Today George Gershwin would have been 117 years old. (Imagine what other music he might have written if he had lived to even half that age. He didn’t even make it to a third of that number.)
I suspect the average person familiar with Western music, conceived rather broadly, knows just as well the four notes that follow these
as the four notes that follow these
What makes "I Got Rhythm" so catchy? There’s the pentatonic aspect of the opening pitch materials, which makes the tune quite user-friendly. And there’s the consistent dotted-quarter pulse overlaid on a common 4/4 meter, which makes the rhythm distinctive but uniform nonetheless. These features of pitch and duration have surely already been pointed out. However, what perhaps has not been pointed out is how the pitch and rhythm of the first four notes correspond in a significant way.
Rather than report this correspondence with a lot of words, I will use a couple of pictures, and let the reader figure it out.
This kind of match is rather rare among four-note motives. (Well, in full disclosure, it does happen with I Got Rhythm’s next four notes, but that’s just because they are the same thing backwards.) I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to discover how elements of these images (such as the stack of fourths, and the a-b-a rhythm) infiltrate the composer’s Variations on “I Got Rhythm.” I will leave it as an additional exercise for the reader to come up with a five-note motive with the same property. I can think of one from rock music.
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