I disliked Gershwin when I was young. No that is not true. I had no feelings for Gershwin himself one way or the other, and I didn't actively dislike his music, but I also can't say that I was particularly fond of it either. I did however rebel at having to play Gershwin in my piano lessons. After wanting to play the piano for as long as I could remember, I finally got to take piano lessons my junior year in high school. My teacher wanted me to play Gershwin and I hated it. I wanted to play Bach and Beethoven.
My tastes in music at that time were probably heavily influenced by my father. The music in our house revolved around the "three B's" (Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms), although I remember being allowed to play recordings of Corelli and Couperin, which I checked out of the Tarleton University Library. I did have a small portable transistor radio, but I mostly heard popular music at friends' homes, and my tastes, until I went away to college, were mostly shaped by my friend's tastes.
In college, the influences were wider, and I moved on to exploring music on my own. I fell in love with Tchaikovsky and Mahler and from there to Shostakovich and Stravinsky on the classical front. Swing dancing was popular, which led me to explore jazz, although I still claim bop as my first jazz love, a preference that continues to embarrass some of my jazz-loving friends. And of course there was rock, punk, reggae and much much more…
Eventually, I came back to Gershwin, although admittedly that took me a little bit longer, not because the music isn't worthy, but because shaking old biases sometimes requires a deeper look at the roots of that bias before one can be clear-headed. I came to love the music of Leonard Bernstein too, although he is another composer I did not take to on first listen. Odd as it may sound, I probably came to appreciate both Gershwin and Bernstein through my love of Shostakovich. What can I say? Some of us seem born to take the complicated and complex path.
But why Gershwin? Why Bernstein?
Last week was the opening concert of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra season, and both Bernstein and Gershwin were on the program. Opening concerts are rarely adventurous and this was true to form: lovely, enjoyable, but hardly inspiring. In fact the combination of Gershwin's Concerto in F with Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Samuel Barber's Adagio, is a fairly popular combination, and we once had an LP, conducted by Bernstein, that contained just that program. George Chadwick's Jubilee was also in the program and it was well suited to the program, which was, overall, well performed.
Despite my late start with Gershwin, the Gershwin piece was one of the highlights of the evening. There is perhaps an advantage in coming to something by way of a roundabout path, in that, having discovered something one had missed, one may be able to listen more closely . The problem with most of the pieces on the program is that they are in fact so popular that they almost become background music. They are familiar and comforting, and one can easily escape into melody and memory and expectation. The Concerto in F in particular alternates bold, almost jarring brashness with subtle sophistication, a contrast that I have only heard effectively captured on rare occasions. That does not make the piece less enjoyable however; it may be in fact be more enjoyable when the performance is less unsettling, and there was enough emotional resonance in this performance to be enjoyable. Sean Chen's performance on the piano, particularly, brought a strong consistency to the music, with an understanding of how the melody provides a unifying structure in both its contrast and eventual unification with the clashing dissonance of the piece.
The blues influences of the Gershwin piece also meshed well with Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, an intensely meditative work filled with tranquility, but also powerfully rich with emotional depth. The interpretation of the piece was perfectly balanced and sonically rich, with a sensuously lush performance by the strings. The memory still makes my heart sigh.
It was, of course, the Barber that prompted this trip down a musical memory lane. The Adagio is often played to mark occasions of public grief, such as at the funeral of J.F.K, and in movies to mark strong emotion. I could not help but recall its use during the movie, Platoon, and this layering of memory with the sound of the music only intensifies the experience. Listening to the Barber reminded me first of George, much in the way funerals always remind us of those we have lost, and his love of the music of Leonard Bernstein, and then of my father and my own delayed understanding of Gershwin.
Connections within connections, loops within loops of memory and experience. We think when we are young that life will get easier as we age, and it does, in that we hopefully learn to hold things more loosely, but our associations also grow richer and more complex, perhaps holding us more than we hold them.