I requested a review copy of this a couple of years ago but was denied for unspecified reasons. It happens. And, as I tend to only request books I am interested in (some people just like to get free books and shotgun a plethora of requests...), I try to get to denied books sometime after they are published. So ... it's later. I finished this last week and had to sift though my notes for a bit before drafting this.

Crawford says in his introduction

But what justifies the appearance of a new Gershwin biography now, eighty-two years after his death? The answer lies in the perspective of the story told here: an academic scholar’s account of Gershwin’s life in music during the composer’s own time.

For an academic, Crawford has written a quite readable, extensively sourced, biography. He writes of the Gershwin family - more than a bit, as would be expected, about Ira - both the relationship and the collaboration. I liked two quotes from Ira's Foreword and Afterword to his own Lyrics on Many Occasions:

[Fore]P.S. Since most of the lyrics in this lodgment were arrived at by fitting words mosaically to music already composed, any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable.
[...]
[After...and this definition was used by the Encyclopedia Britannica]SONG is the joint art of words and music, two arts under emotional pressure coalescing into a third. The relation and balance of the two arts is a problem that has to be resolved anew in every song that is composed.

Succinct.

Crawford chronicles the development of George as a songwriter and then, a composer; his stage and film career; his successes and his tragic early death. About 20% of the book is devoted to Porgy and Bess. And Crawford provides analyses of the different sections, acts, compositions. I admit I found those parts a bit tedious. Example:

The new song, for which DeSylva shared credit with “Arthur Francis,” is a celebration of modern dance, and the sanctified spirit achieved through disciplined practice, the right footwear, and the will to battle life’s discouragements. The verse, in the manner of blues music, unfolds over the orchestra’s repeated quarter notes. But Gershwin complicates the harmony’s trajectory and quickens the pace of its modulations. His novel harmonic “steps” support a vocal line that rises over fifteen bars, a semitone at a time, from G to D-flat. The tonal territory traveled is huge, yet each step receives solid underpinning in whole notes. The verse’s tonal complexity exceeds that of any song Gershwin had written to date; it is easy to imagine Gershwin’s delight in sharing it with Kilenyi.

I like to listen to Dr. Robert Greenberg's Great Courses lectures on music and he gets into the compositional details quite a bit, but in general, Crawford's were a bit dry. Still, the overall reading was quite easy, if detailed, and made even easier in that I listened to various recordings of Gershwin pieces while reading it. (I recommend this box set - some recordings are Gershwin himself playing and speaking. But for the majesty of Rhapsody in Blue, nothing beats Bernstein's powerful arrangements!) I should also admit that I am not enthralled with a soprano singing the titular song; I much prefer an instrumental version, or less piercing vocals.

On my favorite of his, Rhapsody, of course, I never knew this:

Will any one who heard him forget the astonishment he created in that first measure, when, halfway up the seventeen-note run, he suddenly stopped playing separate notes and slid for home on a long portamento that nobody knew could be done on a clarinet? It’s a physical impossibility; it’s not in any of the books; but Ross [Gorman] knew it could be done with a special kind of reed and he spent days and days hunting around till he found one.

That note is best heard with eyes closed, chin down, breathing in while tilting the head up to its peak. But that's me. Your mileage may vary.

Gershwin's composition sketches lent themselves to orchestration with countermelodies "especially where melodic pauses need filling."

In 1929 Gershwin told an interviewer that, deeming “ordinary harmonies, rhythms, sequences, intervals, and so on” fundamental to his compositional vocabulary, he experimented at the piano with ways to enliven these elements. “I would spend hour upon hour trying to change them around so that they would satisfy me.”

On his Concerto in F

Critic Charles L. Buchanan, having panned the Concerto in F in December of 1925, now awarded it “an increasingly clear title to be ranked the one composition of indubitable vitality, and authentic progressiveness, that this country has produced.”

With fame comes acceptance? Well, Bach wasn't recognized for the genius he was until long after his death.

On the craft:

To Gershwin, the study of musical technique was indispensable. “Many people say that too much study kills spontaneity in music, but I claim that, although study may kill a small talent, it must develop a big talent.” He advises the aspiring composer to “write something every day, regardless of its length or quality.” Failure is the norm, and facing failure down is part of the songwriter’s daily lot. “Perhaps the tenth—or the hundredth—song will do the trick.”

Jerry Pournelle's advice to budding writers was along the lines of "write, write, write, and then write some more."

DuBose Heyward was the author of the book "Porgy" from which the play and opera were adapted. DuBose dropped out of school at fifteen to help his impoverished family with various jobs, some of which "brought him in contact with South Carolina's black population." Crawford makes an insightful observation:

Each of these jobs gave the young man a vantage point for observing a people who remained separate from, and imperfectly known by, the white population of Charleston. The racial imbalance of power never claimed much of his attention; what fascinated him was the mystery of cultural difference.

"...separate from, and imperfectly known by..." American understanding is not much different today from any non-white culture.

I like that speculation, however educated a guess, is couched with “suggested” or “likely” or similar, such as "Two songs Gershwin wrote with Irving Caesar in early 1919 suggest the range of professional opportunity now open to the young songwriter." I dislike pronouncements of fact that cannot be know, which amounts to creative fictionalizing nonfiction, and Crawford does not allow himself to fall into that trap.

A good, non-romanticized, certainly not fictionalized like the 1945 film "Rhapsody in Blue", biography. ( )