In the last eight or nine years, it’s felt to many Americans as if the country has changed very dramatically, if not irreversibly. A century ago, our forebears had a similar feeling. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and managed to get through a full term without dragging us into another war; in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was reelected on the promise to keep us out of war and a month after his inauguration took us into World War I. During these last years, woke ideology has poisoned American culture; a hundred years ago, the phenomenon that was shaking up American culture, although not (for the most part) in a toxic way, was modernism. The year 1922, for example, saw the publication of both James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, two works that represented striking departures from literary tradition.
All I need to know is that … it’s as stirring as ever, an American classic and a modern milestone.
American popular song also underwent a sea change. Before World War I, the hit parade had been dominated by tunes like “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” (1900), “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” (1904), and “Down by the Old Mill Stream” (1910), which today conjure quaint images of Midwestern homes with antimacassars and Tiffany lamps. Just a few years later — on the other side of the war and in a time when Americans were highly conscious of living in a new world, defined and dominated not by old Europe but by their own young country — the popular songs were, thanks to the influence of black New Orleans jazz and the genius of New York songwriters, most of them Jewish and from poor immigrant families, quite different. Many of those songs, indeed, became standards. The year 1924 alone — exactly one century before our own current year — gave us Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do,” Gus Kahn and Isham Jones’s “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” and the Gershwins’ “Oh Lady, Be Good.” (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Biting the (Left) Hand That Feeds Him)
In that same year, there was another little Gershwin ditty. The story goes that on January 3, 1924, the Gershwin brothers, composer George and lyricist Ira, were hanging out at a pool hall in New York with their then collaborator Buddy DeSylva — later to become one-third of the songwriting team DeSylva, Henderson, and Brown (“The Best Things in Life Are Free”) — when Ira read in the New York Tribune that the centerpiece of an important event on February 12, entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” taking place at New York’s Aeolian Hall, and featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, was to be a new “jazz concerto” by George. Whiteman, who dubbed himself “The King of Jazz,” was putting the program together, and his principal goal was to demonstrate that jazz had come to stay and deserved to be taken seriously.
George was all of 25 years old. At age 15, he’d gone to work as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley — demonstrating new songs on a piano for prospective purchasers of sheet music. He’d started composing his own songs at age 17, and in 1920, when he was 21, the biggest singer of the era, Al Jolson, made his song “Swanee” (with lyrics by Irving Caesar) a megahit. Two years later, when Whiteman’s band introduced “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” (music by George, lyrics by Ira and DeSylva) in the show George White’s Scandals of 1922, George mentioned to Whiteman his desire to someday write a piece that combined jazz and classical elements. The next year, George and Whiteman took part — Whiteman as conductor, George as piano accompanist — in a concert of jazz tunes, and afterwards, according to at least some accounts, Whiteman asked George “for a serious piece to be performed during a concert Whiteman was planning to present with his band in Aeolian Hall.” (By the way, Aeolian Hall, which in its day was a major performance space and which closed its doors in 1927, was located on the first and second floors of the still extant Aeolian Building, across 42nd Street from Bryant Park.) George, if these accounts are to be credited, “promised a piece, and promptly forgot about it.”
Even Gershwin’s friend and fellow songwriter Arthur Schwartz … would later say that the piece’s structural elements were reflective more of “intuition than tuition.”
Now the Tribune had joggged his memory. Contacting Whiteman, he agreed to write something. But a concerto? He didn’t have time for that. Nor, he claimed at the time, was he capable — as he most assuredly would be a few years later — of contriving the kind of orchestration that such a piece would require. (Biographer William G. Hyland challenges this assertion, noting that manuscripts discovered in a Warner Brothers warehouse in the 1980s indicate that Gershwin, by that point in his career, was much more skilled at orchestration than he let on.) In any event, George set about writing a rhapsody with a piano solo part, and another piano part that Whiteman’s sturdy arranger, Ferde Grofé, would whip up into a score for jazz band.
George threw himself into the task. As he later recounted, he got started while taking a train to Boston for the out-of-town opening of his musical Sweet Little Devil. His account exists in multiple versions, of which the following is, like his rhapsody itself, something of a pastiche:
It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating to a composer (I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise) that I suddenly heard — and even saw on paper — the complete construction of the Rhapsody from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind, and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America — of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had the definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.
As for the middle theme, it came upon me suddenly, as my music sometimes does. It was at the home of a friend, just after I got back to Gotham … Well, there I was, rattling away [at the piano] without a thought of rhapsodies in blue or any other color. All at once I heard myself playing a theme that must have been haunting me inside, seeking an outlet. No sooner had it oozed out of my fingers than I knew I had found it…. A week after my return from Boston I completed the Rhapsody in Blue.”
Well, that’s one version of how it came to be written. Other versions say that Gershwin began composing the piece on January 7, at the upright piano in the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and 100th Street where he and Ira lived with their immigrant parents. According to some sources, the composition took a week, with Grofé turning up every day to pick up the newest pages; according to other sources, it took three weeks, with George handing his completed work to Grofé on February 3. Hyland writes that Grofé, the scale of whose contribution to the Rhapsody is immense, finished his orchestration the next day. (READ MORE: Nordic Musicians Want to Ban Israel From This Year’s Eurovision)
As for the “theme” that had been “seeking an outlet,” Hyland records that in fact George had originally used another melody in that place, but that when Grofé disapproved, Ira urged George to use instead another one that he’d written earlier. “Grofé was enthusiastic,” writes Hyland. This account is consistent with the statement in other sources that it was Ira’s idea to incorporate in the piece “an expressive romantic theme” that George had “previously improvised at a party.” (“George objected that it was too sweet,” writes Hyland, “but finally gave in.”)
