All-American Rhapsody

The love theme on the back half of Rhapsody in Blue—that magnificent, slow melody—very nearly didn’t make it into the piece. According to Kurt Dieterle, a violinist who performed in the orchestra at the work’s premiere, Gershwin loathed sentimentality in music and tried to cut the section before the first performance. It took a fierce argument during rehearsal with orchestrator Ferde Grofé to set him straight, preserving one of America’s most whistleable pieces in history in its current form. More or less.

“Most performances today actu­ally sound very different than what happened on February 12, 1924,” says Mitch Glickman, founder and conductor of the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra, an LA-based ensemble of nearly 70 studio players. Glickman met Dieterle before he passed away in the 1990s and recorded his recollections of that legendary first performance. This spring, Glickman gave a four-week lecture course at UCLA Extension on the Rhapsody, using stories from Dieterle and his own research. “I was also fortunate to get one of those early two piano sketches, and it just blew me away, because it’s not what most peo­ple are playing today,” Glickman says.

Glickman also conducted a perfor­mance in May with jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, whose improvisatory interpre­tation is closer to the original premiere version, which Glickman referred to as “lightning in a bottle” and a pivotal moment in American music history.

To mark the work’s centennial, musicians, orchestras, and writers around the country are paying heightened atten­tion to the Rhapsody. Many ensembles are playing the traditional 1942 version for piano and full orchestra. Some are playing historic and freshly composed responses to the piece, like composer Edmar Colón’s Rhapsody in Blue Reimag­ined, which welcomes additional musical cultures into Gershwin’s musical melting pot, or composer Peter Boyer’s Rhap­sody in Red, White and Blue, an original composition making its way around all 50 states that doffs its cap to the original work in style only. There’s a new critical edition of the Gershwin score, released to coincide with the centenary, plus a plethora of media think pieces assessing the Rhapsody’s place in America’s musical culture. (Is it appropriative? Is it even good? Why all the fuss?)

Roberts’ version is an expansive, jazzier take on the piece, with Roberts in a trio with bass and percussion impro­vising their way through sections of the music, more like Gershwin’s original per­formance. “If you see a set of drums and some kind of bass guitar and some kind of keyboard or lead guitar, you now have a rhythm section, which is probably one of the most important contributions that jazz music has made to American music,” Roberts says. “When people go to see a rock ‘n’ roll group, they don’t always real­ize that that comes from jazz. This piece brought that into the concert hall.”

To mark the work’s centennial, musicians, orchestras, and writers around the country are paying heightened attention to the Rhapsody.

Sin in Syncopation

Ah, the ‘20s. It was a time of prohibition and speakeasies and bullish extrava­gance. Not to mention Jim Crow laws that kept Black musicians and jazz from the stage until a white musician stepped in. Paul Whiteman (yes, the name now seems ironic) started his music career as a conventional violist in the Denver and then San Francisco symphonies before getting bit by the jazz bug and moving to New York. He founded the most popular band of the decade, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, bringing jazz into the concert hall in defiance of his musically conser­vative father.

This was not a simple process. Back then jazz, or jaz, or jas, was seen as a dangerous, corrupting influence. Thomas Edison said that he played jazz records backward because they sounded better that way. A famous educator quipped that jazz “puts the sin in syncopation.” (“I want that one on a bumper sticker,” says Glickman, who keeps a folder of such invective.)

In the 1920s, a famous educator quipped that jazz music “puts the sin in syncopation.”

To prove the merits of this emerging style, Whiteman decided to put on the concert of the decade, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” a huge swing for the fences, a four-hour monolith of an all-jazz educational concert to which he invited major names in the music indus­try and the press. “I sincerely believe in jazz. I think it expresses the spirit of America and I feel sure it has a future,” he later wrote. “I want to help that future pan out. Other Americans ought to be willing to give jazz a respectful hearing.”

Whiteman put in $11,000 of his own money, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to around $200,000 in today’s money. He only earned back about $4,000 (adjusted, that would be about $73,000 today). “Back in the 1920s, American sort of society jazz was in its own particular corner of the musical boxing ring, and classical music was in the opposite corner,” says conductor Anthony Parnther, who premiered a new 2024 critical edition of the score with California’s San Bernadino Symphony Orchestra, where he is music and artistic director, in March. “This was one of the places where they first met, briefly.

Whiteman commissioned composers like Irving Berlin and Zez Confrey in addition to Gershwin, who was already working with jazz elements in his com­positions and with whom Whiteman had previously collaborated. According to legend, Gershwin either turned down the commission or forgot he’d accepted it until about a month before the concert, and he wrote the score in a frantic dash. The exact details are foggy, but what’s certain is that Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated the piano score in a bit over a week, and that Gershwin left himself ample room to improvise at the piano during the premiere, which he played himself—a rather Beethovenian flourish—nodding to Whiteman when he was wrapping up his solos to cue the band. (Grofé, composer of such works as Grand Canyon Suite, orchestrated the 1926 version of Rhapsody in Blue for pit band and the 1942 version for symphony orchestra.)

