George Gershwin (1898-1937)

American composer, whose musicals and popular songs are among the finest in those genres and whose compositions in art-music forms are infused with the idioms of jazz and popular music.

Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898. He studied with the American composers Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Wallingford Riegger and with the Russian-born composer and theorist Joseph Schillinger. At the age of 16 Gershwin became a pianist and song promoter for a music publishing firm, but the success of his song "Swanee" (1918) established him as in Tin Pan Alley (the name given to the area of New York where the headquarters of the music publishers were located). The lyrics for nearly all his songs were written by his brother Ira Gershwin, his collaborator in a series of revues and musical comedies that included George White's Scandals (1920-1924); Lady Be Good (1924); Funny Face (1927); and the political satire Of Thee I Sing (1931), the first musical comedy to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Gershwin's songs are marked by uncommon harmonic inventiveness, and he was one of the first to introduce into popular songs the rhythms and melodic twists of jazz. Among his best-known songs are "The Man I Love", "I Got Rhythm", and "Someone to Watch Over Me".

At the invitation of the bandleader Paul Whiteman, Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue (1924) for piano and jazz band, later orchestrated by the American composer Ferde Grofé. The work profoundly influenced European and American composers to use jazz-derived melodic and rhythmic patterns. Gershwin's other concert works include the Piano Concerto in F (1925), the tone poem An American in Paris (1928), the Second Rhapsody (1931) for piano and orchestra, and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Based on a novel by the American writer DuBose Heyward, Porgy and Bess draws on the idioms of black folk music, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and European classical music to produce a work of unique character that is Gershwin's masterpiece. Gershwin died in Beverly Hills, California, on July 11, 1937.

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