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In Lyrics on Several Occasions (1959) Ira Gershwin described the art of the lyricist as that of fitting words "mosaically" to music, an art that required "the infinite patience of a gemsetter." To answer that perennial question, whether the words or music came first, it was usually the music, or at least the musical germ of a song. "I hit on a new tune," George Gershwin once explained, "and play it for Ira and he hums it all over the place until he gets an idea for a lyric. Then we work the thing out together." Working it out meant finding the precise syllables, words, and phrases that fit the notes of a melody. Sometimes it took Ira all night to find a single word. Once he had to check into a hotel room for three days to find a setting for a tricky string of staccato notes in one of his brother George's melodies; what he came up with--"Come to Papa, come to Papa, do," a line in "Embraceable You" (1930)--shows why, among songwriters, Ira Gershwin was known as "The Jeweler."
While Ira Gershwin is usually associated with George Gershwin's music, he also collaborated over the course of his career with many other composers, each with a distinctive musical style: Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, Harry Warren, Burton Lane, Arthur Schwartz, Kurt Weill, and even Aaron Copland.
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