George Gershwin - An American in Paris (Analysis)

An American in Paris begins with a walk that seems audible before it has fully taken shape in the imagination: an agile theme advances with a light step, the woodwinds exchange compact phrases, and taxi horns break into the flow with the unpredictable noise of the street. Within minutes, however, the urban scene yields to the experience of the person moving through it. Gershwin begins with the colour and motion of Paris, then turns them into something more inward—a traveller's journey from the excitement of discovery to homesickness and, finally, to a new sense of belonging within the foreign city.

The score grew from lived impressions, yet it was never bound to a rigid programme. Gershwin explained that he wanted to convey what an American visitor might feel while walking through Paris, listening to its streets and absorbing the French atmosphere. He deliberately avoided assigning every musical episode to one fixed event. Deems Taylor's detailed narrative, written for the premiere, remains a valuable document of its time and an engaging companion to the music; it is not the score's only possible “script.”

The first seed had appeared in 1926. While staying in Paris with Robert and Mabel Schirmer, Gershwin wrote a small theme on a thank-you card, marked it “Very Parisienne,” and gave it the title An American in Paris. When he returned to the material two years later, his frame of reference had broadened considerably. His European journey in the spring of 1928, his encounters with leading musicians and his daily experience of Paris supplied the work's outward setting. Its inward turning point had already been imagined in New York: looking across the Hudson River, Gershwin pictured his traveller missing home and heard that feeling as the blues.

This double perspective governs the entire composition. The Parisian opening moves through lucid melodic lines, quick exchanges, lively rhythms and a lightness that recalls the world of Debussy and Les Six while remaining unmistakably Gershwin's own. In the large central span, pulse, tonal weight and sonic perspective all change. Trumpet and saxophones bring the blues to the foreground as the traveller's personal voice. By the time the walk returns, the two worlds have begun to interact: their themes meet, overlap and lead towards an ending in which the experience of Paris and the memory of America can be heard together.

It also matters that Gershwin orchestrated the work himself. After Rhapsody in Blue, whose original orchestration had been made by Ferde Grofé, An American in Paris marked a decisive step in the formation of Gershwin's personal symphonic language. The orchestra no longer frames a solo protagonist; it becomes the narrator. Woodwinds give mobility and personality to the walk, brass and percussion convey the pressure of the metropolis, saxophones alter the music's cultural accent, and the taxi horns bring into the concert hall a timbre that had belonged to the street.

Movements / Structure

The work is performed without a break, but its large trajectory clearly traces a free A–B–A′ design. Seven internal episodes are associated with the walk, the sounds of the city, homesickness, an unexpected meeting and the visitor's eventual adjustment to Parisian life. To make this continuous journey easier to follow by ear, those episodes can be gathered into five broader regions.

1. The Parisian Walk — Allegretto grazioso

The first principal theme appears immediately in F major and functions as the walking theme. Duple motion, syncopation, short woodwind interjections and taxi horns create a world that changes from moment to moment, as though the visitor's attention were continually caught by something new. A second principal theme in B-flat major opens the orchestral space and adds extroversion, theatrical energy and a stronger rhythmic profile.

2. A Pause and Episodes on the Left Bank — Calmato to Assai moderato

The pace temporarily relaxes and the texture grows calmer in a passage that the premiere narrative associates with walking past a church. Two subsidiary ideas then move through successive tonal regions, contract, change shape and meet material already heard. The music acquires an unmistakably developmental character: what first seemed like separate impressions begins to reveal an underlying network of relationships.

3. The Great Blues Section — Andante ma con ritmo deciso

The move to B-flat major and a quadruple pulse shifts the centre of gravity. A solo trumpet introduces a broad blues melody in three four-bar phrases, following an AAB pattern. Observation of the city gives way to personal memory. Blue notes, syncopations and chromatic harmonic movement blur the boundary between major and minor colour without dissolving the sense of tonal direction.

