12 George Gershwin Quotes on Music

George Gershwin quotes on music

2. I frequently hear music in the heart of noise.

4. The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself:Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.

5. Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.

6. Modern European composers:have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

7. Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.

9. When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

10. An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

11. I like to think of music as an emotional science.

12. It was on the train,with its rattle-ty bang,that is often so stimulating to a composer that I suddenly heard the complete construction of the Rhapsody. Comment on his Blue Rhapsody composition.

14. Gershwin's tragedy was not that he failed to cross the tracks, but rather that he did, and once there in his new habitat, was deprived of the chance to plunge his roots firmly into the new soil.

15. If jazz should threaten to become a hampering stereotype, a 'tradition' in its turn, George would go forward to the next fresh impulse that arose in him. You may call him the King of jazz and associate his name with the lifting of jazz into musical artistry. Very well, and his best thanks. But not on that account is he to be thrust into a pigeonhole. George Gershwin did not begin as a jazzer; he will not end as one.

16. Gershwin's melodic gift was phenomenal. His songs contain the essence of New York in the 1920s and have deservedly become classics of their kind, part of the 20th-century folk-song tradition in the sense that they are popular music which has been spread by oral tradition (for many must have sung a Gershwin song without having any idea who wrote it).