322 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
Grofé, who orchestrated the piece for the idiosyncratic W hiteman ensemble,
some of whose members played as many as four or fi ve instruments.
The name rhapsody is generally used by composers to indicate a one-
movement piece with no set form, but expressive and spontaneous in effect.
Some recent commentators have pointed out that Rhapsody in Blue contains four
linked sections that resemble a symphony’s fast opening movement, playful
scherzo, melodious slow movement, and energetic fi nale; in this manner it is
reminiscent of the First Piano Concerto and other pieces by Franz Liszt, whose
music Gershwin had studied in his youth.
Two thematic elements, or motives, recur in all of the Rhapsody’s themes,
either singly or together. One motive is a seven-note syncopated rhythm (short-
short-short-long-short-short-short) derived from ragtime. The other is a four-note
melodic fragment that emphasizes a blue note, the lowered seventh degree of the
major scale. In Gershw in’s time this fragment was already familiar as a song tag akin
to the response portion of a call-and-response interchange. In short, ragtime and
blues—the African American building blocks of jazz—permeate Rhapsody in Blue.
Throughout Gershwin’s Rhapsody, the musical material plays upon the
widely accepted boundaries separating the classical, popular, and traditional
spheres. From the opening clarinet smear through the blues-tinged themes to
the syncopation that enlivens tunes and transitions, the work claims African
American music as part of its pedigree. Gershwin’s experience as a song writer
also leaves its mark on the work’s harmony and melody, with phrases and
periods cast in the four-, eight-, and sixteen-bar units of popular song. Finally,
the work’s title and length, as well as its sections of near-symphonic development
and virtuoso piano writing in the vein of Chopin and Liszt, show the infl uence
of the European piano concerto. They also refl ect the concertgoing that
began early in Gershwin’s teenage years, his classical training on piano, and
the private study of harmony and later classical composition through much
of his working life. Gershwin’s references are not borrowed tune quotations
but evocations of different musical styles; this is the work of a composer who
understood and believed in the artistic worth of all three spheres of American
music.
W hiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music” was a concert with a purpose: to
illustrate that the group’s jazz stylings were not just good dance music but American
music worth listening to sitting down, in a concert hall. That was what the brochures
handed out at the concert asserted, and that was what New York’s music critics were
there to weigh in on. As the capstone of W hiteman’s experiment, the premiere of
Rhapsody in Blue was a landmark event in American music history. The music crit-
ics validated that impression, fi rst by showing up at a concert they would proba-
bly have skipped had W hiteman not held public rehearsals to get them involved,
and then by writing seriously about the work—some praising it warmly (the New
York Sun’s W. J. Henderson called it America’s answer to Stravinsky in the “mod-
ern music” vein), and others roundly criticizing it. Whiteman played the piece in
public no fewer than eighty times in 1924 and frequently thereafter. A phonograph
record, made in April 1924 with Whiteman’s orchestra and Gershwin himself, saw
a steady growth in sales until by 1928 or so it was realizing substantial “mechanical
royalties.” By the end of the 1920s there was no more famous piece of music in the
United States than the Rhapsody, and it has never really gone out of fashion. Indeed,
in its later reorchestration, again by Grofé, for a more-or-less standard symphonicstructuremotivesstylea landmark premiere172028_13_305-331_r3_ko.indd 322 23/01/13 8:39 PM