Music History Monday

We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.

Here’s how we’re going to proceed.  Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.

Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.

StatementGeorge Gershwin (1898-1937) on the cover of Time magazine, July 20, 1925

George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39). 

He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898.  He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  

(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building.  By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized.  It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)

Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner.  Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime.  By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano.  But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone.  …

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Addendum: A Heartfelt Postscript

This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post.  I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them.  It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music.  From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic. 

If you are not already part of my Patreon family, I would urge you to consider joining us!

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Serge (or Sergei) Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1916

We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice.  Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.

Movers and Shakers

Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time.  In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:

“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts.  All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts.  I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”  

Diaghilev at 17, circa 1889

Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).  Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One.  Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war.  Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend.  Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!

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Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612)

We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli.  Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.

Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music.  The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!

To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.   

It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…

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Easy Times!

We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle.  Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).

Today we get back to the historical repertoire.  But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).

“Portrait of a Young Man” (1432) by Jan van Eyck; possibly Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!

We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay.  He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.

Guillaume Du Fay as The First Professional Composer

Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:

“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”

Early Life

He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels.  He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…

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We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District.  Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.

Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen); 1941-1974Brief Biography

Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland.  According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”

The Pale of Settlement

(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties.  As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live.  Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)

It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!

Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground.  (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)

It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark.  She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.”  In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show.  In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps.  Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…

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Taylor Swift (born 1989)

Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.  (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)

Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!

A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.

No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.

Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again.  My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.

 “Earthquake Country”: San Francisco, April 1906

I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate.  These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions.  The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south.  The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.

Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast.  So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…

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Indispensability

The title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.”  

According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:

“There is no indispensable man.”

Said President John F. Kennedy:

“Nobody’s indispensable.”

Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970):

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.”

It’s a school of thought that I do not attend.  That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical ends could not have been achieved.  Here are four obvious examples.

James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books).  Flexner was correct in so titling his book,  because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person.  Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost.  And without Washington, the American presidency and with it, the nascent American democracy, would very likely have devolved into autocracy, perhaps even monarchy.  (This book should be required reading for a certain six members of our current not-terribly-Supreme Court, who need – desperately – to be reminded of what the Founders intended and what moral greatness look like.)

We should all be loath to even consider what the United States would look like today if not for the indispensable moral guidance and eloquence of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).  As for the twentieth century, the world as we know it would not exist, and the forces of darkness might very well have triumphed, without the indispensable Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).  

(As for the overly politically and socially sensitive among us: yes, yes, I am aware that these are all white, Protestant men; one of them a slave owner [Washington]; one of them an imperialist [Churchill]; and three of them members of the wealthy, ruling class [Washington, Churchill, and Roosevelt].  So what? Does that information in any way reduce their contributions to humanity?)

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt together at the White House on May 24, 1943

The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pinpointed the traits that leaders require to make them “indispensable”:

“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.” 

Okay: some perspective as we observe the obvious: the indispensable people of, say, the world of potash-mining; of lip-gloss manufacturing; and of shipping palette design may not be as well-known and their impact on humanity not as universal as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt.  But in terms of their fields, they are indispensable people as well.  Yo: without Howard T. Hallowell (1877-1955), who patented the first shipping palette in 1924 (he called it a “Lift Truck Platform”), the American trucking industry might never have gotten off the ground in the manner it did.  Long live Howard T. Hallowell, the indispensable person of the shipping palette!

Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833Another Unsung Hero! Another Indispensable Person!

We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 167 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist, chronicler of Beethoven, and teacher Carl Czerny.  For all his various and extraordinary contributions, Czerny must be considered an indispensable person to Western music during the first half of the nineteenth century!

I would hazard that some might think that I’m stretching the “indispensable-thing” just a tad by including Carl Czerny on a list that just featured George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Howard T. Hallowell.  But no, I’m not.…

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We mark the birth on July 8, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence, in Brooklyn, New York.  He died just four months ago, on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles.

