Download or read book A Journey to Greatness The Life and Music of George Gershwin written by David Ewen and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book George Gershwin His Journey to Greatness written by David Ewen and published by Frederick Ungar. This book was released on 1986 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book George Gershwin His Life Music written by Ean Wood and published by Bobcat Books. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the summer of 1937 George Gershwin died suddenly from a brain tumour at the age of 38. His tragically early death stunned the world. A composer of classical and popular music, he had summed up the unique qualities of what is meant by ""American music"". This book sheds fresh light on the man and includes exclusive interviews with musicians who knew him, material from the Gershwin family archives and coverage of the composer's musical works in full."
Download or read book George Gershwin written by Carin T. Ford and published by Enslow Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of American composer George Gershwin"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book George Gershwin written by Howard Pollack and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-15 with total page 938 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive biography of George Gershwin (1898-1937) unravels the myths surrounding one of America's most celebrated composers and establishes the enduring value of his music. Gershwin created some of the most beloved music of the twentieth century and, along with Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter, helped make the golden age of Broadway golden. Howard Pollack draws from a wealth of sketches, manuscripts, letters, interviews, books, articles, recordings, films, and other materials—including a large cache of Gershwin scores discovered in a Warner Brothers warehouse in 1982—to create an expansive chronicle of Gershwin’s meteoric rise to fame. He also traces Gershwin’s powerful presence that, even today, extends from Broadway, jazz clubs, and film scores to symphony halls and opera houses. Pollack’s lively narrative describes Gershwin’s family, childhood, and education; his early career as a pianist; his friendships and romantic life; his relation to various musical trends; his writings on music; his working methods; and his tragic death at the age of 38. Unlike Kern, Berlin, and Porter, who mostly worked within the confines of Broadway and Hollywood, Gershwin actively sought to cross the boundaries between high and low, and wrote works that crossed over into a realm where art music, jazz, and Broadway met and merged. The author surveys Gershwin’s entire oeuvre, from his first surviving compositions to the melodies that his brother and principal collaborator, Ira Gershwin, lyricized after his death. Pollack concludes with an exploration of the performances and critical reception of Gershwin's music over the years, from his time to ours.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Gershwin written by Anna Harwell Celenza and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how Gershwin's iconic music was shaped by American political, intellectual, cultural and business interests as well as technological advances.
Download or read book Journey to Greatness written by David Ewen and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Summertime George Gershwin s Life in Music written by Richard Crawford and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of a beloved American composer reflected through his music, writings, and letters. New York City native and gifted pianist George Gershwin blossomed as an accompanist before his talent as a songwriter opened the way to Broadway, where he fashioned his own brand of American music. He composed a long run of musical comedies, many with his brother Ira as lyricist, but his aspirations reached beyond commercial success. A lifetime learner, Gershwin was able to appeal to listeners on both sides of the purported popular-classical divide. In 1924—when he was just twenty-five—he bridged that gap with his first instrumental composition, Rhapsody in Blue, an instant classic premiered by Paul Whiteman’s jazz orchestra, as the anchor of a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” From that time forward his work as a composer, pianist, and citizen of the Jazz Age made him in some circles a leader on America’s musical scene. The late1920s found him extending the range of the shows he scored to include the United Kingdom, and he published several articles to reveal his thinking about a range of musical matters. Moreover, having polished his skills as an orchestrator, he pushed boundaries again in 1935 with the groundbreaking folk opera, Porgy and Bess—his magnum opus. Gershwin’s talent and warmth made him a presence in New York’s musical and social circles (and linked him romantically with pianist-composer Kay Swift). In 1936 he and Ira moved west to write songs for Hollywood. Their work was cut short, however, when George developed a brain tumor and died at thirty-eight, a beloved American artist. Drawing extensively from letters and contemporaneous accounts, acclaimed music historian Richard Crawford traces the arc of Gershwin’s remarkable life, seamlessly blending colorful anecdotes with a discussion of Gershwin’s unforgettable oeuvre. His days on earth were limited to the summertime of life. But the spirit and inventive vitality of the music he left behind lives on.
Download or read book Arranging Gershwin written by Ryan Raul Bañagale and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconceives the history and reception of Rhapsody in Blue, freeing it from established narratives and frequently encountered anecdotes. By approaching the Rhapsody as an "arrangement," it shifts emphasis away from a centralized text and from the sole agency of George Gershwin, providing a dynamic and multifaceted reappraisal of this emblematic piece.
Download or read book The Sheet Music of George Gershwin written by Thomas Inglis and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fine and Dandy written by Vicki Ohl and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kay Swift (1897–1993) was one of the few women composers active on Broadway in the first half of the twentieth century. Best known as George Gershwin’s assistant, musical adviser, and intimate friend, Swift was in fact an accomplished musician herself, a pianist and composer whose Fine and Dandy (1930) was the first complete Broadway musical written by a woman. This fascinating book—the first biography of Swift—discusses her music and her extraordinary life. Vicki Ohl describes Swift’s work for musical theater, the ballet, Radio City Music Hall’s Rockettes, and commercial shows. She also tells how Swift served as director of light music for the 1939 World’s Fair, eloped with a cowboy from the rodeo at the fair, and abandoned her native New York for Oregon, later fashioning her experiences into an autobiographical novel, Who Could Ask for Anything More? Informed by rich material, including Swift’s unpublished memoirs and extensive interviews with her family members and friends, this book captures the essence and spirit of a remarkable woman.
