Have We Been Playing Gershwin Wrong for 70 Years?
'It is one of the most famous pieces of American music but for 70 years orchestras may have been playing one of its best-known effects wrong.
The work is George Gershwins jaunty, jazzy symphonic poem An American in Paris, and the effect involves a set of instruments that were decidedly not standard equipment when it was written in 1928: French taxi horns, which honk in several places as the music evokes the urban soundscape that a Yankee tourist experiences while exploring the City of Light.
The question is what notes should those taxi horns play. In something of a musicological bombshell, a coming critical edition of the works of George and Ira Gershwin being prepared at the University of Michigan will argue that the now-standard horn pitches heard in the classic 1951 movie musical with Gene Kelly, in leading concert halls around the world, and eight times a week on Broadway in Christopher Wheeldons acclaimed stage adaptation are not what Gershwin intended.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/theater/have-we-been-playing-gershwin-wrong-for-70-years.html?