Anne Goldman Listening To Gershwin
Anne Goldman
an excerpt from
Listening to Gershwin
I. Russia
My favorite nursery rhyme was not about spiders or stars. Wordless, its melody
still arrested my ear. As a small child I sat underneath the piano in our living
room, listening—the record’s faded jacket propped on my lap, the wood floor
cool beneath my legs, the air shadowed by the dark curve of the instrument
over my head. If music has color then this song was iridescent, a flash of tril -
ing piccolo and spangled climbing scale. Its high registers rang out with the
radiance of sun on water or the trackless luster of gleaming ice.
“L’ oiseau de feu,” Stravinsky called his Firebird Suite, in the language
spoken by the Russian intel igentsia before their own 1919 funeral pyre burned
away all traces of the grand manner. While it played I stared at the phoenix
reproduced on the album cover. The il ustration was too muted to match the
music’s vibrancy, but as the tones flitted in the corners of the room, the firebird
hovered for a moment in my mind’s eye. Incandescent, the creature was too
brilliant to look at directly. Its wings scattered light across the wal , each feather
a prism. Its heat created small turbulences in the surrounding air, and as its
call rushed through Kashchei the Immortal’s garden, I imagined I saw sound
waves resolved to form in the flowers nodding in the great bird’s wake.
Grown, I still listen to this music. When I hear it I am transported to the
suburban Boston home of my childhood. I remember the circle of rose-colored
light cast by my bedside lamp, the lisp of tree branches against the side of the
house in the windy dark, the umber piano resting in silent majesty down the
hal . And then I travel outward from these sheltering wal s to the gilded hal s of
the Paris Opera, where the 1910 première of Stravinsky’s avant-garde composi-
tion turned him into a household name overnight. Struck as a teenager by the
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novel rhythms of the Firebird Suite, a Brooklyn-born musician adapted their
hesitancies and suspensions some years later in the first of his own classical
compositions. When we hear Rhapsody in Blue today, most of us recognize
by the music’s third bar the hurried pace Jacob Gershovitz announces. The
Rhapsody’s first performance in 1924 transformed George Gershwin from a Tin
Pan Alley upstart into a classical composer whose drawing power superseded
the Russian’s own, but the twenty-six-year-old was quick to claim Stravinsky
as rhythmic model. In “Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul,” an essay he
contributed to Theater Magazine in 1927, Gershwin linked the Rhapsody’s meter
to the “ever accelerando” tempo of American life. Yet his indigenous music was
created by a young man whose parents had left St. Petersburg only five years
before his birth. No surprise the pianist-composer would look to Stravinsky
as mentor: the familial conversation he listened to as a boy was conducted in
a lively, accented English punctuated by Russian phrasings and the rhetori-
cal questions his parents shrugged off in untranslatable Yiddish. In the brash
elegance of the Rhapsody I hear the same mixture of pragmatism and poetry
that must have characterized that domestic speech, and as the music plays
on my stereo I wonder whether in creating it Gershwin was not momentarily
returned to the sound-world of St. Petersburg, that city of pogrom and pleasure
his parents had forsaken with eagerness and regret.
