Friday 22 April 2011

George Gershwin: living with disruption

It is common for people to think that technology is moving so fast that we are in danger of being passed by.  In yesterday's post I reported how Feargal Sharkey had talked of the effect of 3-4 disruptive technologies happening during his musical career.  These included music going digital, the advent of the CD and download technologies like iTunes.

This feeling is nothing new, and for two hundred years or more people have felt the same way.  You might be tempted to think that this would not apply to the music business, but it is as true for music as for any other aspect of life.  A good way of illustrating this is to look at the life of George Gershwin.

Gershwin was born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family in New York in 1898.  There were no obvious musical influences in the family, but George seemed to show an aptitude for the piano at an early age.  He went on to become a prolific composer of songs, musicals and orchestral works, and was probably the first composer in history to get rich from music.

George Gershwin quit school at the age of 15 to join the music business.  At that time the money was in sheet music, and George was employed as a music 'plugger' (a kind of salesman) in Tin Pan Alley.  His job was to promote songs owned by publisher Remicks to would-be buyers from Broadway and music halls.  A catchy number associated with a hit show would sell hundreds of thousands of copies of the sheet music.

At the same time Gershwin was starting to produce recordings of Remick's numbers, and some of his own compositions, on a new development for the music business, the automatic piano.  These devices were the forerunners of programmable computers - virtuoso pianists would themselves create original 'recordings' on paper rolls which in turn would be fed into the ultimate in-home entertainment system.

George Gerswhin's big break came with one of his own numbers, writing the music in 1920 for Swanee which was a huge hit for singer Al Jolson and librettist Irving Berlin.  Recorded?  Yes.  Jolson's success with with an emerging technology, the phonograph.  This went on to change everything - effectively wiping out most of the sheet music business.

George Gershwin, though, was hot property in the older musical economy, and went on to write hundreds of individual songs, mostly in Broadway shows and other musical offerings.  Some of these shows went on to become massive hits (and, like Oh Kay, are still performed today), others died quietly.  Gershwin's greatest songs have been recorded by countless musicians.

Gershwin was one of the first musicians to realize the promotional potential of radio, the hottest medium of the early 1920s.  At the beginning of 1922 there were just 28 radio stations in the US: by the end of the year there were 570.  The new 'broadcasters' were struggling to fill the schedules, and here the music industry was able to help out and  music 'pluggers' like the young Gershwin were sent out to plug the gaps. 

If this technological explosion sounds familiar, then listen to this complaint from the time when networked radio was becoming a reality: "Anyone who thinks he can carry a tune... nowadays takes a 'shot' at music making" (Gershwin himself in 1926, when his burgeoning career as a national broadcaster, with a syndicated coast-to-coast radio show and a massive audience to match.

Gerswhin, of course, turned his hand to orchestral works (the most famous being Rhapsody in Blue) and opera (he wrote the music to the perennial Porgy and Bess).  The next technology he embraced was the movies, moving to Hollywood in 1934 and writing the score for two Goldwyn blockbusters, including Shall We Dance which featured Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

George Gershwin died tragically early, on July 11 1935.  During his short career the music business he earned a living from evolved from making its money from sheet music and piano rolls, the stage and then into radio, gramophone and the movies.  Gershwin was just 39, and in his short life had ridden the wave of a succession disruptive technologies.  Feargal Sharkey is 52.

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