4. The Meeting and the Second Blues — A Lively Charleston Theme

A new theme in D major, bright and rhythmically angular, conveys the effect of an unexpected encounter. Its social energy and dance-like momentum evoke the Charleston, while the twelve-bar logic of the blues remains active beneath the surface. Later, the broad slow melody returns in C major, with a different accompaniment and gentler intensity, as if homesickness had already been changed by the intervening experience.

5. Return of the Walk and Coda — Moderato con grazia, Grandioso, Presto

Section A′ brings back the opening theme first in A major, then in C major, and only after this tonal wandering in the original F major. The recapitulation is compressed and dramatic: Parisian and American motifs follow one another rapidly or coexist within the same orchestral texture. At the Grandioso, the great blues melody enters the world of the walk before the Presto drives the work towards a brilliant, decisive close.

Musical Analysis

The Opening: Rhythm as a Way of Seeing

The first theme needs almost no time to establish the work's personality. Its phrase is short, clear and memorable, moving with something close to the natural pace of a human step. Around it Gershwin places an entire miniature world of syncopations, repeated notes, upward surges, playful cadences and sudden interruptions. The walk acquires the spontaneity of direct experience. Each new stimulus redirects attention, and form grows out of the sequence of those responses.

The duple metre gives the opening agility without reducing it to mechanical motion. Displaced accents and syncopations disturb the regular step, while the woodwinds change roles with remarkable speed: they continue the melody, comment upon it, echo it or divert it towards a new course. The xylophone adds dry clarity, the strings sustain momentum, and the brass suddenly enlarge the scale of the picture. A listener can recognise a stable character while remaining alert, because the next timbre often arrives like something newly glimpsed around the corner.

The taxi horns belong inside this rhythmic organisation. They are not pieces of sonic realism placed outside the musical syntax. Their entries occupy carefully chosen points, answer orchestral motifs and contribute to the scene's harmonic roughness. Recent scholarship has shown that the letters A, B, C and D in the autograph score identify the four individual horns rather than the notes to be played. The pitches Gershwin actually selected correspond approximately to A-flat, B-flat, high D and low A—a combination far more abrasive and distinctive than the later convention of using A–B–C–D.

The arrival of the second principal theme in B-flat major widens the horizon of the opening idea. The music becomes more expansive and theatrical, while earlier rhythmic cells continue to circulate through the orchestra. One of the score's central principles is already audible: melodies possess sharply defined identities, yet they inhabit the same web of rhythmic memories, small motifs and recurring colours. Coherence depends not only on thematic transformation, but also on the return of a recognisable sonic environment.

The Slowdown: From Looking Outwards to Listening Within

At the Calmato, the density of the score decreases and the previously continuous energy is held back. Stepwise chordal movement, softer dynamics and longer breaths allow the first theme to sound almost like a memory of itself. No literal stage direction is needed for the change to register: the rhythm of the street has been suspended and the traveller's attention briefly turns inward.

The continuation, linked by Gershwin to episodes on the Left Bank, introduces two subsidiary ideas around E major. One passes into the other; phrases contract, travel to new keys and meet motifs from the opening. The music ceases to function as a string of self-contained impressions and approaches a process of symphonic development. Material first heard during the walk returns with a different harmonic function and a changed emotional weight.

One passage in the Assai moderato is especially striking: parallel chords stand a tritone apart. Their polytonal bite momentarily recalls Stravinsky's Petrushka and unsettles any sense of stable harmonic ground. The resemblance need not be treated as a deliberate quotation. It does, however, reveal how directly Gershwin was conversing with the modern European music he knew and admired. The clear diatonic answers that follow restore his characteristic melodic immediacy without erasing the tension that has just been created.

The Blues: Memory Finds a Voice

The entry of the Andante ma con ritmo deciso brings the work's deepest transformation. The tonal centre settles in B-flat major, the pulse becomes quadruple, and a solo trumpet—usually muted—presents the third principal theme. The melody spans twelve bars and unfolds in three four-bar phrases of AAB type: the first two state related thoughts, while the third answers and completes them. Its design comes from the blues, but its long breath and symphonic continuation allow it to act as a fully developed central theme.

