Duration: 2 minutes

Description: George Gershwin (1898–1937) composed Rialto Ripples Rag in 1916, at the age of seventeen, in collaboration with fellow songwriter and Remick employee Will Donaldson (1891–1954); the precise extent of Donaldson’s contribution remains uncertain, and some scholarship suggests that he may have assisted principally with arranging or with securing publication for the young composer. The piece dates from Gershwin’s formative years as a song plugger for the New York publishing firm Jerome H. Remick & Co., when his daily exposure to Tin Pan Alley popular music coincided with his developing interest in ragtime, classical music, and the new rhythmic styles that would eventually inform his distinctive synthesis of American popular and concert idioms; the Library of Congress identifies Rialto Ripples as Gershwin’s first complete surviving instrumental composition and his earliest work still in the repertoire. Its title probably invokes the theatrical district of Broadway (the term “Rialto” was contemporary slang for Broadway) while “ripples” may refer to the flowing piano figuration, and the music itself places syncopated ragtime rhythms within an unusually sophisticated rondo-like design, already revealing flashes of the harmonic personality and mixture of exuberance and melancholy that would characterize Gershwin’s mature music. Gershwin recorded the work as a piano roll in September 1916 on Aeolian Universal Uni-Record Piano Roll #202935, apparently providing its earliest documented performance; Jerome H. Remick & Co. published the score in 1917, the only Gershwin composition the firm issued during his employment there. Today, Rialto Ripples Rag is performed far less frequently than Gershwin’s Three Preludes or his major concert works, but it maintains a significant place in the solo-piano repertoire as his only known published rag and, more importantly, as the earliest substantial instrumental work by Gershwin to retain a continuing performance life, offering a fascinating glimpse of the teenage composer already beginning to bridge ragtime, popular entertainment, and the concert tradition. This edition has been transcribed and edited by Richard Dowling, with the extensive preface containing historical notes on the composer, the composition, and the piano roll.

• M390291 / 36-M390291 RIALTO RIPPLES SOLO $5.95Buy Now