Listen For Yourself! Has Gershwin's An American In Paris Been Played Wrong For Decades?

In the 1920s, George Gershwin composed two orchestral pieces that claimed Jazz Age legitimacy to America's emerging contributions to the world of classical music.

Four years after his "Rhapsody In Blue" thrilled the nation with its daring display of bluesy syncopation, "An American In Paris," inspired by his first trip to the French capital, premiered at Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic.

The composer famously brought home Parisian taxi horns to incorporate into the score, simulating the city's hurried traffic, but The New York Times reports that the exact tones of those horns are now the subject of a controversial claim in a coming critical edition of the works of George and Ira Gershwin being prepared by the University of Michigan.

"I have a feeling that percussionists are going to be somewhat put out by this whole conclusion," says Mark Clague, the editor in chief of the critical edition, who attended some test performances of the revised score by the Reno Philharmonic last month.

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It all seems to stem from an innocent and understandable mix-up, perhaps originating with Arturo Toscanini's 1945 recording of the piece with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, eight years after the composer's death. The video is mislabeled 1943.

Compare that with this 1929 recording, conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret, where Gershwin was in the studio to supervise.