He'd got plenty o' somethin'

Exactly 60 years ago today, a stunned international public heard the news that George Gershwin had died in Hollywood at only 38, some five hours after an emergency operation for a brain tumour. Amidst the tide of tributes that swept the media over the next few weeks, perhaps none was more remarkable than a brief radio message broadcast during his memorial service on 12 July 1937. "Music was to George Gershwin not a mere matter of ability. It was the air he breathed, the dream he dreamed. I grieve over the deplorable loss of music, for there is no doubt that he was a great composer." The speaker was Arnold Schoenberg.

He had personal reasons for endorsing so warmly the dazzling young musician he had come to know well over the previous winter. Between working on such Fred Astaire vehicles as Shall We Dance?, Gershwin had indulged the 62-year-old Viennese master's passion for tennis by frequently inviting him round to his own court; and had also, quite competently, painted his portrait. No doubt the flattering possibility of Gershwin taking composition lessons from Schoenberg had also been raised, and, of course, there was their shared Jewishness. Not that the relationship was entirely unruffled. The pianist Oscar Levant recalled a tennis court incident shortly after a performance of Schoenberg's latest 12-tone string quartet, when Gershwin airily remarked, "I'd like to write a quartet some day. But it will be something simple, like Mozart," which the ever-paranoid Schoenberg instantly took personally, riposting, "I'm not a simple man - and anyway, Mozart was considered far from simple in his day."

Yet the genuineness of Schoenberg's admiration was confirmed a year later when he published a more extensive tribute. "Many musicians do not consider George Gershwin a serious composer," he began. "But they should understand that, serious or not, he is a composer - that is, a man who lives in music and expresses everything, serious or not, sound or superficial, by means of music because it is his native language." Schoenberg continued: "It seems to me beyond doubt that Gershwin was an innovator. What he has done with rhythm, harmony and melody is not merely style. It is fundamentally different from the mannerisms of many a serious composer."

In particular, Schoenberg praised Gershwin's ability to conceive ideas as a unity in which melody, harmony and rhythm were "not welded together, but cast. I do not know it, but I imagine, he improvised them on the piano. Perhaps he gave them later the finishing touch; perhaps he spent much time to go over them again and again..." Yet, after refusing to speculate whether posterity would regard Gershwin as a kind of Johann Strauss or Debussy, Offenbach or Brahms, Lehr or Puccini - all of these, incidentally, composers whom Schoenberg deeply esteemed - he concluded: "But I know he is an artist and a composer; he expressed musical ideas; and they were new - as is the way in which he expressed them."

Strikingly absent from this heartfelt encomium are any of those critical niggles that dogged Gershwin during his career, and ever after: that, in presuming to raise himself from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to the concert hall and opera house, he was outstripping his gifts; that such "symphonic" efforts as the Piano Concerto and An American in Paris are really only medleys of tunes with creaking transitions; that the "lessons" he continued to take to the end with such teachers as the Russian-born theorist Joseph Schillinger were actually just to get his orchestral scores vetted for errors and ineffectualities; and so on, and on. What Schoenberg was saying was, so what: here was a genius with the very essence of music in his ears, imagination and fingers, doubtless including the ability to pick up any mere technical expertise as, and when, he needed it.

Indeed, Ravel - whose affection for the Rhapsody in Blue is audible in his Piano Concerto - was evidently of the opinion that rigorous formal training might actually inhibit Gershwin's musicality. Whether or not he really responded to the younger man's request in 1928 for lessons with the question, "Why should you become a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?" as the legend has it, he certainly wrote home from New York to Nadia Boulanger in similar terms: "There is a musician here endowed with the most brilliant, most enchanting and perhaps the most profound talent: George Gershwin. His world-wide fame no longer satisfies him, for he is aiming higher. He knows that he lacks the technical means to achieve his goal. In teaching him these means, one might ruin his talent. Would you have the courage, which I wouldn't dare have, to undertake this awesome responsibility?"

In fact, she never got the chance; and, given the shortness of his career and the manifold distractions of fame, the wonder is not how stumblingly he progressed, but how fast. Until his parents acquired a piano when he was 12, he could barely noodle out a tune. Yet, by 16, he was a rampaging, virtuoso song-plugger for a leading New York popular music publisher, and by 20 he was already composing inimitable show-songs - a primal pleasure he was never to renounce for all his "higher" aspirations. Yes, Rhapsody in Blue (1925) had to be hastily scored by Ferde Grofe, since Gershwin had simply not, as yet, gained experience enough. Yes, the transitions in An American in Paris (1928) are still obvious, but with what characteristic and evocative nuances they are also filled in their own right. And when one considers the vast and cornucopian scope of Porgy and Bess (1935), the cumulative half-hour span of its opening scene, the melodic variety of its numbers, innovatory textures of its choruses and its often exquisitely detailed recitatives, and asks oneself just how much of this Gershwin could have achieved even five years earlier, then the implications of Schoenberg's tribute really begin to come home.

And behind his words surely lay a deeper conviction, out of his Viennese cultural past, which Schoenberg seems to have clung to through all the historical shocks of his lifetime and the aesthetic shocks of his own development: a belief in the essential unity of musical experience. Good light music was in no way different from good serious music, he would argue, except in its more relaxed, less concentrated presentation of musical ideas. Doubtless such teaching helps to explain the cordiality with which his pupil Alban Berg received Gershwin in Vienna itself in 1928. And if, despite the manifold cultural differences, masters such as Ravel, Berg and Schoenberg were happy to welcome Gerswhin as one of their own, then who cares about the critics. The clue, of course, is that Gershwin had the good fortune to mature during a quite exceptionally sophisticated phase of American popular song itself, a development that would ultimately enable his hero, Jerome Kern, to construct a number as melodically sinuous, as harmonically recherche, as "All the Things You Are" (1939) and still carry the public with him.

If we now find it difficult to think of a single pop hit since the Beatles with remotely the compositional substance and skill of the best of Gershwin, Kern and Cole Porter, maybe we should also ask to what extent the notorious gap that widened after the last war between "classical" modernism and pop really was the fault of an elitist avant-garde as alleged, and how far it was due instead to the influence of the vast interests that came to control the provision of popular music itself. And although we are now supposed to have evolved into a post-modern phase in which "accessibility" rules and crossover composers such as Michael Nyman and Karl (Adiemus) Jenkins are marketed to the millions, the contrast between their meagre, manipulative little formulae and Gershwin's overflowing talent only heightens the sense of what music lost by his untimely deathn