"Cuban Overture" by George Gershwin

In February 1932, George Gershwin fled the appalling winter that had overtaken New York that year and sailed, with an entourage of six, to Havana, Cuba, where he holed up just long enough to absorb the local atmosphere and Hispanic verve that went into his Cuban Overture. He finished the piece in New York that August.

Having once left the orchestration of one of his greatest works – the Rhapsody in Blue – to someone else (Ferde Grofé), Gershwin was by now his own very capable orchestrator. He famously asked the great orchestral colorist Ravel for lessons; Ravel asked him how much money he had earned the previous year. Gershwin told him (nearly twenty times Ravel’s own income), and Ravel replied, “I should be asking you for lessons.” Gone, also, is his timidity over his own technical competence. For all its shimmering local color and (especially) rhythmic vitality, the Cuban Overture is in its way a very serious work. At the first performance, the title was simply Rumba (and it certainly is one), but by the second performance Gershwin had retitled the piece, to give, he said “a more just idea of the character and intent of the music.” Not content with demanding Cuban percussion instruments and playing techniques, Gershwin includes in the score a detailed diagram of how they should be deployed on the platform.

Determined to acquire what he considered a “proper” compositional technique, Gershwin had enrolled the previous summer as a student with the uncompromising theorist Joseph Schillinger, who set him to work analyzing Stravinsky and completing compositional exercises of terrifying abstruseness and complexity. The Cuban Overture, paradoxically, was the first fruit of this unlikely relationship. Or maybe the second; only weeks before signing the last page of the score, Gershwin had handed in an assignment entitled Rhythmic Groups Resulting from the Interference of Several Synchronized Periodicities.

None of this prevents the Cuban Overture from being its joyous self, dancing around Échale Salsita, a song that had wafted through every bar in Havana while Gershwin was there, and even sneaking in a glimpse of La Paloma. Gershwin would not live long enough to become a typical product of the Schillinger studio, but only he could perform short-base periodic interference on a rumba.