The blue notes enter the expressive core of the melody. Ambiguity between major and minor colouring, extended chords and chromatic shifts make the harmonic ground feel less secure. Against the large orchestra, the trumpet sounds like a solitary human voice. As the theme moves to the saxophones or is supported by the other winds, private memory gradually acquires a collective body and homesickness spreads across the orchestral texture.

The choice of B-flat major also has practical and timbral significance. For the transposing instruments at the heart of jazz—the trumpet, clarinet and tenor saxophone—it corresponds to notation in C major. Gershwin therefore builds the section in a region that lies naturally under their technique, phrasing and sound. Jazz elements are not added as ornamental colour to an otherwise complete symphonic language. They shape the melody, the breathing of phrases and the distribution of orchestral weight from within.

From the Charleston to the Second Blues

After a short modulatory bridge, the fourth principal theme appears in D major. It is brighter, more angular in rhythm and closely related to the Charleston. Beneath its dance-like surface, the twelve-bar organisation of the blues remains intact. Gershwin thus presents the slow, nostalgic song and the outward-facing dance as two states of the same musical language, capable of moving between private recollection and social motion.

In the composer's general programme, this change is linked to meeting a friend. The music does not need to portray an identifiable person in order to convey the effect of that encounter. Rhythm becomes more sociable, phrases grow shorter and the orchestra's replies become more immediate. Motion returns after the long inward pause, as though the traveller had turned once again towards the life surrounding him.

When the slow blues returns in C major, it is accompanied by rhythmic material already introduced. Its new appearance therefore carries the memory of the Charleston and the meeting. The melody stretches towards a small coda, the dynamics recede and brief reminders of the second Parisian theme begin to emerge. Homesickness remains present, but it is no longer isolated: it is gradually absorbed into the world that called it forth.

The Recapitulation: Returning with a Changed Memory

The opening of A′ avoids an immediate return to the tonic. The walking theme is first heard in A major, then moves towards C major, where extended dominant regions accumulate tension. Delaying F major gives its eventual return genuine formal weight. Across the broadest scale, the tonal path F–B-flat–F links the Parisian opening, the blues centre and the close through a spacious plagal relationship.

The recapitulation is much shorter than the opening section and acts as a synthesis of everything heard so far. The walking theme, subsidiary motifs and rhythmic shapes from different regions interlock within the orchestration. At the Grandioso, the great blues melody returns, supported by a motif from the second Parisian theme. The inward American voice and the outward Parisian setting now occupy the same musical space; the score's dramatic resolution lies precisely in this coexistence.

The Presto restores the syncopated drive of the opening. Shortly before the final impetus, the Largo lets fragments of the principal themes exchange one last reply, like a brief glance back across the completed journey. The symphonic close avoids the feeling of an external victory. It confirms the new identity created through the encounter of the two musical worlds and gives the original walk a meaning it could not have possessed at the beginning.

Form: Wandering and Symphonic Architecture

For many years, An American in Paris was described chiefly as a free succession of urban scenes. That account explains the music's vivid, immediate surface, but it does not exhaust its construction. The A–B–A′ design, the contrast between the Parisian region and the blues centre, the developmental function of the intervening episodes, the return of opening material and the final tonal balance reveal a hybrid symphonic logic. Recent critical scholarship has particularly emphasised the relationship of this trajectory to processes associated with sonata form.

Gershwin does not apply a Classical model mechanically. He thinks through melodies with the completeness of popular songs, twelve-bar blues designs, compact rhythmic cells and episodes that retain their own personality. Symphonic coherence arises from return, harmonic repositioning and, above all, the simultaneous presence of material that originally belonged to different regions. Wandering is the narrative face of the form; beneath it operates a carefully organised architecture of memory.

