Virtually everyone has experienced the shock of learning they have an obligation that they had either forgotten, or had never known about. From a longago scheduled doctor’s appointment that somehow never made it into your calendar, to the due date of a project which you could have sworn was at least a month away, we have all had that momentary jolt of terror when we realize someone is expecting something of us that we weren’t expecting of ourselves. Such was George Gershwin’s experience when he read in the New York Tribune on January 3, 1924, that the bandleader Paul Whiteman would be premiering Gershwin’s new “jazz concerto” the following month. Gershwin had written no such concerto, nor was one in the works. He had no idea what the article was referring to, but he knew that he had better call Paul Whiteman and find out.
Reaching Whiteman the next day, Whiteman confessed that he had been pressured into announcing his new concert, titled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” earlier than he had intended. He had learned that another conductor was about to announce a similar program highlighting works that blended jazz and classical music, and Whiteman wanted to make sure he announced first. He reminded Gershwin that he had broached the idea of a jazz concerto with the composer over a year earlier, but Gershwin had become engrossed in other projects, and had long ago forgotten about Whiteman’s suggestion. After some negotiating over the length of the work and who would do the orchestration, Gershwin agreed to drop everything else he was doing and begin composing. Three days later, he began work on the piece that would end up changing his life—and American music—forever.
Later in life, Gershwin wrote that the initial outline of the work came to him while he was on a train to Boston: “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating to a composer ... And there 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.”
Returning from Boston, Gershwin began work in earnest at the Upper West Side apartment he shared with his brother Ira in Manhattan. Ferde Grofé, whom Whiteman had hired to do the orchestration of the work, was a daily visitor to the apartment, recalling “I practically lived too 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 Rhapsody in Blue grew into being.”
Grofé’s initial orchestration was for jazz ensemble instead of full orchestra, and it was in this form that the work was premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, a mere six weeks after Gershwin had seen the New York Tribune article. The New York Times’ music critic, Olin Downes, described the performance: “Then stepped upon the stage, sheepishly, a lank and dark young man—George Gershwin. He was to play the piano part in the first public performance of his Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra. ... the audience was stirred and many a hardened concertgoer excited with a sensation of a new talent finding its voice ... There was tumultuous applause for Mr. Gershwin’s composition.”
Suddenly, Gershwin, who until that point had been known purely as a composer of popular songs and Broadway musicals, was being viewed in a different light. Rhapsody in Blue was a new kind of music—a work that effortlessly combined the jazz idiom with the classical tradition. It was a uniquely American sound that had not been heard before, and audiences could not get enough of it. Grofé would go on to do a second score for full orchestra in 1926, and the work has been a staple in concert halls and on recordings ever since.
The iconic glissando in the first clarinet part which opens the piece was another “happy accident.” Gershwin had originally written a trill and a 17-note scale leading to the opening melody. Paul Whiteman’s clarinetist, perhaps in a passive/aggressive jab at Gershwin, or perhaps because he couldn’t navigate the written scale, decided to play a glissando instead. Far from being insulted, Gershwin loved the sound, and today mastering the bluesy opening of Rhapsody in Blue is a rite of passage for every orchestral clarinetist. Following the orchestral introduction, the pianist enters with an extended solo, alternating between sultry nightclub music and the “steely rhythms” and “rattle-ty bang” sounds of that train ride to Boston where Gershwin had found his inspiration. The work continues as a series of interludes for soloist and orchestra, featuring pompous brass and bar room stride piano, before the final, expansive melody is announced in the orchestra. The conclusion is the grandest of finales, where the “unduplicated national pep” and “metropolitan madness” of 1920s New York is on full display and irresistibly intoxicating. George Gershwin wasn’t looking to birth a new kind of American music in 1924, and he certainly wasn’t looking for the pressure of producing a totally new kind of concerto in just over a month. But he took the risk, and his career exploded as it might never have otherwise. 100 years later, audiences still cheer his courage and his work ethic and revel in one of the “happiest accidents” in music.
