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George Gershwin’s music is not confined to one universe. Its background hints at European sources, while Gershwin’s achievement is clearly rooted in the American aesthetic world. Thus, the “serious” music of the classical musician naturally enters into a dialogue with various folk cultures (especially Central European and African-American music, be it religious, orchestral, rural, etc.). Gershwin’s professional commitment and his artistic openness testify to his unprejudiced approach to art, which accounts for his music becoming a staple of three very different repertoires — jazz, pop, and “classical” music. Gershwin is even responsible for a form of mutual contamination between jazz and classical music, since jazz has borrowed operatic forms from Gershwin ( Porgy and Bess has been performed by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis), while Gershwin borrowed colours and rhythms from jazz and imported them into classical music. The logical outcome of such a mixed heritage is obvious in contemporary jazz pianist Marcus Roberts’ rendition of Gershwin’s works, which involves a symphony orchestra and a jazz rhythm section, thus harking back to Gershwin’s own double outlook. Gershwin was not an isolated case. The great composers of his time shared the same ambivalent attitude, caught between cultural ties that reflect European origins and the American universe that ultimately gave shape to their music. Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Howard Dietz, Sigmund Romberg, and Alan Jay Lerner come to mind. Social factors impact aesthetic substance : the rise of a new musical form stems directly from the coming together of composers of Jewish-European origin, African-American culture and the development of show business. George Gershwin showcases a specifically American incarnation of the dialectics of art seen both as a product of contemporary folk culture and as an individual elaboration of this material in the field of “legit” music.