The Orchestra as Urban Landscape

The orchestration distinguishes the work's regions while keeping the passages between them open. Woodwinds, xylophone, clear string lines and sudden brass interjections dominate the Parisian opening. In the blues, trumpet and saxophones bring American popular music more directly to the foreground, while snare drum and the rest of the percussion alter the weight of the pulse. Celesta adds discreet flashes of light to transitional passages, and the strings turn individual phrases into longer symphonic curves.

The original saxophone writing was more complex and more changeable in colour than the version that later circulated through Frank Campbell-Watson's revision. Three players doubled soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones, changing brightness, depth and penetration from phrase to phrase. The critical edition restored those doublings together with many other details. Their importance exceeds textual accuracy: they allow us to hear more clearly how Gershwin designed the perspective of his urban landscape, now close and incisive, now distant and veiled.

Selected performance: Frankfurt Radio Symphony, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

From the 1926 Postcard to the Restored Score

In April 1926, shortly before leaving Paris, Gershwin wanted to thank Robert and Mabel Schirmer for their hospitality. He took a card and, instead of writing a conventional farewell, placed a small melodic idea upon it. Beside it he wrote “Very Parisienne,” and underneath added a title that looked more like a promise than a completed plan: An American in Paris. The card remained behind as the first trace of a work that had not yet found either its route or its great contrast.

Almost two years later, back in New York, Gershwin returned to the theme. The continuation did not come easily. The solution appeared far from Paris as he looked across the Hudson and imagined his American traveller, amid the excitement of a foreign city, suddenly missing the river of his own. In that moment the composition acquired its inner axis: walking, distance, blues. Paris would give the score its pace, colours and noise; America would be heard when the traveller became conscious of how far away it was.

In March 1928, George and Ira Gershwin crossed the Atlantic with Ira's wife Leonore and their sister Frances. The journey quickly filled with invitations, interviews, dinners and meetings with European composers. George sought working time between engagements and often continued composing in hotel rooms. Ira later recalled that the entire large blues section was written at the Hotel Majestic. Within a room in Paris, the imaginary traveller's homesickness began to find the voice of the trumpet.

There was one sound the piano could not imitate. One day Gershwin and Mabel Schirmer visited the motor shops along the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, trying taxi horns and listening closely to their different pitches. They returned to the hotel with an unusual collection; contemporary recollections suggest that around twenty horns had been gathered. Gershwin was not looking for any generic street noise. He wanted four individual voices that could be built rhythmically and harmonically into the score.

Soon afterwards, the young pianists Jacques Fray and Mario Braggiotti entered the room to visit him and found themselves facing this peculiar ensemble. Gershwin handed each of them a horn, sat at the piano and began to play the opening pages. They waited for a nod of his head before sounding their instruments at the appropriate moment. For a few minutes, the room at the Majestic became an improvised orchestration workshop: one piano, two friends holding taxi horns and a composer testing how a Parisian street might fit inside a symphonic hall.

Work continued after the return to America. On 1 August 1928, Gershwin completed the short-score autograph, followed by the two-piano version. That autumn he withdrew to friends' farm in Connecticut to prepare the full orchestration. On 18 November, he wrote the date of completion in the manuscript. Fewer than four weeks remained before the premiere—an exceptionally short period in which to prepare such a demanding and unusually scored work.

On the evening of 13 December 1928, Walter Damrosch took the podium at Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra brought the journey to life for the first time. The audience responded with lively enthusiasm. The reviews, however, showed how controversial the arrival of a Broadway composer within the symphonic repertory still seemed. Some heard melodic power, contrapuntal skill and an authentically new American voice; others regarded the score's theatricality and lightness with suspicion. An American in Paris had entered the concert hall carrying precisely the sounds that part of the critical establishment believed should remain outside it.

