Delicious george gershwin biography video
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The origins of Second Rhapsody
This work had an unusual gestation, beginning when Gershwin was in Hollywood at the end of 1930, having been asked, along with his lyricist brother Ira, to write songs for a Fox movie that was released a year later under the title "Delicious'. At possibly Gershwin's own suggestion a lengthy musical sequence was devised for the film that would give Gershwin more artistic scope. Gershwin then went one step further and used the opportunity to turn the project into a full length serious concert work. As it turned out it was only later (after the completion of this new concert work) that Gershwin's full score was then adapted, in truncated form, for a 7 minute musical sequence in the movie.
During the making of 'Delicious' the production notes refer
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George Gershwin
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George Gershwin! His name conjures memories and nostalgic imaginings of the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, flappers, musicals tumbling forth in glorious profusion from his creative, fertile imagination. Gershwin represented all this, of course, and so much more: his serious compositions, which confounded the critics at first performances, remain highly popular in the concert repertoire, and his stage and film songs continue to be jazz and vocal standards. Gershwin's music was his personal digestion of European, jazz, and black styles, characterized by melodies at once catchy and beautiful, accentuated by wonderfully complex rhythmic patterns. He was a bundle of energy, a school dropout at fifteen whose wrote the enormously successful Swanee at nineteen, a playboy who rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous of two continents, a natural athlete, a painter of considerable talent, a generous, gregarious man with an ego the size of a ballroom who helped promote the careers of other musicians such as Vernon Duke, Oscar Levant, and Arnold Schoenberg. He never experienced a dry spell or the composer's equivalent of writer's block, and he was equally adept at composing music to which words were added or fitting music to book and lyrics already written, as he did in Porgy and