It was Ira, later George’s regular lyricist, who came up with the piece’s title — Rhapsody in Blue, which was purportedly inspired by James McNeill Whistler’s practice of giving his paintings titles like “Symphony in White.” A couple of the sources I consulted for this article state that the famous glissando with which Rhapsody in Blue begins was actually improvised in rehearsal — “as a joke,” one account suggests — by clarinetist Ross Gorman, but Hyland adduces evidence to the effect that this tale is “nonsense.” Hyland does note, however, that the songwriter Victor Herbert (“Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life”), then 85 years old, who had ruled over the prewar era of operettas, “made one suggestion to Gershwin to precede the opening passage of the slow theme, and it was incorporated by Gershwin.”
Many of the specifics surrounding the creation of Rhapsody in Blue, then, are in dispute. But “[w]hatever the details,” writes Hyland, “the composition was a remarkable achievement. With no particular background or experience in writing longer forms, Gershwin assembled a masterpiece in a very short time.”
Partly for this reason, and partly because its “popularity made it suspect,” it “faded” for a while “from the classical repertory of the major orchestras.
As planned, Rhapsody in Blue had its premiere at New York’s Aeolian Hall on the afternoon of February 12, 1924, and was performed with George himself at the piano, actually improvising (or playing from memory: accounts differ) the piano solos, which he hadn’t yet had time to get down on paper. The Rhapsody was just the penultimate item in a long — by all accounts, overlong — program of twenty-six jazz compositions, beginning with what Whiteman described as the very earliest jazz tune, “Livery Stable Blues” (1917); the audience included a blue-ribbon committee of judges (including composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductor Efrem Zimbalist, and soprano Alma Gluck) who were supposedly tasked with answering the question “What Is American Music?,” although it appears that no official answers to the query were ever forthcoming.
The other items on Whiteman’s program didn’t leave much of an impression; but Rhapsody in Blue was an immediate smash. Over the next three years, Whiteman’s recording of it sold a million copies. It marked Gershwin’s transformation from popular tunesmith to serious composer. And it marked a transformation in American music, too. It was fitting, Milton Cross later wrote, that Rhapsody in Blue had its premiere on Lincoln’s Birthday, because “it proved to be the emancipation proclamation of American popular music.” Other commentators have since characterized Gershwin’s Rhapsody as “uniquely describ[ing] the American spirit of the 1920s,” as “manifest[ing] the confidence and nervous energy of the ‘Roaring Twenties,’” and as being, quite simply, “modernity’s anthem.” (READ MORE: Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein — And I Am Marie of Romania)
To be sure, some of the serious critics of the day felt obliged to carp. While two writers for the New York Sun found the Rhapsody “stunning” and “ingenious,” Olin Downes of the Times maintained that while it revealed “extraordinary talent” and was most assuredly “fresh and new and full of promise,” it also exhibited “technical immaturity” and showed that Gershwin had yet to “master” the form that he had ventured to tackle. Other critics were even tougher, using words like “grotesque”; writing about the Rhapsody in the Tribune, Lawrence Gilman lamented “the lifelessness of its melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive.” Later, the twin towers of American classical music, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson, would both refer dismissively to the Rhapsody.
Even Gershwin’s friend and fellow songwriter Arthur Schwartz (“Dancing in the Dark,” “I See Your Face Before Me”) would later say that the piece’s structural elements were reflective more of “intuition than tuition.” And thirty-one years after its premiere, Leonard Bernstein more or less agreed:
the Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water. Composing is a very different thing from writing tunes, after all. I find that the themes, or tunes, or whatever you want to call them, in the Rhapsody are terrific — inspired, God-given…. But you can’t just put four tunes together, God-given though they may be, and call them a composition.
Well, maybe you’re not supposed to do that, but Gershwin did, to the delight of generations of music lovers. After George’s untimely death in 1937, Grofé’s full orchestral version of Rhapsody in Blue, completed in 1926, became a staple in the repertoires of symphony orchestras around the world. The line I quoted above from Milton Cross appears in his two-volume 1953 Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and their Music, in which the chapter on Gershwin is sandwiched triumphantly between those about the solidly classical César Franck and Christoph Willibald Gluck, and in which Cross describes Rhapsody in Blue as “the best loved and most frequently heard serious American work in the entire literature for orchestra.”
To be sure, as Hyland reports, the Rhapsody has had its up and downs over the decades: there were new arrangements, some better than others, and orchestras that gave it “increasingly sweet treatment” or that, alternately, delivered “wooden and uninspired” performances; he quotes the musicologist Gunther Schuller as writing in 1997 that “no famous work has been more mishandled, bowdlerized, dismembered and misinterpreted” than the Rhapsody. (READ MORE: The Crown’s Surprisingly Touching Finale)
Partly for this reason, and partly because its “popularity made it suspect,” it “faded” for a while “from the classical repertory of the major orchestras” and became consigned to the “pops” category, only to make a major comeback in recent years, not only with the best orchestras but with some music critics who decided, after years of disparaging it, that Rhapsody in Blue was, after all, a masterwork. All I need to know is that — a century after its creation, and decades after I first thrilled to it in my childhood — it’s as stirring as ever, an American classic and a modern milestone. George Gershwin had a healthy ego, but did even he imagine that the work he began contemplating on that Boston train and raced to complete in a matter of days would still be blowing audiences away a hundred years later?