The score's adventures continued almost at once. For the first commercial recording in February 1929, five passages—112 measures in all—were removed so that the music would fit onto four sides of two 78-rpm discs. This shortened form became standard for decades, while later intervention also altered numerous orchestral details. Modern critical work by Mark Clague was required before the final 1929 version and the uncut autograph version delivered to Damrosch in 1928 could once again be presented separately. Nearly a century later, the musical city that had been forced to fit onto four record sides recovered its full extent.

🎧 Listening Guide

The work's large trajectory becomes easier to recognise when the ear follows a few stable landmarks and notices not only their first appearance, but also how they return transformed.

  • The walking theme: heard from the opening with a light, stepping character. When it reappears near the end, the phrase remains recognisable, but its orchestral surroundings now carry material gathered throughout the journey.
  • The taxi horns: their brief calls participate in rhythm and harmonic tension. Differences between performances may reveal whether the older convention or the restored reading of their pitches is being followed.
  • The change of pulse: the move from duple agility to quadruple time brings a broader, heavier breath. Solo trumpet and saxophones signal the shift of attention from the city towards the traveller.
  • The Charleston theme: its bright entry in D major restores outward energy while retaining the twelve-bar blues logic beneath the surface. Structural kinship remains audible under the change of mood.
  • The delayed F major: the walking theme first returns in other keys. The final recovery of F major gains force because it follows this harmonic wandering.
  • Coexistence in the coda: at the Grandioso, the great blues melody sounds within the sonic world of the opening. The work's central idea is condensed here: the American and Paris have ceased to occupy separate musical regions.

🎶 Further Listening

Three contrasting approaches reveal the score's symphonic extroversion, its natural relationship with jazz and the results of modern textual restoration.

  • Leonard Bernstein — New York Philharmonic (1959, Columbia/Sony): an extrovert, strongly theatrical account with elastic rhythm and an instinctive sense of American phrasing. Bernstein lets the melodies sing while keeping the work's large formal direction clear.
  • André Previn — London Symphony Orchestra (1971, EMI): pianist, composer and conductor meet in a reading whose syncopations and blues inflections feel entirely natural. The movement between symphonic precision and a more relaxed rhythmic current is achieved without overstatement.
  • Louis Langrée — Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Transatlantic (2019, Fanfare Cincinnati): a recording of the critical edition that includes both the uncut 1928 version and the final 1929 version. Direct comparison reveals different proportions, restored colours and the way the cuts alter the score's overall formal balance.

📚 Further Reading

A fuller understanding of the work requires biography, examination of the manuscript sources and analytical study of its form. The following titles open complementary routes into the creative history and musical language of An American in Paris.

  • Howard Pollack — George Gershwin: His Life and Work: the most comprehensive monographic study of the composer's life and output, with extensive documentation of the genesis, premiere and early reception of An American in Paris.
  • Richard Crawford — Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music: a more recent biographical account that places Gershwin's symphonic music within his complete career and the wider American cultural environment.
  • Steven E. Gilbert — The Music of Gershwin: a systematic analytical study of Gershwin's harmony, melodic thought, rhythm and contrapuntal writing.
  • Joseph Michael Van Dyke — George Gershwin’s An American in Paris for Two Pianos: A Critical Score Study and Performance Guide: a doctoral dissertation comparing the two-piano autograph, orchestral score and published versions, with detailed thematic and formal mapping.
  • Mark Clague, ed. — An American in Paris, George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition: the modern critical edition in two volumes, essential for distinguishing between the final 1929 form and the uncut 1928 version.

🔗 Related Works

The meeting of jazz and symphonic writing, the experience of the modern city and the creative exchange between America and Europe assume different forms in the following works.

