On January 3, 1924, the Gershwin brothers were up late, George playing a game of pool with a friend and Ira perusing the morning edition of the next day’s The New York Herald. Among its pages Ira discovered an announcement for a concert called “An Experiment in Modern Music” featuring Paul Whiteman’s jazz band on February 12. The concert would be attended by a who’s who of the classical music world, including the composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, the conductor Leopold Stokowski and the violinist Jascha Heifetz, and would showcase new music inspired by jazz. Much to their surprise, the highlight would be a new “jazz concerto” by George Gershwin.
Apparently, Gershwin had completely forgotten about the concert, and four days later he began writing down what would become Rhapsody in Blue. He had already been working out much of the piece in his head, however, during the month before, as he revealed in a letter several years later:
“Suddenly an idea occurred to me. There had been so much chatter about the limitations of jazz….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. Inspired by this aim, I set to work composing with unwonted rapidity. No set plan was in my mind—no structure to which my music would conform. The rhapsody, you see, began as a purpose, not a plan.
“At this stage of the piece I was summoned to Boston for the première of Sweet Little Devil. I had already done some work on the rhapsody. It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is so often stimulating to a composer….And there 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, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a 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 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.”
At 25, Gershwin was already the toast of Broadway. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Gershwin had taken piano lessons as a kid growing up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. After dropping out of high school to become a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley, he landed his first Broadway show at 20 and began his meteoric rise as one of America’s leading popular song writers. His ambitions extended beyond Broadway’s stages, however; Gershwin had always had an interest in classical music, and even attended a New York performance of Schoenberg’s avant-garde song-cycle Pierrot lunaire.
Though Gershwin later claimed that his knowledge of music theory at this time could have fit on a three-cent postage stamp, he nevertheless wrote an iconic piece that remains a landmark in the history of music. Controversial from the first, Rhapsody in Blue challenged notions regarding the divide between classical and popular music; its relatively free-form structure flew in the face of symphonic traditions; and perhaps most importantly, it combined freshness and originality with an irresistible accessibility. Few other purely instrumental works of its length so successfully grab the attention of even uninitiated listeners from its first note to its last.
Its genesis was also much more collaborative than is traditional for a piece of classical music. In keeping with the practice of Broadway composers of the time, Gershwin wrote the piece in short-score form for two pianos (one representing the soloist and the other the band). It was then arranged by Ferde Grofé, a composer and orchestrator who often made arrangements for Paul Whiteman’s unique ensemble. Gershwin also originally wrote the famous opening clarinet glissando as a scale; it took its unforgettable final form when the band’s clarinetist Ross Gorman played it that way in rehearsal, possibly as a joke.
Since Gershwin’s untimely death at age 38, his most famous composition has rarely been heard in the original form that thrilled listeners at the premiere. Even during his life early recordings invariably cut the work down drastically so that it would fit on two sides of a record. Grofé’s original scoring was for a modest orchestra of 23 musicians – unusual for a modern symphony orchestra, but a respectable jazz band. Today, Rhapsody in Blue is certainly among the most often-performed American concert works ever written, and it has rightly taken its place, exactly as Paul Whiteman had intended it, as one of the first true marriages of American musical style and European artistic tradition.
