The Classical Music Book

260 RAGTIME AND JAZZ INFLUENCES

You might lose your

spontaneity and, instead

of composing first-rate

Gershwin, end up with

second-rate Ravel.

Maurice Ravel

to George Gershwin

African American genres that changed

the course of classical music

The cakewalk

Enslaved plantation workers first danced the

cakewalk, strutting in couples to syncopated

rhythms in parody of their white owners.

The dance won European attention when

performed at the 1889 Paris Exposition.

Ragtime

The music of African American composer

Scott Joplin—such as the famous Maple

Leaf Rag—and the marches of John Philip

Sousa brought the ragtime style out of a

purely black idiom and into the mainstream.

Jazz

Arising from the music of enslaved African

Americans in the South, jazz was an

improvised form that drew on work songs,

marches, and dance rhythms. It was

popularized in New Orleans in the 1890s. 

rejection of a white European

tradition, was also seized on by

Igor Stravinsky, recently settled in

France, in 1919, when he created

his dissonant Piano-Rag-Music,

which pulls apart and rearranges

ragtime like a cubist painting.

Jazz meets classical

By the 1920s, ragtime had been

superseded in the United States by

more improvisational and flexible

styles of jazz, particularly in jazz

dance bands. One of the most

popular bands was led by Paul

Whiteman, who relied on carefully

orchestrated arrangements,

using a large ensemble, rather

than improvisation. He made

continued attempts to introduce

the concertgoing public to the new

jazz style, which he considered to

be the first truly American music,

giving performances at New York’s

prestigious Aeolian Hall. It was

for one of these events, titled “An

Experiment in Modern Music,” that

Whiteman commissioned a young,

successful songwriter named

George Gershwin to compose

a piano concerto. When first

approached, Gershwin turned

down the offer, but Whiteman

informed the press that he was

writing the concerto anyway, and

so Gershwin’s hand was forced.

Rhapsody in Blue premiered on

February 12, 1924 and was instantly

acclaimed by both classical and

jazz audiences, which included

Sousa, now the elder statesman of

ragtime, and the Russian composer

Sergei Rachmaninoff. The piece

itself was only sketched out by the

inexperienced Gershwin, who left

the orchestration to Whiteman’s

pianist and arranger Ferde Grofé.

The unmistakable opening clarinet

glissando was also not Gershwin’s

own invention but rather that of

Whiteman’s clarinetist. Further

orchestrations by Grofé, in 1926 and

1942, were to fix Rhapsody in Blue

firmly in the classical repertoire.

Following the success of his

concerto, Gershwin traveled to

Paris to study composition. He

hoped to work with composers

such as Nadia Boulanger and

Maurice Ravel, but all potential

tutors refused, concerned that such

studies would endanger Gershwin’s

own style. Returning to New York,

he started on his most ambitious

stage project, the opera Porgy and

Bess, which had its premiere on

Broadway, in 1935. Styled as a “folk

opera,” it drew heavily on New York

jazz and African American folk

music such as spirituals and the

blues in songs such as It Ain’t

Necessarily So and Summertime.

The opera also incorporated many

classical techniques, such as

leitmotifs (themes introduced to

identify characters) and recitative

(speechlike song), and even

elements of the polyrhythms and

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