George Gershwin’s An American in Paris “is one of the most famous pieces of American music—but for 70 years orchestras may have been playing one of its best-known effects wrong,” writes Michael Cooper in Tuesday’s (3/1) New York Times. “The effect involves … French taxi horns, which honk in several places…. A coming critical edition … being prepared at the University of Michigan will argue that the now-standard horn pitches … are not what Gershwin intended…. Gershwin’s score labels the four taxi horns with a circled ‘A,’ a circled ‘B,’ a circled ‘C’ and a circled ‘D.’ … The new critical edition will argue that Gershwin’s circled letters were merely labels specifying which horns to play, not which notes. [Mark Clague, editor in chief of the critical edition and] an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, … pointed to the evidence of a Victor recording of ‘An American in Paris’ that was made in 1929, under Gershwin’s supervision [with] a more dissonant set of notes: A flat, B flat, a much higher D, and lower A.” Says Clague, “George would have saved everybody a lot of trouble if he had just numbered them ‘1,’ ‘2,’ ‘3,’ and ‘4’ rather than ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D.’ ”
Posted March 1, 2016
