AURORA | George Gershwin was a troublemaker, a thief who’d steal from pushcarts and a bully who’d pick fights with the other kids in the neighborhood.
If he’d grown up in the early decades of the 21st century, the composer of jazz standards like “Summertime” and orchestral works like “Rhapsody in Blue” could have easily been diagnosed with some kind of conduct disorder. It’s the kind of verdict that could carry a prescription for any number of psychotropic drugs, treatments like ritalin and adderall designed to retool the chemistry of the brain.
But Gershwin, born in 1898, didn’t have access to that kind of medicine. The streets of Brooklyn were his childhood playground; they turned him tough as his impoverished family moved from dilapidated apartment to dilapidated apartment in the early 1900s.
“Gershwin could have gone off the rails,” Richard Kogan told a rapt audience during a dual lecture and piano performance at the Anschutz Medical Campus on Sept. 19. Kogan spoke with plenty of expertise — in addition to his credits as an accomplished concert pianist, he’s a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College and co-director of the center’s Human Sexuality Program. “Even his parents predicted that he would grow up to be a bum.”
Kogan went on to illustrate just how wrong that prediction turned out to be during the lecture and concert, part of the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities’ new Music and Medicine Initiative. Kagan’s guest appearance on campus came as the Center for Bioethics and Humanities looks to expand its programming beyond the revolving exhibitions at the Fulginiti Pavilion that opened last year.
“I think this let people know that this music and medicine initiative is under way, to explore the healing properties of music,” said Tess Jones, the director of the Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program and the interim director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. That initiative includes an on-campus choir and orchestra performances. “Our hope is that it will whet people’s appetites and get them to participate or come out and enjoy the incredible musical talent that’s part of our population on campus.”
As the artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine program, Kogan has made his own efforts to create conceptual ties between the two disciplines. During his presentation at Anschutz, he explained how the ancient Greeks designated Apollo as the god of both music and medicine. He spoke of ancient shamans who were healers and artists in equal measure. He spoke again and again of “music’s capacity to transform young people’s lives.
“Over time, music and medicine split apart,” Kagan said. “Each of these disciplines have become increasingly specialized.”
But for a young Gershwin who spent his time getting into trouble on the streets of Brooklyn, the distance between those two schools of thought wasn’t that far. A friend’s violin recital proved to be the most effective kind of prescription for Gershwin’s early behavioral problems. At age 10, Gershwin found salvation in the simple notes, chords and rhythm; he stumbled on to a treatment that would ultimately lead to fame, fortune and the undisputed title of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.
“As soon as he heard those first notes, Gershwin was so transfixed, on the spot (he) decided to devote the rest of his life to the study of music,” Kogan said. “He made a remarkable recovery.”
From there, Gershwin turned all of his frenetic, nervous energy to his art. He started learning the piano obsessively. He quit school at the age of 15 to be a “song-plugger” in the Tin Pan Alley neighborhood of New York, promoting sheet music for a large publishing company and working on his own music in his spare time. Collaborating with his brother Ira, George Gershwin pumped out tune after tune, obsessively working to perfect his craft. Full-blown commercial success came after Broadway crooner Al Jolson performed Gershwin’s song “Swanee” in 1919. That exposure was the first step in making Gershwin a household name.
“He completely inhaled the jazz tradition,” Kogan said. “Before he was skilled, he was actually convinced he was great.”
More enduring artistic achievements followed. Gershwin’s 1924 classical work “Rhapsody in Blue” came to define the sound of American music. His opera “Porgy and Bess,” composed in 1935, started as a commercial flop. It was only after Gershwin’s death from a brain tumor at age 38 that the show would achieve status as one of the greatest orchestral works of the 20th century.
Kogan brought Gershwin’s story to life through words and notes. A graduate of the Julliard School of Music Pre-College program, Kogan took breaks from his lecture to play solo and sweeping renditions of selections from “Porgy and Bess,” “Rhapsody in Blue” and standards like “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Swanee.” He spoke of Gershwin’s struggles with depression in his 30s, of the role that music played in keeping his focus. Even as he suffered from the undiagnosed brain tumor that eventually killed him, music remained the main focus of Gershwin’s life. He made good on his decision to give his life to the art form.
“It’s one of the great tragedies of recent history,” Kogan said in reference to the years and years of bad diagnoses as the brain tumor made its fatal progress. “It boggles the mind to imagine what he might have produced.”
But the larger message of Kogan’s lecture was clear: a greater tragedy would have come if that 10-year-old ruffian raised on the streets of Brooklyn had never discovered music. With song credits that number in the hundreds and a cultural impact far too great to measure, Gershwin made the most of the medicinal quality of music. It was a drug more powerful than ritalin or adderall; it was a treatment that left a permanent mark on the world.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com