Gershwin: His Life and Work - Pollack

I first read this book when I was in high school. As you shall see, there's many similarities with Ravel. Though he was definitely into the ladies. - "Studying the piano made a good boy out of a bad one," he later stated. "It took the piano to tone me down. It made me more serious. I was a changed person six months after I took it up' -- I started much younger than Gershwin, but that's very true for me and guitar. "The actual time Gershwin spent with Hambitzer remains somewhat uncertain. In 1925, Gershwin stated, "I stopped taking [piano] lessons because my teacher [Hambitzer] died," and there's no reason to doubt this, though some sources assert that these lessons ended earlier. At the same time, Gershwin often claimed that he studied piano for only four or five years, telling one interviewer, for instance, "My technique is not like that of so-called great pianists. I developed an original method, for altogether I have studied only about five years." If he started studying the piano about 1910, and worked with Hambitzer from 1913 to 1918, that would total eight or nine years. Perhaps he discounted his piano studies prior to working with Hambitzer." [...] "My serious music," he once said, "was an outgrowth of light music. I had written light music for ten or fifteen shows before I composed my Rhapsody in Blue." "Even so, it seems imprecise to refer to Gershwin as someone from the other side of the tracks who came to the classical tradition relatively late in life. From his early years, Gershwin's involvement with concert music paralleled his activities in popular music. He did not so much cross over as from the very beginning plant one foot on each side of the tracks and attempt to straddle them as firmly as he could."