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GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898–1937)
composed after the performance. The New York Times critic felt that the cadenzas and the tuttis were too long. (A tutti is when “all” the orchestra plays, without the soloist.) The New York Tribune critic wrote:
How trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are; sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment,
under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint! ... Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!
The Atlantic Monthly critic wrote: “[The music] runs off into empty passage-work and meaningless repetition.”
The opening glissando was meant as a joke. In rehearsal, Whiteman’s clarinet player turned a scale into a glissando, leading up to the high note. In opera, this is called a scoop. Gershwin loved it, and asked that the player, Ross Gorman, do it all the time, only with a bit of a wail. This scale is the clarinet imitating a jazz trombone.
Gershwin used street player and New Orleans piano styles, called song-plugger, stride, comic, and novelty. He used rhythms like syncopation, ragtime, blues, and Tin Pan Alley. He would go up to Harlem to watch jazz, and learned many of his left-hand techniques from Luckey Roberts. At age 12 he wrote an unpublished piece called “Ragging the Traumerei,” where he applied Joplin rhythms to Schumann’s otherwise stately piece.
Joplin’s rags were traditionally played metronomically, with very rigid rhythms so people could dance to them. Gershwin felt that jazz needed to breathe, to be more flexible rhythmically, so he used rubato, where you slow down for effect. Rubato means “robbed” in Italian, so you rob some time from the piece. Chopin said that when he robbed time here, he paid it back. There was a feeling that a piece had to add up to 100, and any slowing down needed to be counteracted with a commensurate speeding up, so that things came out evenly. Music structure, scales, and tonality are based on equations, but it doesn’t always do for the cart to lead the horse. Fences have to bend to let people through.
Three years later, Whiteman’s recording of the Rhapsody had sold a million copies.
Rhapsody in Blue
It was the jazz-band conductor Paul Whiteman’s idea to bring classical credibility to jazz by asking Gershwin to write a jazz “concerto” for piano and orchestra. This idea also brought jazz popularity to classical music, and solidified Gershwin’s reputation in both arenas, which was almost impossible to do (and still is).
Gershwin went on to follow the Rhapsody with cross- overs like Concerto in F and An American in Paris (which he wrote after Nadia Boulanger refused to teach him).
Born to Russian parents, Moishe and Roza Gershowitz, on Brooklyn’s Snediker Avenue, Gershwin left school at 15 and became a song plugger, whose first published song two years later was “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em.” Three years later he wrote “Swanee.” The Rhapsody was his first major classical work. Gershwin wrote:
It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to
a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper—the complete construc- tion 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 metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distin- guished from its actual substance.
Gershwin wrote the piece originally for two pianos. He called it American Rhapsody, but his brother Ira had just seen Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Arrangement in Grey and Black (also known as “Whistler’s Mother”), and suggested the idea of something blue, to go with the blues. At the
first performance, Gershwin improvised the piano part, and only later wrote down what he’d played. So the piece was
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