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GEORGE GERSHWIN
Rhapsody in Blue (orchestrated by Ferde Grofé) (1924)

George Gershwin’s career is a great American success story, tempered (as with Mozart and Schubert) by early death in his 30s that cut it short. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor household. As Aaron Copland, his slightly younger Brooklyn contemporary, also discovered, music offered opportunities. But while Copland went to study abroad as an American in Paris, Gershwin dropped out of school and started working his way up as a “song-plugger,” playing Tin Pan Alley songs for perspective customers at a music store. Soon he was writing his own songs (his first big hit was “Swanee” in 1919) and enjoying success on Broadway.

The signal event of his early career came at age 25, on Tuesday afternoon, February 12, 1924, at a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall given by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” it featured a variety of familiar pieces, including popular fare and comedy, as well as pieces by Edward MacDowell, Victor Herbert, and concluding with one of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches. 

Whiteman explained that the purpose of the experiment was to highlight “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today which—for no good reason— is still being called jazz.” The comment that the music came “from nowhere in particular” is striking. As the music historian Richard Taruskin keenly observed, this event was “in essence an attempt to sanitize contemporary popular music and elevate it in public esteem by divorcing it from its roots in African American improvised music and securing endorsements from luminaries of the classical music establishment, many of whom were in attendance that evening.” (Among those said to have been there were Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler.) It was not so much that the music was unusual but rather the idea of presenting performances by a dance band in a concert hall.

Gershwin had written the piece in the space of just a few weeks in a two-piano version that was quickly orchestrated by Whiteman’s favored arranger, Ferde Grofé (1892–1972), best remembered today for his own composition The Grand Canyon Suite. Grofé was intimately familiar with the marvelous instrumental colors Whiteman’s band could produce; he followed suggestions outlined in Gershwin’s piano score, which were supplemented by almost daily meetings with the composer. The famous opening clarinet glissando was contributed by Ross Gorman, who asked permission to change a written-out scale to something more enticing.

The Rhapsody proved to be the highlight of the concert, an enormous success before a capacity audience, as well as with most of the critics. Deems Taylor said the piece “hinted at something new, something that had not hitherto been said in music.” Gershwin, he believed, provided “a link between the jazz camp and the intellectuals.” Even a grumpy voice from Theatre Magazine acknowledged that the wildly popular concert “was often vulgar, but it was never dull.” Whiteman repeated the program a month later and then again at Carnegie Hall in April, as well as in Philadelphia and Boston. In June he and Gershwin made their first recording of the Rhapsody, which sold over a million copies. Over roughly the next decade performances, recordings, and sheet music earned the composer some $250,000, an almost unimaginable sum at the time.

Gershwin originally titled the work American Rhapsody, perhaps to capitalize on the popularity of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, but his brother Ira suggested using something inspired by paintings of James McNeill Whistler, such as Nocturne in Blue and Silver.

The Rhapsody basically unfolds as a sequence of five Tin Pan Alley–like songs with virtuoso connecting passagework. The piece has been criticized by some as a loose patchwork of relatively interchangeable parts (Gershwin’s own early recordings made cuts so as to fit on one 78 disc), but Howard Pollack has observed that the work might be viewed as a “compressed four-movement symphony or sonata,” along the lines of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy. For his part, Gershwin said that he “wanted to show that jazz is an idiom not to be limited to a mere song and chorus that consumed three minutes in presentation,” which meant putting the blues “in a larger and more serious form.” Twelve years after its successful premiere he commented that the piece was “still very much alive,” while if he had “taken the same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.” 

—Christopher H. Gibbs

GEORGE GERSHWIN
Rhapsody in Blue (orchestrated by Ferde Grofé) (1924)

George Gershwin’s career is a great American success story, tempered (as with Mozart and Schubert) by early death in his 30s that cut it short. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor household. As Aaron Copland, his slightly younger Brooklyn contemporary, also discovered, music offered opportunities. But while Copland went to study abroad as an American in Paris, Gershwin dropped out of school and started working his way up as a “song-plugger,” playing Tin Pan Alley songs for perspective customers at a music store. Soon he was writing his own songs (his first big hit was “Swanee” in 1919) and enjoying success on Broadway.

The signal event of his early career came at age 25, on Tuesday afternoon, February 12, 1924, at a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall given by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” it featured a variety of familiar pieces, including popular fare and comedy, as well as pieces by Edward MacDowell, Victor Herbert, and concluding with one of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches. 

Whiteman explained that the purpose of the experiment was to highlight “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today which—for no good reason— is still being called jazz.” The comment that the music came “from nowhere in particular” is striking. As the music historian Richard Taruskin keenly observed, this event was “in essence an attempt to sanitize contemporary popular music and elevate it in public esteem by divorcing it from its roots in African American improvised music and securing endorsements from luminaries of the classical music establishment, many of whom were in attendance that evening.” (Among those said to have been there were Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler.) It was not so much that the music was unusual but rather the idea of presenting performances by a dance band in a concert hall.

Gershwin had written the piece in the space of just a few weeks in a two-piano version that was quickly orchestrated by Whiteman’s favored arranger, Ferde Grofé (1892–1972), best remembered today for his own composition The Grand Canyon Suite. Grofé was intimately familiar with the marvelous instrumental colors Whiteman’s band could produce; he followed suggestions outlined in Gershwin’s piano score, which were supplemented by almost daily meetings with the composer. The famous opening clarinet glissando was contributed by Ross Gorman, who asked permission to change a written-out scale to something more enticing.

The Rhapsody proved to be the highlight of the concert, an enormous success before a capacity audience, as well as with most of the critics. Deems Taylor said the piece “hinted at something new, something that had not hitherto been said in music.” Gershwin, he believed, provided “a link between the jazz camp and the intellectuals.” Even a grumpy voice from Theatre Magazine acknowledged that the wildly popular concert “was often vulgar, but it was never dull.” Whiteman repeated the program a month later and then again at Carnegie Hall in April, as well as in Philadelphia and Boston. In June he and Gershwin made their first recording of the Rhapsody, which sold over a million copies. Over roughly the next decade performances, recordings, and sheet music earned the composer some $250,000, an almost unimaginable sum at the time.

Gershwin originally titled the work American Rhapsody, perhaps to capitalize on the popularity of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, but his brother Ira suggested using something inspired by paintings of James McNeill Whistler, such as Nocturne in Blue and Silver.

The Rhapsody basically unfolds as a sequence of five Tin Pan Alley–like songs with virtuoso connecting passagework. The piece has been criticized by some as a loose patchwork of relatively interchangeable parts (Gershwin’s own early recordings made cuts so as to fit on one 78 disc), but Howard Pollack has observed that the work might be viewed as a “compressed four-movement symphony or sonata,” along the lines of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy. For his part, Gershwin said that he “wanted to show that jazz is an idiom not to be limited to a mere song and chorus that consumed three minutes in presentation,” which meant putting the blues “in a larger and more serious form.” Twelve years after its successful premiere he commented that the piece was “still very much alive,” while if he had “taken the same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.” 

—Christopher H. Gibbs