The well-known dance music director Paul Whiteman wanted to cancel his concert on February 12, 1924. He acknowledges this in
Jazz
, the autobiography he published shortly after with the journalist Mary Margaret McBride.
But that performance, at New York's prestigious classical concert hall Aeolian Hall, which had been grandly billed as
An Experiment in Modern Music
, ended up being legendary.
The idea arose seeing the fascination that the inclusion of jazz songs in a classical recital aroused among the audience in that room.
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Whiteman chose to take that idea further than anyone else, although he was terrified of the consequences.
He intended to open new artistic paths by introducing that genre of music from African-American communities, then considered immoral and even dangerous, into the sophisticated classical concert hall.
To this end, he put together a varied program with his orchestra of 23 multi-instrumentalists that opened with
Livery Stable Blues
, as an example of “the true form of jazz,” and concluded with Elgar and his first march from
Pomp and Circumstance
, to illustrate “the scope of classical music".
But he commissioned the young pianist and composer George Gershwin to create a special work that ideally combined both extremes.
The result was
Rhapsody in Blue
, a composition that changed the history of music.
It now celebrates its centenary without having lost an iota of interest and popularity.
But not controversial either.
It became clear on January 26 in the pages of
The New York Times
, where the pianist and jazz critic Ethan Iverson described it as “the worst masterpiece”, a “naive and corny” composition that he compared to “a cheesecake , or anything else attractive but unhealthy.”
Nothing new for a composition whose overwhelming popular success always aroused criticism from both sides.
On the classical side, it came to be doubted that
Rhapsody in Blue
was a composition
sensu stricto
, beyond a succession of melodies without formal integrity or thematic development.
And on the jazz side it was always seen as a rude, and even racist, appropriation by Gershwin (a white musician of Jewish origin) of a language that did not belong to him by right.
A paradigmatic example of fake jazz whose commercial success ended up eclipsing the real thing.
Although the concert at the Aeolian Hall was a resounding triumph, Whiteman himself compiled the negative reviews in his aforementioned autobiography.
Olin Downes, in
The New York Times
, accused him of being a piece of jelly that trembles more than he directs, or Lawrence Gilman, in
The New York Herald
, considered the rhythm and colorful instrumental of
Rhapsody in Blue
to be novel , but weak and conventional. its melodies and harmonies.
He also remembers that many of the city's leading classical artists attended that concert.
Case of the singer Amelita Galli-Curci, the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninov, the violinist Fritz Kreisler or the conductor Leopold Stokowsky.
He does not forget that, despite the snowfall that day, there was no shortage of fights and pushing to gain access to the concert.
And he reports his financial fiasco, since he could have sold ten times the capacity of the room, although in the end he lost about seven thousand dollars (more than one hundred thousand euros today).
No one can doubt today that
Rhapsody in Blue
made Gershwin a pioneer capable of transcending the supposed musical division between popular and classical music.
Richard Crawford highlights this idea in his recent biography of the American composer who died prematurely at the age of 38 (WW Norton).
A musician who did not receive the usual academic training, but who was not self-taught either.
His beginnings date back to the age of 15, when he became a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and got, in 1914, a job as a song salesman at the Remick publishing house.
There he befriended a teenager named Fred Astaire, who worked as a
song plugger,
and they both shared their dreams of a future in musical comedy.
The first manuscript of the score for 'Rhapsody in Blue', dated July 7, 1924. Gabriel Hackett (Getty Images)
Gershwin's career had a decisive boost, starting in 1920, when he began composing the music for
George White's Scandals
.
This series of Broadway revues allowed him to develop the future language of
Rhapsody in Blue
.
In 1922 Whiteman joined the revue with his orchestra and that year he wrote a verismo-style jazz-opera in one act, titled
Blue Monday
.
A number of about twenty minutes that a New Haven critic considered “the first truly American opera set to music in the popular vein.”
It referred to the use of four indigenous genres: jazz music, sentimental song, blues and
ragtime recitative.
That would be the germ of his future black folk opera,
Porgy and Bess
, from 1935. But also the expressive axis of his first major instrumental composition, which is now one hundred years old.
At first, Gershwin did not accept Whiteman's commission, but the director convinced him with an advertisement in the press.
The composer confessed years later to Isaac Goldberg, for his 1931 biography, that the main objective of
Rhapsody in Blue
was to demonstrate that jazz should not cling to the strict pulse of dance rhythms.
To do this he used several melodies of blues songs with a varied rhythmic territory until he achieved a freer and more unpredictable music.
He confessed to Goldberg that one of the melodies came to him while traveling by train to Boston, where he also had an epiphany in which he contemplated the entire work in his head.
Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in 1922.Gilles Petard (Redferns/ Getty)
But
Rhapsody in Blue
was also a composition that had other protagonists.
We know that its title was the idea of his brother and lyricist, Ira Gershwin, when he looked at the painting
Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea
, by James McNeill Whistler, and related it to the tonal vocabulary of the work based on blues music, with that
experiment
of connecting the format of Franz Liszt with the style of Jelly Roll Morton.
He originally wrote the composition for two pianos and its instrumentation was carried out by Ferde Grofé.
We also owe this composer the idea of presenting the lyrical and expressive central theme of the work three times, first on the strings, then with the entire orchestra and finally with the piano.
Grofé would later write two more orchestrations of the work: in 1926, for a small orchestra and, in 1942, for a symphony orchestra, which is the most common version in the concert hall.
And its famous opening, with that spectacular, jazzy clarinet
glissando
that ascends two octaves and a fourth, was devised by Ross Gorman, the soloist of that instrument in Whiteman's orchestra.
Gershwin recorded
Rhapsody in Blue
for the Victor record company with Whiteman's orchestra in June 1924, and sales of the album reached one million copies.
It was the first of hundreds of records to come, but also the beginning of his intense reception, which confronted the popularity of the new composition with emerging American musical modernism.
A move that soon elevated Aaron Copland over Gershwin, as Carol J. Oja's studies have revealed.
Influential critics, such as Paul Rosenfeld and Virgil Thomson, described Copland as an artist who elevated jazz to art, while Gershwin kept it at the base level of popular entertainment.
The success of
Gershwin's 1924
experiment ended up overshadowing everything.
And his attempt to introduce jazz into the concert hall prevailed over the contemporary and later achievements of American modernist composers, such as Copland, and even true African-American musicians, such as William Grant Still and Duke Ellington.
Thus was born and fueled the controversy surrounding
Rhapsody in Blue
, which intensified with the interest it aroused among the main European composers of the time, such as Ravel, Bartók and Stravinsky.
Among the responses to the recent article against Iverson's
Rhapsody in Blue
in
The New York Times
, the comment from a composition professor at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan stands out.
The article made him listen to Gershwin's work again and be surprised by the formal miracle of it, which he does not hesitate to compare with Stravinsky's
The Rite of Spring
.
Precisely, the New York premiere of that controversial work by the Russian composer took place, at Carnegie Hall, exactly two weeks before Gershwin's work.
And the impressions of both compositions were related and even some critics understood
Rhapsody in Blue
as the New World's response to Stravinsky.
Gershwin had become the first American composer capable of measuring himself against a European titan.
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