Book Review
Aug. 15th, 2010 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariGeorge Gershwin
by Rodney Greenberg
This was another of the straightforward Phaidon composer biographies and thus provided a good overview of Gershwin's life and work. Even though Gershwin is not a primary interest of mine, I appreciated getting good information on him. I especially liked the way his life story shed a lot of light on the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical. Plus, it's kind of refreshing to read about a composer who was financially and socially successful as a result of his work. However, I was not happy with the way Greenberg seemed to feel the need to constantly defend Gershwin's viability and quality as a composer of serious concert music. It got a irritating, particularly since Greenberg's primary method was to denigrate some of Gershwin's contemporaries (e.g., Virgil Thomson, Dohnyanyi) and emphasize how much more commercially successful and popular Gershwin's concert pieces are compared with these contemporaries.
by Rodney Greenberg
This was another of the straightforward Phaidon composer biographies and thus provided a good overview of Gershwin's life and work. Even though Gershwin is not a primary interest of mine, I appreciated getting good information on him. I especially liked the way his life story shed a lot of light on the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical. Plus, it's kind of refreshing to read about a composer who was financially and socially successful as a result of his work. However, I was not happy with the way Greenberg seemed to feel the need to constantly defend Gershwin's viability and quality as a composer of serious concert music. It got a irritating, particularly since Greenberg's primary method was to denigrate some of Gershwin's contemporaries (e.g., Virgil Thomson, Dohnyanyi) and emphasize how much more commercially successful and popular Gershwin's concert pieces are compared with these contemporaries.
