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5 ignaCio Piñeiro, george gersHwin, and tHe sCHiLLinger system What follows is a fable about the transcultural alchemy of art. Its broad purview takes in the early twentieth-century musical cultures of Cuba, the United States, and Europe. Its array of styles includes Afro-Cuban rumba/salsita, American jazz/Tin Pan Alley, and European modernism/ popular classicism. Its topical focus will be on a specific case of the twentieth -century musical imagination, a conjunction of history and art memorialized in a work of brilliant, original, syncretic, high-modernist genius, George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture. Its historical particulars come down to us in the concentrated image of a time, a place, a cultural moment, it might be called, involving a set of strangely coinciding cultural vectors. The first to be considered here involves the emergence in the golden age of Cuban and American broadcast radio music and popular recording of a notable Cuban artistry, on the part of various songwriters and performers , arising out of the traditions of Spanish son/canción and African percussion—at the time, called rumba, and in this case centered on the work of the biggest such celebrity of the era, the pioneering Afro-Cuban entertainer Ignacio Piñeiro ; the second treats a high moment of personal artistic passage into an extraordinary period of creative orchestral genius by a famous American composer, songwriter, and pianist, George Gershwin , the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, best known at the time as a modernist exponent of jazz and the popular American song. The third concerns the appearance and sudden rise to widespread influence among American composers of the era of a European-educated Russian German musical theorist and teacher of formal orchestration, Joseph Schillinger —a codifier of elements of classical harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration claiming to have achieved a complete mathematical system. So, out of such a creative synergy, in keeping with the spirit of the literary and artistic experimentalism of the era, would emerge an achievement of Piñeiro, Gershwin, and the Schillinger System 61 eclectic modernist genius. At the heart of the achievement and the genius would be the power of Cuba and the Western musical imagination. All of this, to be sure, is a large claim to make. In the eight decades since its premiere, George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture has never managed to outlive its conventional reputation as a musical curiosity—a brief, intense , even scintillating, but second-line set piece in the composer’s canon . Put beside a parallel production of the same great creative period, such as An American in Paris, for example, it has always seemed Gershwin’s “American in Havana,” so to speak, and a poor relation at that: a cut up from “The Peanut Vendor,” a popular Cuban import/jazz band favorite of the period; a cut down from Ravel’s Bolero, conventionally invoked as its closest twentieth-century classical analogue. Usually, in studies of Gershwin ’s life and music, it becomes the subject of a brief, amusing chapter on a February 1932 bachelor trip to Havana in the company of the publisher Bennett Cerf and the stockbroker Daniel H. Silberberg, with a few colorful Cuban anecdotes thrown in—nearly always including the one about the fourteen- or sixteen-piece rumba band hired by the composer’s friend Henry Gitelson that showed up to serenade the composer outside his room at the Hotel Almendares at four in the morning. Most such accounts then wrap themselves up with a sketch of early performance history: the work’s 16 August 1932 debut, under the title “Rumba,” in an all-Gershwin outdoor concert at the now vanished Lewisohn Stadium on the City College of New York campus at 138th and 139th Streets on the upper west side, overlooking Harlem; its second playing, under the permanent title, at a 1 November benefit concert by two hundred unemployed musicians at the Metropolitan Opera House, as part of the second half of a program beginning with the Franck Symphony in D minor—where it was further squeezed in after the Gershwin Concerto in F and An American in Paris and before a concluding orchestral medley of Gershwin songs. The rest of the artistic history of the composition as a matter of performance and recording may be predictably recounted. Though widely known, it is nearly always relegated to popular, rather than critical regard, as brief, jazzy, colorful, exotic—a kind of sui generis orchestral bagatelle. One brings to mind Tchaikovsky’s Cappriccios Espanol and Italien, Chabrier...

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