Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”
Notes by TŌN clarinetist Craig Swink
There is no better sound to capture the unfettered magic of the Roaring Twenties, or the Années folles decade of Paris, than the glittering score of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris. This tone poem is what became of George’s visit to Paris in 1928, a part of his European trip during which he met the foremost Modernists of the time, including Sergei Prokofiev and Alban Berg.
The score ultimately took inspiration from the murky, blue harmony of Maurice Ravel and the French Impressionists, and Gershwin wrote, “My purpose is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere.” You will hear in the opening the bustle and chaos of Parisian street traffic, with bright orchestral colors and syncopated rhythms evoking the energy of a city in constant motion.
As the music unfolds, Gershwin’s musical traveler wanders through the streets of Paris, encountering a series of contrasting scenes and characters. The score moves freely between jazz-inflected rhythms, blues harmonies, and sweeping lyrical melodies, as if we were strolling without a fixed destination. Gershwin’s orchestration is especially vivid, including muted brass, shimmering percussion, and woodwind flourishes. Unexpected instrumental combinations paint the city in sound, while the famous Parisian taxi horns punctuate the texture like flashes of color in a crowded boulevard.
At the heart of the work is the celebrated blues episode, where the bustling exterior world gives way to something more inevitable. The solo trumpet introduces a languid melody that unfolds gradually through the orchestra—the memory of Harlem pulling the weary traveler back into their identity, a wave of homesickness that the composer felt could best be expressed by the blues. Yet even here, Paris remains present; fragments of earlier themes and restless rhythmic figures gradually pull the music back into the streets.
The final section gathers these contrasting impressions into an exuberant orchestral climax. Gershwin’s Paris is neither entirely French nor entirely American; it is a place seen through the eyes of an American composer captivated by the sounds, colors, and possibilities of a foreign city. In An American in Paris, jazz and symphonic music meet not as opposites, but as two languages capable of telling the same story.