Ferde Grofé was born Ferdinand Rudolph von
Grof, to Emil and Elsa von Grof, in New York City on 27th
March 1892. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Los Angeles.
Ferde Grof came by his instinct for music quite naturally. His
father was a baritone and actor, while his mother was a cellist
and music teacher of some note.
In 1906 Grofé left home to work variously
as a bookbinder, truck driver, usher, newsboy, elevator operator,
lithographer, typesetter and steelworker, studying violin and
piano in his spare time. By 1908 he began to take casual musical
engagements at lodge dances, parades and picnics and in 1909 met
Albert Jerome, a dancing teacher, with whom he toured Californian
mining-camps. By day the pair operated a cleaning and pressing
establishing, at night Grof playied for Jerome's pupils. It was
also in 1909 that Grof wrote his first commissioned work, The
Grand Reunion March, for an Elks Clubs convention in Los
Angeles. He joined the American Federation of Musicians that year
and began a ten-year association with the Los Angeles Symphony
Orchestra, playing the viola.
In 1915 Grofé was playing at the Portola
Louvre in San Francisco where musicians would drop in after hours
to hear his original arrangements and jazz improvisations. One of
the musicians in the audience was Paul Whiteman, whose orchestra
Grof joined in 1917 as pianist, permanently employed from 1920
for the next twelve years as pianist, assistant conductor,
orchestrator and librarian. He toured Europe with the orchestra
in 1923 and in 1924 had his first real break when he
orchestrated Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a
collaboration that brought immediate notice.
Grof now undertook the composition of
original works and among his earliest hits was the tone-poem, Broadway
at Night. His subsequent Metropolis, Blue
Fantasy in E Flat, Mississippi Suite and Three
Shades of Blue, reveal an astonishing development in his
handling of the symphonic jazz idiom. Challened by a friend's
suggestion that he could even write music about a bicycle pump,
he wrote two unusual works: Theme and Variations on Noises
from a Garage (1926) and Free Air (1929). All the
varied experiences of his life became inspiration for his music,
as he himself observed, grateful for the background that made
possible such compositions as Symphony in Steel, Tabloid
Suite, Broadway at Night, Mississippi Suite,
Metropolis, Henry Ford, Knute Rockne and
Death Valley Suite.
