Vernon Duke’s, “I Can’t Get Started”—what has that got to do with Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music sales, pianolas, song pluggers and early Yiddish musical theater? I will try to explain. I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion and about that certain kind of exchange between one who knows and one who does not, otherwise known as the teacher and the student. Here, this interdependent relationship is represented by George Gershwin and Vernon Duke.

These two men were both composers, pianists and song-writers of Russian heritage. Their paths crossed in New York City in the year 1921 when George Gershwin was twenty-three years old, shortly after the huge success of his song, “Swanee.” Vernon Duke, just eighteen, had also played piano in Constantinople cafes though he had studied piano and composition at the Kiev Conservatory under Reinhold Gliere. George encouraged “Vladimir Dukelsky” to continue writing classical music but to explore popular songs in the American style, saying, “Don’t be scared about going low-brow” and to change his name to “Vernon Duke.”

But how, we ask, as we type “George Gershwin” and “Vernon Duke” into the search field at YouTube, can we even hope to come to grips with these early Broadway-Follies composers? And then opening, downloading, fast forwarding and scanning the videos, something emerges from the grainy moving images—the outline of a man, the shadowy portrait of somebody who is not “Tin Pan Alley” or “Ragtime” or “not quite classical,” but an interesting, complex and individual human being. We know him through his brother, Ira, who refused a new piano. We see him hanging on Max Rosen’s coattails at the player piano, learning piano roll versions of perhaps, “The Old Folks at Home” and “After the Ball.” We watch his parents sending him off to be trained in European classical music with Charles Hambitzer. We observe with irony as he spends one year in high school studying accounting in order to help with the family’s restaurant business only to drop out and go to work as the youngest ever song plugger at Jerome H. Remick and Company, one of Tin Pan Alley’s sheet music publishers. Here he earns $15 a week, the average salary of Americans at the time.

The song plugger is sitting in a booth at a piano and playing Remick’s own songs for the vaudeville performers that come in looking for new material. Sometimes he is out bantering with singers, orchestra leaders, dancers and comedians to use the songs. (It is even said that the “v” in “Gershvin” became “Gershwin” at this point because he had been so impressed by comedian Ed Wynn.) Soon he is recording piano rolls because Mr. Remick wants the recordings to help the sales of the sheet music. This 16 year old George Gershwin is in the right place at the right time.

George Gershwin would go on to record one hundred and forty player piano rolls over a ten year period. Below is a video of a piano roll recording of his first instrumental published composition, “Rialto Ripples Rag.”

Gershwin recorded “Rialto Ripples Rag” on a piano roll for player piano

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”