Steve Lawrence (1935-2024)

Steve Lawrence, one might ask?  Have potential topics for Music History Monday become so depleted that after nearly eight years (my first such blog was posted on September 9, 2016) I’ve been reduced to profiling baritone-voiced male pop singers of the second half of the twentieth century?  Who’s next: Dean Martin? Perry Como?  Andy Williams? Tom Jones? Jack Jones? Vic Damone? Al Martino? Robert Goulet?

And what of it, I would rather AGGRESSIVELY ASK IN RESPONSE?  Over the years, I’ve profiled the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Otis Redding, and Chubby Checker, among others.  SO WHY NOT STEVE LAWRENCE?

Okay, I will admit that there is an ulterior motive here, and we’ll get to that ulterior motive behind this profile of Maestro Lawrence in due time.  But first, permit me, please, to reminisce.

“Fitting In”

As I have mentioned more than once, I was born and spent my first years in that Olduvai Gorge of American ethnicity (pronounced “et-nicity”): the New York City borough of Brooklyn.  Three of my four grandparents were born there as well (the fourth – my paternal grandfather – was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey but moved to Brooklyn as a toddler and grew up there). Both of my parents and my stepmother were born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brooklyn.   

That’s a lot of freaking Brooklyn.

While I grew up in the New Jersey ‘burbs and was shaped by the lower middle-class suburban experience of the 1950s and 1960s, my grandparents and parents were all New Yorkers to the bone, and were shaped by the dual experience of growing up in Brooklyn and by being the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Belarus.  That meant maintaining something of their ethnic and religious identity while, paradoxically, at the same time, trying to blend in – to assimilate – and be, as my paternal grandfather Sidney would say, “real Yankees!”

When my extended family got together, you could count on certain conversations to always take place.  The alte kaker (meaning the old men; literally “old poopers”) would play pinochle and complain about politicians, taxes, the stock market, the weather, and the New York Mets.  Boring and predictable. It was the women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations whose conversations I would eavesdrop on, because they were interesting and they were funny. (If they saw me listening, they’d start speaking in Yiddish, so I’d have to keep my distance and look as if I wasn’t listening to them at all.)  

I recall their conversations as representing gossip and innuendo raised to high art, conversations more often than not fixated on other women: who was married to the worst/best husband (sometimes the same thing: “he slaps her around, but he makes a BUCK”); who had the best/worst clothes and jewelry, and what they paid for their best/worst clothing and jewelry; who was too fat or too thin (these were Jewish ladies, so it was indeed possible to be “too thin”); who wore too much makeup and who wore too little; whose teeth needed fixing and hair needed cutting and/or coloring; who was drinking too much and popping diet pills (meaning methamphetamines, which were legal at the time); who was sexless and who was shtupping the mailman; etc.  The comments I enjoyed the most were about the people I knew: my girl cousins, some of whom were these ladies’ daughters.  This one needs to go on a diet, that one needs a nose-job; this one needs to see a dermatologist, that one has to dress more appropriately; this one needs to do something with her hair, that one needs braces.  

Genuine compliments for anyone were few and far between, though the greatest compliment that these women could bestow on any fellow female is burned into my memory:

“She could pass.”

“She could pass”: meaning, she could pass for a goy, for not being Jewish. The beneficiary of such a compliment would be slim (but not, God forbid, skinny); her hair and teeth would be straight; her skin would be clear, her accent undetectable, and her nose a button. 

Sidney Liebowitz

Which – finally! – brings us back to Steve Lawrence.  He was indeed born Sidney Liebowitz, in Brooklyn, on July 8, 1935.  He came by his musical bona fides honestly: his father, Max Liebowitz was a cantor (a professional singer and prayer leader) at Temple Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav in Brooklyn; his mother Anna (born Gelb), was a homemaker.…

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The original Sony Walkman, model TPS-L2

We mark the introduction on July 1, 1979 – 45 years ago today – of the Sony Walkman.  The Walkman was the first entirely portable, high-fidelity (or at least fairly high-fidelity) audio cassette player, a revolutionary device that allowed a user to listen to entire albums anywhere, anytime.  Introduced initially in Japan, the higher-ups at Sony expected to sell 5000 units a month for the first six months after its release.  Instead, they sold 30,000 units in the first month alone and then – then – sales exploded.  All told, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmen (“Walkmans”?) in cassette, CD, mini-disc, and digital file versions, and Sony remained the market leader among portable music players until the introduction of Apple’s iPod on October 23, 2001.

