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[It is important to emphasize here this recent discovery. These manuscripts were
discovered as recently as 2009 and the published orchestra material by G. Schirmer were
only made available to orchestras in 2020. According to the Schirmer website where they
track rental activity for the music they provide, our Plymouth Philharmonic is only the fourth
orchestra to have ever performed this music. – sk]
Price’s life and work have been explored in the Emmy-nominated DVD: The Caged Bird: The
Life and Music of Florence Price (2015), articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker
on recent rediscoveries of many long-lost manuscripts (caches found in 2009 and 2019),
and Rae Linda Brown’s excellent new biography (The Heart of a Woman, Illinois, 2020).

Rhapsody in Blue George Gershwin
(1898 — 1937)
George Gershwin was a notable composer and jazz pianist based in New York City whose
popular music has featured in notable films such as American in Paris and Funny Face.
Gershwin’s American Rhapsody, retitled Rhapsody in Blue on the suggestion of his brother
Ira (after James McNeil Whistler’s painting “Nocturne in Black and Gold”), was composed
in January 1924. The work’s premiere in Aeolian Hall helped to transform Gershwin from
a Broadway songsmith into a respected classical artist. Ferde Grofé (1892-1972), chief
arranger for bandleader Paul Whiteman from 1920-1932, orchestrated the piece: he would
go on to compose Grand Canyon Suite in 1931, re-orchestrate Gershwin’s Rhapsody for
full orchestra in 1942, and teach orchestration at Juilliard. Grofé noted, “I practically lived
in their uptown Amsterdam and 100th Street apartment, for I called there daily for more
pages. He and his brother Ira had a back room where there was an upright piano, and that
is where [the two-piano version of] Rhapsody in Blue grew into being.”

Gershwin developed the conception of the piece while traveling to Boston; he recalled,
“It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattlety-bang that is often so stimulating
to a composer… I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction
of the rhapsody, from beginning to end… 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 distinguished
from its actual substance.” Critics praised the opening, an “outrageous cadenza of the
clarinet [with] subsidiary phrases, logically growing out of it, often metamorphosed by
devices of rhythm and instrumentation” (Olin Downes in The New York Times) while some
missed the significance of the work entirely: “Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and
harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive… it suffered from melodic and harmonic
anemia of the most pernicious kind” (New York Tribune). Rhapsody in Blue became
Gershwin’s musical calling card, selling millions of copies and even becoming a Viennese
café standard of the 1920s.

Gershwin recorded the Rhapsody twice with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra for RCA -- in 1924
and 1927. Recent books on the composer include an intimate personal history by Joan
2022/23 Season Oh, the Places We’ll Go! PAGE 13