Despite her many accomplishments, little information about Dana Suesse’s early life is available. She was born in 1909 in Kansas City and traveled the Midwest on the vaudeville circuit, performing as a pianist and dancer. She and her mother moved to New York City in 1926, where she started learning jazz composition with one of George Gershwin’s teachers and earned a reputation for improvising publicly on themes audience members suggested. At 19, Suesse published Syncopated Love Song, her first instrumental composition and the piece through which she established her reputation. Four years later, the orchestra leader Paul Whiteman commissioned the Concerto in Three Rhythms, which received its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1932, along with works by Gershwin and Ferde Grofé.
Suesse said of the work’s composition, “I locked myself in my apartment and wouldn’t see anybody for ten days. I wrote the Concerto in Three Rhythms. It has three different styles blending together. First, there is the foxtrot, basically a sonata. Then, there is the blues style, basically an adagio. Finally, there is the jazz, the Italian fugue. You can imagine how I rushed to get through it in ten days … and it takes 20 minutes to play.” Suesse became reasonably well-off after her composition Moon About Town was featured in the Ziegfeld Follies. She shifted her focus to orchestral music after spending three years in Paris working with the gifted teacher Nadia Boulanger. Other than Gershwin, she was the only composer to perform as part of the national broadcasts of the General Motors Symphony. Suesse died in 1987, halfway through working on a musical. Given the number of intersections between Suesse’s and Gershwin’s careers—she was even known as “Girl Gershwin”—it is intriguing that comparatively little is known about her today.
Program notes by © Jennifer More 2024