I Can’t Get Started

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

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.

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

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?

The first title for this blog was “Letters to the Line Between Fiction, Non-Fiction, Neither and Both.” Today it is called “A Common Listener.” One title falls somewhere between Rilke and the other Virginia Woolf. Maybe next time it will be a three letter abbreviation CGS.com for “Can’t Get Started.” Anyway, it is all an attempt to begin a stream of thoughts about some of the music from some of the Americas, mostly in the English language but not always.

Thinking it possible to go back seventy-five to one hundred or so years and become in our imagination one of the Ziegfeld Follies, or a singer or composer in Tin Pan Alley could be a fun thing, a funny thing. That such imaginations are only imaginations, that “becoming a Tin Pan Alley-ist”, performing decades old music and poetry as we play our own now is an illusion, is true. “Our own” here is now used for anything past Billie Holiday and the great divide in jazz past the black and the white. Very likely the Early Broadway-ist would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible (Jeanne Lee): our idealized picture of what we might call the life in Tin Pan Alley would make them laugh. Still, the urge that demands we return to them (“we—Billie Holiday, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Jeanne Lee, Hankus Netsky and the narrator here; “them”—Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Eve Arden, Peter Solari,) is so strong and the haunting light-heartedness that blows through the old recordings (and films) are so tantalizing that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being a fuddy-duddy, an old fart.

Rosa asked who was Vernon Duke since there was no link to his name that appeared in the last post’s title. And still not knowing the ropes or the dashboard or the wp content folder in the hosting server, the thought came that in order to get something up, go to Vernon and answer her kind curiosity. The history stretches all the way from Russia to Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s to somewhere near the South Pole in Brazil. (The local beer is called “Antartica.”)

The composer who wrote “April in Paris,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” is the same Vernon Duke of “I Can’t Get Started with You.” If the hope to get a plug-in for audio in the near future can be fulfilled, then we might fly around the world as common listeners.