For Sony the Walkman was a commercial triumph.  For consumers, it was a technological game-changer.  But for humanity, taken as widely as we please, it can (and will!) be argued that the “portable music player” – or PMP – has been an unmitigated disaster, a tragedy that has served to increasingly isolate human beings from one another in a manner unique in our history.

A Walkman ad from 1979, inadvertently promoting individual isolation and the death of public interactionHeadphones and Earbuds

Growing up, my maternal grandparents lived in a pre-War apartment building at 82nd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (or just Lincoln Center) was just 16 blocks to the south, a 16.3-acre complex between 66th and 62nd Streets.  Lincoln Center’s Library & Museum of the Performing Arts opened in 1965, and I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother Steve down to see it.  Actually, I don’t just “remember” the visit; it is etched forever in my 11-year-old memory because of what happened there.

There was a large, open area filled with small, circular tables on which were built in record turntables.  As I recall, each of these circular tables had four stereo headphones plugged in around the turntable.  One would go up to a counter, request a particular record, and then sit down and listen to it through the headphones.

I had never listened to music through over-the-ear headphones (stereo or otherwise) before that visit, and I still remember the amazement I felt: I’d never, ever experienced such sonic fidelity; I’d never imagined that recorded music could sound so fantastic.  And because I was listening through over-the-ear headphones, most of the ambient noise in the room was blocked out, effectively isolating me and allowing me to focus strictly on the music. I don’t remember what my grandmother did to drag me away from that turntable, whether she used a leather sap, a fire hose, the jaws-of-life or, more likely, the promise of ice cream on the way back to her apartment.  Whatever; because of those stereo headphones, I had experienced musical high-fidelity for the first time in my life, and I was hooked.

To this day, I have a number of excellent over-the-ear headphones, and when I really must “listen” for recorded detail, I will listen through one of them.  (FYI: I will not use earbuds, as I can’t tolerate the sensation of something shoved into my ear canal.  Too bad for me.)

To the point.  The immersive experience provided by headphones – by broadcasting directly into our ears while isolating us from ambient sound – is seductive.  But at what point might the isolating aspect of the headphone/earbud experience become a less-than-positive thing?  The advent of PMPs – be they Walkmen, iPods, or smartphones – has allowed two generations of listeners to isolate themselves from the world around them, often to the point of near total disengagement. …

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One sort of Boogie Fever: Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) cuttin’ the rug at New York’s Studio 54, circa 1978

On June 24, 1374 – 650 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively, and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or, in some cases, just plain dropped dead.  It was a real-life disco inferno, true boogie-fever stuff: the first (but not the last) major occurrence of what would come to be known as the “dancing plague (or mania)” or “choreomania,” which soon enough spread across Europe.

There had been small outbreaks of the “dancing plague” before, going back as far as the seventh century.  An outbreak in the thirteenth century – in 1237 – saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that is believed to have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

But the outbreak in Aachen 650 years ago today was big.  Before it was over, thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from the western German cities of Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and Stuttgart; to the Belgian cities of Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren; then across France, the Netherlands, and finally, back into Germany!

Another sort of Boogie Fever. The authorities typically had music played during outbreaks of dancing plague, as it was believed to somehow “cure” the mania; painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), after drawings by his father.

This gigantic outbreak came to be referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance.”  (These names were coined based on the assumption that the dancing plague was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, St. John having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and St. Vitus martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.) 

Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way:

“They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.”…

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