George Gershwin (review)

The fact that this new book on Gershwin is part of Yale University Press's Broadway Masters series simplifies the matter of stating the book's premise. In a climate that promises a new study of Gershwin almost every year, University of Washington musicologist Larry Starr need not recite biographical data, assess the whole of Gershwin's output, or make yet another comparison/rapprochement between "Gershwin the composer" and "Gershwin the songwriter." While the second aspect of this standard dichotomy is clearly the topic of his book, the "songwriter" that Starr addresses is not the creator of pop/jazz "standards" but, rather, the provider of music for Broadway shows and their ilk.

This is not to say that Starr does not reveal himself to be, at heart, a Gershwin apologist. In his preface he admits to having long regarded Gershwin in "a context totally divorced from the Great White Way," and he suggests that resituating Gershwin's work "with Broadway squarely at the center" nowadays might well seem "anachronistic" (xiv). Later he writes that "it is no longer necessary to validate Gershwin's 'classical' works" (78) and then embarks on an eight-page validation. Rhetorically he asks: "Is it far-fetched to posit some relationship between the large-scale temporal proportions that characterized [Gershwin's] music theater works and the temporal proportions favored by Gershwin in structuring his 'classical' works?" (81). Musing on "a fact, as it were, hidden in plain view," he wonders if the proliferation of Gershwin "standards" in the wake of the 1924 Rhapsody in Blue is somehow indebted to Gershwin's investment in that fabulously successful concert-hall piece, ignoring the idea that the "sudden explosion" of post-Rhapsody hits might also have something to do with the equally unhidden fact that by 1925 Gershwin was simply a more mature, more skilled musical craftsman (83). But Starr's championing of "Gershwin the composer" is for the most part confined to a short chapter in the middle of the book, a chapter that self-consciously bears the label "Entr'acte," and he clearly knows that for the sake of this volume his brief discussion of Gershwin's concert-hall music is off the chosen path.

The path through "Gershwin the songwriter" is chronological, albeit with gaps.

After an introductory chapter ("In Lieu of Biography") and then a lucid argument ("In Search of Gershwin's Style") on the futility of trying to pigeon-hole a musician whose patrons valued versatility above all else, serious discussion of the Broadway songs begins with a taxonomy of the pieces Gershwin concocted for the 1924 show Lady, Be Good! ("In Search of the Gershwin Musical"). Readers will doubtless be intrigued and enlightened by Starr's neat breakdown of this material into "defining," "action," and "specialty" numbers, and they will find that this analytical scheme applies by and large to all of the shows to which Gershwin contributed music later in the decade, for example, Tip-toes (1925), Oh, Kay! (1926), Funny Face (1927), Rosalie (1928), Show Girl (1929), and Girl Crazy (1930). Readers might find it frustrating, however, that Starr does not pay the same keen attention to the dozens of songs that Gershwin produced before Broadway shifted, ca. 1924, from the revue to the "book" musical. It is true that the vast majority of these pre-1924 songs (almost all of them with lyrics by someone other than Gershwin's brother Ira) no longer register on anyone's "recognition meter"; nevertheless, these songs were crucial to the establishment of Gershwin's Broadway career, and it is surprising that they are by and large ignored in a study of Gershwin as a "Broadway master."

After the above-noted "Entr'acte" chapter that speculates on possible connections between Gershwin's show tunes and his music for the concert hall, Starr focuses on Of Thee I Sing (1931) and Porgy and Bess (1935), arguing that whereas the earlier Broadway titles were scripted shows into which disparate Gershwin songs...