Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s

Abstract

Like Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, and a host of other innovative figures in American music, George Gershwin straddled the divide between the so-called high and low realms of art. The position must have been exhilarating, providing an opportunity to challenge time-hardened expectations and attempt daring new feats. But for spectators, it was often unsettling. In Gershwin's case, the same critics who heartily acclaimed his popular songs and Broadway shows often winced at his ventures into the concert repertory, as two contrasting scenes from a 1945 film biography of Gershwin vividly illustrate. 1 In the first, Gershwin chats amiably in a Paris nightclub, clearly in familiar surroundings. But in the next, as he wanders through a gallery of contemporary art, the dashing young American appears to have lost his confidence, completely out of place in a European temple of abstract expression. Although broadly drawn, these cinematic snippets convey a common view: Gershwin was at home in the commercial world, but once he ventured into high art, he quickly lost his bearings. In working toward a musical and cultural study of the modernist composers' movement in New York City during the 1920s-a decade when a talented and ultimately powerful generation came of age, including Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson-I have grappled with this stylization of Gershwin, trying to fathom how it took shape and how closely it reflects evidence from the period. 2 After all, Gershwin was of the same age and nationality as the American modernists, and his concert music emerged simultaneously with theirs, receiving performances in the same concert halls and being reviewed by the same critics.3 He and they all aimed for recognition in an international arena and worked to challenge longheld distinctions between lowbrow and highbrow--to use the lingo of the day. A close look at writings from the 1920s by both composers and critics suggests not only that Gershwin at one time