Download or read book The Rest Is Noise written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.
Download or read book The Gershwin Style written by Wayne Schneider and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even as orchestras, performers, enthusiasts, and critics across the nation--and across the globe--celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, George Gershwin (1898-1937) remains one of America's most popular yet least appreciated composers. True, he is loved and revered for his wonderful popular songs, a few instrumental works, and the majestic opera Porgy and Bess. But most of his music is virtually unknown; hundreds of compositions, Broadway show tunes, and even several large and important instrumental works are gradually disappearing with the generations that first heard them. The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin is a bold new work that stands in opposition to this disappearance. It is also a fresh collection of essays that promises to make a key contribution to American music research. Editor Wayne Schneider has corralled some of the leading authorities of Gershwin's efforts--renowned experts and authors who have researched his music for years if not decades--and sets their work alongside articles by scholars who come to Gershwin for the first time from backgrounds in American music or popular music in general. The notable contributors include Wayne D. Shirley, Charles Hamm, Edward Jablonski, and Artis Wodehouse (who has transcribed nearly all of Gershwin's piano performances). No one who surveys the American musical landscape can doubt Gershwin's enduring popularity or profound influence, but his critical standing among today's serious music scholars is much less certain. As Schneider points out in his Introduction, there have been many biographies of Gershwin but comparatively few studies of his music in and of itself. Covering both the "popular" and "classical" extremes of Gershwin's output, as well as the many and subtle points in between, this book reevaluates the music of an American original from several enlightening perspectives. This is a book with much to offer any student or scholar of American music--while some essays explore new methods of measuring Gershwin's abilities as a composer, others draw on hitherto unavailable musical and archival sources to make arguments previously unthinkable. The essays gathered here, most of which were written especially for this volume, thus address a number of important research topics, among them biography, source studies, music analysis, performance practice, and questions of interpretation and reception. The contributions also reflect the wide diversity of contemporary thinking regarding the logic, legacy, and lure of Gershwin's music.
Download or read book George Gershwin written by Walter Rimler and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Gershwin lived with purpose and gusto, but with melancholy as well, for he was unable to make a place for himself--no family of his own and no real home in music. He and his siblings received little love from their mother and no direction from their father. Older brother and lyricist Ira managed to create a home when he married Leonore Strunsky, a hard-edged woman who lived for wealth and status. The closest George came to domesticity was through his longtime relationship with Kay Swift. She was his lover, musical confidante, and fellow composer. But she remained married to another man while he went endlessly from woman to woman. Only in the final hours of his life, when they were separated by a continent, did he realize how much he needed her. Fatally ill, unprotected by (and perhaps estranged from) Ira, he was exiled by Leonore from the house she and the brothers shared, and he died horribly and alone at the age of thirty-eight. Nor was Gershwin able to find a satisfying musical harbor. For years his songwriting genius could be expressed only in the ephemeral world of show business, as his brilliance as a composer of large-scale works went unrecognized by highbrow music critics. When he resolved this quandary with his opera Porgy and Bess, the critics were unable to understand or validate it. Decades would pass before this, his most ambitious composition, was universally regarded as one of music's lasting treasures and before his stature as a great composer became secure. In George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait, Walter Rimler makes use of fresh sources, including newly discovered letters by Kay Swift as well as correspondence between and interviews with intimates of Ira and Leonore Gershwin. It is written with spirited prose and contains more than two dozen photographs.
Download or read book Popular Music written by Roman Iwaschkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive guide to popular music literature, first published in 1986. Its main focus is on American and British works, but it includes significant works from other countries, making it truly international in scope.
Download or read book The Reader s Companion to American History written by Eric Foner and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 1253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An A-to-Z historical encyclopedia of US people, places, and events, with nearly 1,000 entries “all equally well written, crisp, and entertaining” (Library Journal). From the origins of its native peoples to its complex identity in modern times, this unique alphabetical reference covers the political, economic, cultural, and social history of America. A fact-filled treasure trove for history buffs, The Reader’s Companion is sponsored by the Society of American Historians, an organization dedicated to promoting literary excellence in the writing of biography and history. Under the editorship of the eminent historians John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, a large and distinguished group of scholars, biographers, and journalists—nearly four hundred contemporary authorities—illuminate the critical events, issues, and individuals that have shaped our past. Readers will find everything from a chronological account of immigration; individual entries on the Bull Moose Party and the Know-Nothings as well as an article on third parties in American politics; pieces on specific religious groups, leaders, and movements and a larger-scale overview of religion in America. Interweaving traditional political and economic topics with the spectrum of America’s social and cultural legacies—everything from marriage to medicine, crime to baseball, fashion to literature—the Companion is certain to engage the curiosity, interests, and passions of every reader, and also provides an excellent research tool for students and teachers.
Download or read book Musical Theater written by Alyson McLamore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys. This unique historical survey illustrates the interaction of multiple artistic and dramatic considerations with an overview of the development of numerous popular musical theater genres. This introduction provides more than a history of musical theater, it studies the music within the shows to provide an understanding of the contributions of musical theater composers as clearly as the artistry of musical theater lyricists and librettists. The familiarity of the musical helps students understand how music functions in a song and a show, while giving them the vocabulary to discuss their perceptions.
