Schneider, Wayne, ed.  The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of
George Gershwin.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
290 pp.  ISBN 0-19-509020-9.

I know of few well-known composers who arouse so much patronization and
downright contempt among the classical tribe as George Gershwin.  I have
no idea why.  Virgil Thomson refused to take him seriously, modifying
his earlier sharp disdain as time went on with a mellower view of Gershwin
as a Perfect Fool, a musical spaniel one can pat on the head.  Aaron
Copland's few references (I can recall no more than two) always regard
Gershwin as an example for "serious" American composers to avoid.  Leonard
Bernstein, while taking the relatively liberal approach of acknowledging
Gershwin's genius as a melodist, affords him no respect whatever as a
composer of large concert works.  On the other hand, most popular studies
(until recently, *all* Gershwin studies have been popular, rather than
academic), while more accurate than the Robert Alda biopic, Rhapsody in
Blue, nevertheless follow essentially the same tack: a rags-to-riches,
naive, happy-go-lucky genius turns everything he touches to musical gold
and dies young.  We get very little insight into either the man or the
composer.  From even the anecdotes I've come across (Oscar Levant, Ira
Gershwin, Kitty Carlisle Hart, and others), I suspect Gershwin was far
grittier, wittier, and cannier than the Shepherd Boy Whose Head the Gods
Have Kissed.  Gershwin's own writings - even though for daily or, at
best, monthly journalism - demonstrate that aesthetically he knew very
well not only what he himself was about, but modern music in general (he
was a fan of Stravinsky, Ravel, Schoenberg, and Berg).

Charles Schwartz's (no relation) recent Gershwin: His Life and Music
reacts so strongly against the traditional hagiographic approach, you'd
have thought Gershwin had robbed the poor box and beat up a nun.  Schwartz
had little good to say and seemed to use the book as an occasion to beat
Gershwin with any stick he could find, including (providing no solid
evidence) resuscitating the old charge that Gershwin had fathered and
ignored an illegitimate son.  It's a good thing the dead can't sue.  Joan
Peyser's The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin keeps up,
for those who remember her similar study of Leonard Bernstein, her
tradition of musical ignorance, enthusiasm for psychobabble, lame research
skills, and laughably incompetent prose.  She also brings up the charge
of the illegitimate son and also fails to provide a firm basis for it.
Schwartz differs from Peyser in that, first, he actually demonstrates
he knows something about music as well as how to construct an argument
and, second, he can actually write.

The lack of primary material has hampered scholarship.  On the other
hand, until recently, scholars haven't bothered to seek it out, creating
a circle of lacks.  Surprising for a composer of Gershwin's popularity,
very few listeners have heard what Gershwin really wrote.  We have all
sorts of arrangements of "A Foggy Day," but who's listened to (or seen)
the composer's manuscript?  I learn from Steven E.  Gilbert's "Nice Work:
Thoughts and Observations on Gershwin's Late Songs" that Gershwin had
an unusually large right-hand reach and wrote his piano parts to his
songs accordingly.  The official Warner Bros.  publication (I think
owners of the copyrights) of the songs eliminates inner voices to
accommodate the capabilities of merely human pianists.  The Concerto
in F, An American in Paris, Cuban Overture, and the other concert
works past Rhapsody in Blue (the last of the big pieces Gershwin didn't
orchestrate himself) routinely appear in versions silently "amended" by
other hands.  Gershwin has almost never been allowed to fail on his own.
He's had help.  Fortunately, his own scores reside in the Library of
Congress, so unless the place burns down the possibility remains of
establishing a verum corpus of his work, just as scholars did for Bruckner.
The battle for Bruckner was won based on such work.

Some of this has already begun.  Warners has released facsimile composer
autographs of An American in Paris, Cuban Overture, Rhapsody in Blue,
the Preludes, and the Concerto.  Terrific books - Steven E.  Gilbert's
Music of Gershwin, Deena Rosenberg's Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration
of George and Ira Gershwin, Hollis Alpert's Life and Times of Porgy and
Bess, and even Philip Furia's Lyrics of Ira Gershwin (also his Poets of
Tin Pan Alley) - brilliantly focus on the material, largely without
personal crotchets, for or against.  This new collection of essays joins
that company.

The book divides into an introduction and three major sections with a
coda.  Charles Hamm's "Towards a New Reading of Gershwin" outlines the
problems mentioned above blocking a just appreciation of the composer
as well as others and makes a great case that this most popular of
composers remains unknown.  A section on score analyses follows.  This,
for me, is the most valuable section of the book, but it does depend on
the ability to read music and knowledge of music theory.  It's possible
for the reader with neither of these advantages to nevertheless pan gold,
but I suspect it might be rough going.  Still, this is the only section
that requires such skills.  Essays by editor Wayne Schneider on Gershwin's
Broadway overtures, Steven E.  Gilbert on the late songs (to some extent,
remaking points in The Music of Gershwin, but the points are worth
re-making), and Larry Starr's demonstration that Gershwin's concert
music is indeed composed (as opposed to a bunch of songs strung together
in a medley with transitional filler - essentially Leonard Bernstein's
devastatingly influential charge) are especially valuable.  Wayne D.
Shirley talks of the problems in establishing a definitive score to Porgy
and Bess, Gershwin's last masterpiece.  I don't claim unusual prescience,
but I came to the same conclusions as these writers forty years ago.
Gershwin's blazingly original composing imagination seems to me as if
it should be obvious at hearing.  I do want to know why the serious
writers of the classical community took so long to catch up.

The book's second section concentrates on the reception of the music
and on Gershwin's place in American musical culture.  Charlotte Greenspan
studies the hokey film Rhapsody in Blue both as a tract for the times
(America's home front in World War II) and as the recorder of valuable
performances (including the early Scandals sketch, Blue Monday, sometimes
known as 135th Street).  Susan Richardson talks about the meshing of
Gershwin's career with the early explosion of the pop-music industry -
sheet music, radio, piano rolls, films, and recordings.  The most
problematic essay of the book for me, C.  Andre Barbera's "George Gershwin
and Jazz," ends up stating the obvious (and Gershwin's own position):
that the composer didn't write jazz.  However, there's a bit of strange
hand-wringing over the white man's appropriation and exploitation of the
black man's music, as if Gershwin owed somebody royalties.  It makes no
more sense to worry about this kind of appropriation than it does to
accuse Charlie Parker of ripping off the white European system of harmony
and polyphony, in my opinion.  Many in the white-dominated pop-music
industry have indeed ripped off black artists (and some black music
moguls have done the same, incidentally) and do owe them, but we should
distinguish between money and the materials of art.  The latter is common
property - there for anyone with the talent to use them.  Beyond this
bump in the road, however, Barbera goes on to analyze Gershwin's songs
to find reasons why so many jazz musicians like to play with them.

The third section, "Performance Practices," talks exclusively about
Gershwin's piano rolls, with an essay by Artis Wodehouse and a catalogue
("rollography," oy!) by Michael Montgomery.  I would have hoped for an
historical overview of Gershwin performing styles for both the vocal
pieces and the concert works.  What influence did, say, Toscanini have
on future approaches to the concert music?  For good or ill?  This is
for me the only lack in the book.

The book wraps up with pioneer Gershwinian Edward Jablonski's look at
Ira's career after George's death.  Ira's an immensely entertaining
figure (as well as a lyric genius), and Jablonski does him justice.

In all, a valuable must-read for Gershwin fans, a wake-up call to certain
parts of the academic community, and an engaging way for readers with
lively curiosity to spend their time.

Steve Schwartz