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Essay on How George Gershwin Has Influenced Modern Musicals
"From Gershwin emanated a new American music not written with the ruthlessness of one who strives to demolish established rules but based on a new native gusto and wit and awareness. His was a modernity that reflected the civilization we live in as excitingly as the headline in today's newspaper."
Ira Gershwin, 1938 http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/articles/gershwin/earlyyears.html. George Gershwin, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, was no child prodigy. He was a typical American boy who delighted in the games of the street and in the companionship of other boys like himself. He liked to roller-skate, to play "cat," hockey, and punchball, to discuss the exploits of the baseball heroes of the day. He was not particularly adept at school work.
He was not interested in books of any kind. For a while he looked with superior scorn upon any boy who had an even remote connection with music. Music was for "Maggies," he would say. At the age of six, however, he was fascinated by Rubinstein's Melody in F, which he heard in a penny arcade; and when he was nine he fell in love with a girl because she could sing.
Yet, in spite of such experiences, he refused to consider his musical interest seriously.
He was about ten years old when he became fully awakened to music. He was attending Public School 25, on the Lower East Side, where one of his fellow pupils was a talented young violinist named Maxie Rosenzweig (later to be known on the concert stage as Max Rosen).
Maxie gave a concert in the public auditorium which George-still contemptuous of music and those who pursued it-refused to attend. Instead he played ball in the schoolyard. While he was running around, he heard the strains of Maxie's violin in Dvorák's Humoresque...