Gershwin, anticipating pushback, wrote at the time: “There had been so much chatter about the limitations of jazz, not to speak of the manifest misunderstandings of its function. Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow… I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting-pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropoli­tan madness.”

On February 12, 1924, the “Exper­iment in Modern Music” concert took place at the packed Aeolian Hall in Manhattan. The Rhapsody, which received a reported five curtain calls, is the only work on the original program still heard regularly today.

Sequels

Still, the performance opened the door to an explosion of jazz-inflected compo­sitions on the concert stage, in America and especially in Paris. As soon as 1927, Black pianist and composer James P. Johnson answered Gershwin’s Rhapsody with his own work, with orchestrations by William Grant Still. Yamecraw, a Negro Rhapsody for piano and orches­tra also blends jazz and classical styles, though it makes more overt use of spiri­tuals and is more laid back in character. (The Yamakraw were a Native American tribe in Georgia; Johnson’s Rhapsody is named for a Black town that adopted their name.) By 1955, accordionist John Serry had written his own bluesy Amer­ican Rhapsody, perhaps foreshadowing banjo wizard Béla Fleck’s 2024 Rhapsody in Blue(grass), a more direct transcription and arrangement of Gershwin’s music.

Fleck’s version is admittedly impressive and a little odd, but it still strikes to the heart of what Gershwin’s Rhapsody is about: “Really, it represents this merging and melding that is sort of like the core of American music,” says pianist Lara Downes, who premiered Edmar Colón’s Rhapsody in Blue Reimag­ined at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in October 2023. Composers have continued to put their own stamp on Gershwin’s music, with a great cluster of projects premiering in the centenary year, aided by the fact that the Rhapsody entered public domain in 2020.

The University of Northern Col­orado Spectrum Studio Orchestra, for example, premiered Drew Zaremba’s Rhapsody in (Raag Jog) in Jan­uary, fusing Indian sounds and melo­dies with jazz. In Reimagined, Downes worked with Puerto Rican composer Edmar Colón to “expand” Gershwin’s piece: “The American sound and story have grown exponentially in the last 100 years,” she says. The reimagining opens with clarinet and flute and brass, over­laying trills on top of one another, and there are Caribbean rhythms and Eastern melodic styles throughout the piece as well. There’s also a section in this version that allows different ensembles to add local cultural flavor. “The world premiere happened in San Francisco, so that part was given to an ensemble of traditional Chinese instruments,” Downes says.

Composer Peter Boyer avoids terms like “patriotic” when discussing his Rhapsody in Red, White and Blue, given the charged nature of the term today. “The term that I keep coming back to is ‘American themed,’” he says, adding that instead of directly quoting Gersh­win, he tried to capture something of the optimism of the original work and something of the 1920s sound. “I didn’t want it to be ironic—I wanted the piece to have a sense of contemporary times and their difficulties but to capture something optimistic about our country and its direction.” That’s resonating with America’s orchestras. Ensembles in all 50 states are scheduled to perform Boyer’s Rhapsody, with pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who came up with the idea for the piece and who commissioned Boyer, at the keyboard. Biegel has exclusivity with the piece for three years, and orchestras are continuing to sign on to perform the work.

Banner Music

For all the original Rhapsody’s popularity, however, it attracts plenty of criticism as well. In January, pianist and composer Ethan Iverson riled Gershwinites with a New York Times essay that called it America’s “Worst Masterpiece,” echoing Leonard Bernstein’s assertion in the ‘50s that the Rhapsody isn’t “a real composi­tion.” (Both admitted to quite liking the piece, though.) Other writers insist that the piece is culturally appropriative—which it is, by today’s standards—and argue that the Rhapsody’s popularity has stolen attention from the Black musicians Gershwin listened to for inspiration.

As early as the 19th century, Antonin Dvořák had asserted that America’s musical identity would evolve from African American spirituals. His own musings on the subject today read like a refutation of some of the claims leveled against Gershwin’s Rhapsody: “The point has been urged that many of these touching songs… have not been composed by the Negroes themselves, but are the work of white men, while others did not originate on the planta­tions, but were imported from Africa. It seems to me that this matters but little. One might as well condemn the Hun­garian Rhapsody because Liszt could not speak Hungarian. The important thing is that the inspiration for such music should come from the right source, and that the music itself should be a true expression of the people’s real feelings.”

The Rhapsody couldn’t have been written by a Black composer and taken seriously in the 1920s any more than concert presenters would have allowed Whiteman to include Black musicians in his orchestra. (And he tried.) “Let’s acknowledge that a lot of things were done to African American people that were not correct,” says Marcus Rob­erts. “Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again, but let’s not put any of that on poor George Gershwin.” Would Yame­kraw have premiered at Carnegie Hall if Whiteman, Gershwin, and Grofé hadn’t first created the precedent? Would Gershwin have gone on to take Porgy and Bess—another work with a complex heritage—to the operatic stage? It’s not likely. And that’s Rhapsody in Blue’s real legacy. “That door to Black music and musicians shouldn’t have been closed, but Gershwin certainly helped open it,” Roberts says.