scholarly journals The Hollywood Career of Gershwin's Second Rhapsody

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES WIERZBICKI

Abstract Around the time of its premiere in January 1932, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra was erroneously described as an “expanded” version of music that had been written specifically for a 1931 Fox film entitled Delicious, and for decades this misinformation has been echoed by Gershwin scholars. In fact, Gershwin put the finishing touches on the Second Rhapsody months before Delicious went into production, and his sketch for what in essence is the complete work was made when the screenplay was still in its embryonic stage. Relying on evidence that includes Gershwin manuscripts, various drafts of the screenplay, the conductor's score that was used for the film's recording sessions, and—importantly—the recently restored film itself, this article seeks to clarify both the chronological and the substantive relationship between the fifteen-minute Second Rhapsody and the film's seven-minute “New York Rhapsody.” Along with offering the first detailed account of the musico-narrative content of the film's “New York Rhapsody” sequence, the article shows that the “New York Rhapsody” is a truncation of the Second Rhapsody engineered not by Gershwin but, probably, by Fox employee Hugo Friedhofer.

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 641-662
Author(s):  
TOM F. WRIGHT

Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.


Stone Free ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Jas Obrecht

This detailed account of James Marshall Hendrix’s life before he transformed into “Jimi” Hendrix covers his hardscrabble childhood in Seattle, his early musical inspirations, first instruments and bands, and stint in the U.S. Army. Following his discharge, Hendrix embarks on his professional career, playing the chitlin circuit and making his first recordings as a studio musician. He then lands in New York City, where he lives in abject poverty until his “discovery” by Linda Keith and Bryan “Chas” Chandler. Chandler sees him perform “Hey Joe” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in a Greenwich Village club and arranges his passage to London. In a move that will come back to haunt him, Hendrix agrees to let Chandler and Michael Jeffery manage his career.


Author(s):  
Reva Marin

In Bob Wilber’s Music Was Not Enough, the multi-instrumentalist and bandleader offers a detailed account of his experience in New York during the mid-1940s as a student and protégé of the renowned New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet and the effect of that experience on his life and career. While Wilber’s description of his jazz education with Bechet and his subsequent professional career reveals his rich immersion in New Orleans and East Coast traditional and swing jazz communities, the colorblind lens through which he filters these experiences serves to deemphasize, or even negate, the significance of race in them. This chapter contrasts Wilber’s privilege and apparent distance from New Orleans’ jazz culture with Bechet’s insistence on the significance of his Creole identity to the shaping of his musical and cultural persona.


Maska ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (181) ◽  
pp. 100-110
Author(s):  
Franziska Aigner ◽  
Uri Turkenich

Dominique Mercy first met Pina Bausch in the United States at a summer academy organized by the choreographer Paul Sanasardo. Telling of his experience of the New York dance scene in the beginning of the 70s, and how he perceived it as differing from both living as well as dancing in Europe, he moves on to provide a detailed account of the development of Pina Bausch’s questioning method.


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