Then as a ten-year-old, he was intrigued upon hearing his friend Maxie Rosenzweig’s violin recital.
Until 1908, he cared nothing about music. George lived a boyhood not unusual in New York tenements, which included running around with his friends, roller-skating and misbehaving in the streets. George and Ira frequented the local Yiddish theaters, with George occasionally appearing onstage as an extra. They grew up mostly in the Yiddish Theater District. The family lived in many different residences, as their father changed dwellings with each new enterprise in which he became involved. After Ira and George, another boy, Arthur Gershwin (1900–1981), and a girl, Frances Gershwin (1906–1999), were born into the family.
#GEORGE GERSHWIN COMPOSITIONS PROFESSIONAL#
He soon became known as George, and changed the spelling of his surname to ‘Gershwin’ around the time he became a professional musician other family members followed suit. He was named after his grandfather, and, contrary to the American practice, no middle name. His birth certificate identifies him as Jacob Gershwine, with the surname pronounced ‘Gersh-vin’ in the Russian and Yiddish immigrant community. On September 26, 1898, George was born in the Snediker Avenue apartment. Their first child, Ira Gershwin, was born on December 6, 1896, after which the family moved into a second-floor apartment at 242 Snediker Avenue in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. He married Rose on July 21, 1895, and Gershowitz soon Americanized his name to Gershwine. Gershowitz lived with a maternal uncle in Brooklyn, working as a foreman in a women’s shoe factory. Once in New York, he changed his first name to Morris. Moishe, faced with compulsory military service if he remained in Russia, moved to America as soon as he could afford to. She and her family moved to New York because of increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia, changing her first name to Rose. Moishe Gershowitz met and fell in love with Roza Bruskina, the teenage daughter of a furrier in Vilnius. His teenage son, Moishe Gershowitz, worked as a leather cutter for women’s shoes.
#GEORGE GERSHWIN COMPOSITIONS FREE#
His grandfather, Jakov Gershowitz, was born in Odessa and had served for 25 years as a mechanic for the Imperial Russian Army to earn the right of free travel and residence as a Jew finally retiring near Saint Petersburg. Gershwin was of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry. His compositions have been adapted for use in film and television, with several becoming jazz standards recorded and covered in many variations. He died in 1937 of a malignant brain tumor. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores. Initially a commercial failure, it came to be considered one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century and an American cultural classic.
He subsequently composed An American in Paris, returned to New York City and wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and DuBose Heyward. He moved to Paris intending to study with Nadia Boulanger, but she refused him, afraid that rigorous classical study would ruin his jazz-influenced style. He began his career as a song plugger but soon started composing Broadway theater works with his brother Ira Gershwin and with Buddy DeSylva. Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody.
Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928), the songs “ Swanee” (1919) and “ Fascinating Rhythm” (1924), the jazz standards “ Embraceable You” (1928) and “ I Got Rhythm” (1930), and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935), which gave birth to the hit “ Summertime“. George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist, whose compositions spanned both popular and classical genres.
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