Music Diplomacy

George Gershwin wrote the tone poem - An American in Paris in 1928. He first visited Paris in 1923 and was immediately charmed by the city, thus the idea of writing a musical composition took root. It was his subsequent visit in '28 that he finally found time to work on this project. Gershwin's scored for four car horns to reflect the noisy traffic of the French capital. Inspired from the busy street of the "city of lights", this was how he might have heard during his brief sojourned in Paris.

And in Gershwin's hands ...

Piano roll recording cut in 1933.

Roll editor artist: Frank Milne

 

Gershwin plays Gershwin

The Piano Rolls

Epitome in the artistry of transposing not only musical notations onto paino rolls, Milne incorporated the dynamics, invoking the full soronity and live performance presence of an orchestra. For Gershwin's An American in Paris, he worked on two paino rolls creating a "4-hand" performance. For his mastery, we have a record for posterity how a work was to be played as intended by the composer, circa pre-phonograph. 

Commissioned from the New York Philharmonic, Gershwin wrote his composition in piano and arranged the score for a full symphonic orchestra (he does not usually orchestrate his own compositions). In addition to the standard instruments of a symphony orchestra, he scored An American in Paris for the saxophones, celesta and of course, the automobile air horns !

Antique automobile horns, that is. The technical term for this "instrument" is the air horn.

Full orchestration:

Violin 1st
Violin 2nd
Viola
Double Bass

C Piccolo ~ 01
C Flutes ~ 02

C Oboe ~ 02

F Cor Anglais ~ 01

B flat Clarinet ~ 02

B flat Bass Clarinet ~ 01

C Bassoons ~ 02

E flat Alto Saxophone ~ 01

B flat Tenor Saxophone ~ 01

E flat Baritone Saxophone ~ 01

F Horns ~ 04

B flat Trumpet ~ 03

B flat Trombones ~ 03

E flat Tuba ~ 01

Percussion Timpani

Percussion Snare Drum

Percussion Concert Bass Drum

Percussion Triangle

Percussion Wood Block

Percussion Cymbals

Percussion Tom-Toms

Percussion Xylophone

Percussion Glockenspiel

Percussion Celesta

Taxi Air Horns ~ 04

Gershwin brought back some Parisian taxi horns for the New York premiere of An American in Paris on the 13 December 1928 at the Carnegie Hall with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic.

The original programme note: "My purpose here is to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere ..." and when the tone poem moves into the blues tempo ~ Andante ma con ritmo deciso, "...our American friend ... has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness ... nostalgia is not a fatal disease ..." the American visitor "... once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life ... the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant ..."

Andre Previn with the London Symphony

80 years on, here with the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of Lorin Maazel, performing a symphonic tone poem of An American in Paris by George Gershwin. This time, not in Carnegie hall, but a 14-hour distance by flight away across the pacific - Pyongyang, Democratic People's Republic of Korea !

An American in Paris has become a standard repertoire with orchestras around the world and especially for touring American orchestras. For an establishment like the NY Phil on "National Service" to North Korea, the symphonic tone poem at over 15 minutes, is a "very important piece" declared George's father. 



Lorin Maazel conducting the New York Philharmonic

at the East Pyongyang Grand Theater in Pyongyang, North Korea,

on Tuesday, 26 February 2008.

Or was it An American in Pyongyang ...

A delight to see the 'Taxi Horns" in operation. You can just imagine the camera crew referring to the conductor score during the live filming, cool job :-)

 



Music diplomacy over realpolitik ?
The Korean folk song - Arirang. A very important piece, Morris Gershwin would agree.



14 February 2013