From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s "Jazzbo", about George Gershwin, in The New Yorker (10 January 2005):
[Gershwin] had been saved by the piano. On a fateful day in 1910, a secondhand upright was hoisted through the family’s Second Avenue window and, to general shock, scapegrace street fighting George, age twelve, sat down and tore through a popular tune like a vaudeville virtuoso. He had never studied a note. Many years later, Gershwin recalled the musical epiphanies of his early childhood: sitting transfixed outside a penny arcade as an automatic piano emitted noises that turned out to be Robinstein’s "Melody in F"; feeling a "flashing revelation of beauty" when the strains of Dvorak’s "Humoresque" reached him from the school auditorium while he was, in fact, outside playing hooky.
Posted on October 7th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, true stories
