George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a narrative of jazz, race and the fraught notion of America’s melting pot

February 12, 1924, was a frigid day in New York Metropolis. However that didn’t cease an intrepid group of concertgoers from gathering in midtown Manhattan’s Aeolian Corridor for “An Experiment in Fashionable Music.” The organizer, bandleader Paul Whiteman, wished to point out how jazz and classical music might come collectively. So he commissioned a brand new work by a 25-year-old Jewish-American upstart named George Gershwin.

Gershwin’s contribution to this system, “Rhapsody in Blue,” would go on to exceed anybody’s wildest expectations, turning into one of many best-known works of the twentieth century. Past the live performance corridor, it will seem in iconic movies resembling Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” and Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.” It was carried out in the course of the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and should you ever fly on United Airways, you’ll hear it enjoying in the course of the preflight safety videos.

I’ve spent almost 20 years researching and writing about this piece. To me, “Rhapsody” isn’t some static composition caught previously; quite, it’s a repeatedly evolving piece of music whose which means has modified over time.

Programming “Rhapsody” for concert events at the moment has turn into considerably of a double-edged sword. A century after it premiered, it stays a crowd favourite – and virtually all the time ensures a sold-out present. However increasingly more students are beginning to see the work as a whitewashed model of Harlem’s vibrant Black music scene.

A cobbled-together hit

Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to jot down “Rhapsody” someday in late 1923. However because the story goes, the composer forgot about his project until he read about the upcoming concert in a newspaper on Jan. 4, 1924.

Gershwin needed to work rapidly, writing as time allowed in his busy schedule. Manuscript evidence suggests that he solely labored on the piece a complete of 10 days over the span of a number of weeks.

Accordingly, he relied on the acquainted melodies, harmonies, rhythms and musical constructions that had began to garner him acclaim as a preferred composer for the Broadway stage. This music was more and more influenced by early jazz, because the improvised, syncopated and blues-infused sound of Black musicians resembling Louis Armstrong made its method north from New Orleans. Gershwin additionally mingled with, and was influenced by, a few of the nice Harlem stride pianists of the day, together with James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith.

Regardless of being rapidly cobbled collectively, “Rhapsody in Blue” finally offered hundreds of thousands of records and copies of sheet music. Gershwin’s personal performances of the work on tour additionally helped enhance its recognition.

However success additionally opened up the piece to criticism – significantly that Gershwin had appropriated Black music.

Black musicians really feel snubbed

This isn’t solely a Twenty first-century critique by music historians. Even again then, some Black artists had been miffed.

However quite than calling it out in print, they did so via their very own artwork.

In 1929, blues artist Bessie Smith starred in a brief movie known as “St. Louis Blues,” based mostly on the music of the identical identify by composer W.C. Handy. It options an all-Black solid, together with members of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and the Hall Johnson Choir. Instrumental and vocal variations of Helpful’s music present the sonic backdrop for this 15-minute movie – with one very pointed exception.

Smith performs the a part of Bessie, an unrequited lover to a duplicitous gambler named Jimmy. Within the ultimate scene, after a earlier falling out, Jimmy and Bessie reconcile in a membership. They embrace on the dance flooring to the strains of “St. Louis Blues.”

However unbeknownst to the love-struck Bessie, Jimmy rigorously picks her pocket and unmercifully shoves her again to her bar stool. After Jimmy flashes his newly acquired bankroll, the opening clarinet glissando of “Rhapsody in Blue” begins. During this brief, 20-second cue, Jimmy boastfully backs out of the membership, bowing and tipping his hat like a performer acknowledging his ovation.

It’s exhausting to not see the subtext of introducing Gershwin’s well-known piece at this second: Simply as Jimmy has robbed Bessie, the movie means that Gershwin had pilfered jazz from the Black group.

One other musical response to “Rhapsody” emerged in 1927 from Gershwin’s stride pianist good friend, James P. Johnson: “Yamekraw.” Writer Perry Bradford billed the work as “not a ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ however a Rhapsody in Black and White (Black notes on White paper).”

In fact, the “black notes” had been extra than simply the rating itself. Johnson demonstrates how a Black musician would strategy the rhapsody genre.

Caught within the center with ‘Blue’

Gershwin as soon as described “Rhapsody” “as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America – of our vast melting pot.”

The issue with the “melting pot” metaphor is that it asks immigrants to go away behind cultural practices and identities so as to assimilate into the bulk inhabitants.

And that’s simply what Whiteman’s musical experiment at Aeolian Corridor a century in the past was all about: He sought, as he put it, to “make a lady out of jazz.”

As the concert’s program read, “Mr. Whiteman intends to level out, with the help of his orchestra and associates, the super strides which have been made in standard music from the day of the discordant Jazz … to the actually melodious music of at the moment.”

In different phrases, he wished to fold the period’s standard jazz music into classical music – and, in doing so, draw out the inherent magnificence within the beast, making it extra acceptable to white audiences.

“Rhapsody in Blue” and different classical-jazz hybrid works like it will quickly become known as “middlebrow” music.

This fraught time period emerges from the area between the so-called “lowbrow” and “intellectual,” descriptors that find artistic endeavors on a scale from pedestrian to mental. These phrases initially associated to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which drew conclusions about intelligence based mostly on cranium form and the situation of the ridge of 1’s forehead line.

Intellectual music, made by and for white folks, was thought-about essentially the most refined.

However intellectual music might additionally conveniently elevate lowbrow music by borrowing – or quite, appropriating – musical components resembling rhythm and concord. Merging the 2, the low will get to the center. Nevertheless it might by no means get to the highest by itself phrases.

If Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” is supposed to be heard as a “musical kaleidoscope of America,” you will need to bear in mind who’s holding the lens, what music will get added to the combination, and the way it has modified as soon as admitted.

Nevertheless it’s additionally vital to do not forget that 100 years is a very long time. What the tradition values, and why, inevitably adjustments. The identical is true for “Rhapsody in Blue.”