  • George Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue: the work that opened Gershwin's path into the symphonic world, with a more prominent solo role and a different balance between jazz and orchestra.
  • Darius Milhaud — La création du monde, Op. 81a: a 1923 ballet integrating jazz techniques, blues phrasing and counterpoint within a European modernist framework.
  • Maurice Ravel — Piano Concerto in G major: a work in which jazz, meticulous orchestration and Classical form meet with a different economy and clarity.
  • Igor Stravinsky — Petrushka: a Parisian ballet whose polytonality, compact episodes and orchestral theatricality offer an important European point of reference for the world Gershwin encountered.
  • Aaron Copland — Music for the Theatre: another version of the American symphonic language of the 1920s, shaped by jazz rhythms, urban character and leaner orchestral writing.

🎼 Closing Reflection

When the walk returns, Paris sounds outwardly the same and inwardly transformed. The traveller has recognised his own musical memory within the noise of the foreign city, and the blues now walks beside him. In An American in Paris, a sense of place is ultimately created by everything we carry while passing through it.

📖 References & Sources

This revision draws upon comparison of the work's manuscript and modern critical traditions, primary testimony by the composer and his immediate circle, analytical studies of form and orchestration, and documentary evidence relating to the premiere and earliest recordings. Particular care has been taken to distinguish the uncut 1928 form, the final 1929 version and Frank Campbell-Watson's later revision.

Primary Sources and Scores

  • Gershwin, George. An American in Paris. Autograph orchestral score, completed 18 November 1928. George and Ira Gershwin Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
  • Gershwin, George. An American in Paris. Autograph score for two pianos, 1928. George and Ira Gershwin Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
  • Gershwin, George. An American in Paris: Facsimile Edition. Editorial commentary by Jeffrey Sultanof. Warner Bros. Publications, 1987.
  • Gershwin, George. An American in Paris. George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, Volume 1A: Final Version and Volume 1B: Uncut Version. Edited by Mark Clague. Schott Music, 2025.
  • Taylor, Deems. “An American in Paris: Narrative Guide” (1928), reprinted in Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson, eds., The George Gershwin Reader. Oxford University Press, 2004.
  • Sandow, Hyman. “Gershwin Presents a New Work” (1928), reprinted in Gregory R. Suriano, ed., Gershwin in His Time. Gramercy Books, 1998.

Secondary Sources

  • Crawford, Richard. Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music. W. W. Norton, 2019.
  • Gilbert, Steven E. The Music of Gershwin. Yale University Press, 1995.
  • Jablonski, Edward. Gershwin. Da Capo Press, 1987.
  • Pollack, Howard. George Gershwin: His Life and Work. University of California Press, 2006.
  • Schneider, Wayne, ed. The Gershwin Style: New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin. Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Van Dyke, Joseph Michael. George Gershwin’s An American in Paris for Two Pianos: A Critical Score Study and Performance Guide. Doctoral dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2011.

Reference Discography

  • Bernstein, Leonard; New York Philharmonic. Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue / An American in Paris. Columbia, 1959; later reissues by Sony Classical.
  • Previn, André; London Symphony Orchestra. Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue / Piano Concerto in F / An American in Paris. EMI, 1971.
  • Langrée, Louis; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Transatlantic. Fanfare Cincinnati, 2019. Includes the critical 1928 and 1929 versions.
  • Shilkret, Nathaniel; Victor Symphony Orchestra. An American in Paris. Victor, 1929. First commercial recording, with Gershwin playing celesta.

Digital and Institutional Resources

  • Library of Congress — George and Ira Gershwin Collection, 1895–2008.
  • The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, University of Michigan — documentation of the edition and restoration of the score.
  • The George and Ira Gershwin Official Website — works catalogue and historical account of An American in Paris.
  • OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center — full text of Joseph Michael Van Dyke's dissertation.
  • New York Philharmonic Shelby White & Leon Levy Digital Archives — programmes and archival material relating to the premiere and performance history.

Note on the Editions

The performance tradition most often heard during the twentieth century was based on the shortened form and Frank Campbell-Watson's later revision, which chiefly simplified the saxophone doublings. Mark Clague's critical edition separates the final version associated with the 1929 recording from the uncut autograph form of 1928 and restores, among other features, the original orchestration and pitches of the four taxi horns.