Rhapsody in Blue: How Gershwin broke the mold

if there's one piece of music that is quintessentially New York City it's surely this one Rhapsody and blue by George Gershwin [Music] there's a reason that Woody Allen chose the piece to open his 1979 film Manhattan which by the way isn't where these shots are from they're a montage of time lapses by a more recent New Yorker youtuber Casey nice stir but you can still feel the same magic the same connection [Music] there's something about this music that has woven its way into the hearts of listeners ever since it was first performed in a concert given by jazz band leader Paul Whiteman in New York in 1924 to an audience that included an amazing collection of musical luminaries from all sides of the musical divide classical composers like Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky sat alongside the stride pianist Willie the lion Smith and March bandleader John Philip Sousa and that cross-genre cross-cultural appeal really became the point Rhapsody and Blue is just so like New York it's the sophisticated and the brash rubbing shoulders side by side it's the first truly melting pot piece for a melting pot city [Music] Gershwin's central dilemma when writing the piece was how to turn his propensity for writing a good tune into a more substantial piece of music the fully fledged jazz concerto that Whiteman had asked for a piece in other words that lasted more than a few minutes but somehow didn't just sound like a predictable medley of one tune after another because writing tunes was undoubtedly one of Gershwin's greatest talents his first big hit was a show tune called swanee in 1919 which al Johnson a famous Broadway singer of the day heard Gershwin perform at a party and decided to sing in one of his shows [Music] and many of the tunes Gershwin wrote over the next 15 years or so whether it's lady be good I got rhythm let's call the whole thing off or embraceable you they've become jazz standards tunes everyone knows plays and loves and in rhapsody in blue the melodies are undoubtedly a key part of the pieces success the composers of Leonard Bernstein no stranger to genre hopping himself said over the piece the themes are terrific inspired god-given I don't think has been such an inspired melody stone this earth since Tchaikovsky his next sentence was slightly less gracious but if you want to speak of a composer another matters but we'll come back to that and of course most of these show tunes would have a fairly standard structure typically it'll be a 16 or 32 bars there's been a section and repeat of that a section maybe with a little variety thrown in then a contrasting B section sometimes known as the bridge or the mid-late and finally a return to the a so a nice simple AABA form and the simplicity of this structure is one of the keys to its popularity it has just the right amount of repetition a little sense of variety in the middle before the comfort of a return to the familiar but the very thing that makes it a success makes it difficult to use for Gershwin's purposes it's a closed form it has a beginning a middle and an end finish the end of one cycle and you've got nothing to do nowhere to go other than repeat the cycle again or just go on to something else and I think this shows the inherent problem of genre hopping these structures are there for a reason move too far away from them and you risk destroying the thing itself stick to them too rigidly and well you're just left with a series of tunes which don't really add up to anything greater the sweet spot between these two alternatives is pretty hard to find so what's goin solution well he certainly doesn't abandon the tunes there are five main tunes in the piece each of which has been given a name over the years by academics there's the famous opening tune the one with the clarinet glissando which is known as the written ello as it comes back most often in the piece then there's the Train theme [Music] the stride theme [Music] shuffle theme [Music] finally the love theme [Music] each of these themes when we hear it fully state it seems to have that AABA shape here's the full written ello theme although there's something a little bit different about that last a section which we'll come to in a minute so let's follow this theme at the start of the piece and see how Gershwin uses it and from the outset he doesn't state it in full we just hear the first phrase in b-flat major so then there's some connecting material and a hint of the stride theme but now we've already changed key so now we hear the first phrase again but now it's on a flat in the muted trumpet [Music] then there's two more bars of connecting material and we've moved again D flat major so we keep hearing the same fragment of the tune but it's always on the move changing key every few bars next after a longer transition the piano gets its turn and we finally hear the full version of the written ala theme in yet another new key a major now but even now Gershwin gently pulls the harmonic rug out from under our feet at the start of the B section so that it leads not back home to the kiya started in but to yet another new key this time it's C minor so we've heard the main theme now five times and every time it's been in a different key Gershwin here is following a rule I always tell students what you get up to in the opening of the piece sets the tone for the rest of the piece if you start it one way say with all of those AABA tunes stated in full it's very hard then to move beyond that but if you start with something that straightaway breaks into fragments or quickly changes harmony then you're much freer after that to suddenly stop in the middle of a phrase and move on somewhere else without it seeming out of place and fragmentation is another key trick that Gershwin gets up to here we just saw an example of fragmentation in that last phrase the theme starts but then you get these two lines in the music that's called a scissor er it's a symbol that tells the performer to cut the phrase off and restart in the next bar [Music] and Rhapsody in Blue is full of these kind of moments little unexpected interruptions and diversions [Music] so here for example we're joining the stride teaming were on the second day of it's a ABA structure so it proceeds in an orderly fashion to its B section but we only get the first bar of the final a before it moves into a sequence and then it dissolves into something completely different so with this kind of approach we still get to hear our Gershwin tunes but they're never allowed to complete they always end up breaking up fragmenting moving off in a new direction but alongside these popular elements there were other aspects of the piece that pushed it far closer to something more like a traditional classical work first and foremost despite the jazzy styles it felt like a concerto many of the piano passages and the ways it interacts with the ensemble would not have felt out of place in a work by Grieg or Tchaikovsky the main solos are full of typically classical and decidedly on jazzy rubato and the piano part is also full of traditional classical character types like agitato or skirts and ER so while the band plays its foxtrots in a fairly straightforward style the soloist takes up the tunes and transforms them into something that feels more like a traditional heroic soloist in a piano concerto Gershwin seems to have seen his work as a way of synthesizing a new truly American art form an American Rhapsody as he originally called it by mixing African American traditions like ragtime and jazz with the European traditions of concert music the American soul as he wrote earnestly in a 1926 essay for theatre magazine is black and white all colors and all souls unified it was a grand vision but also perhaps a slightly naive one as many of since noted Gershwin success overshadowed any number of equally talented african-american artists from James P Johnson to Fats Waller to even Duke Ellington himself and as Claudia Roth Pierpont noted in The New Yorker the tide of history was also moving in a new direction in the fall of 1924 the return of Aaron Copland from his studies in Paris and the arrival of Louis Armstrong from the clubs of Chicago began to tear the ideal of an American synthesis apart serious music and jazz went their distinct ways a composers art and a performers art eternal Verity and Restless improvisation leaving Gershwin in a no-man's-land that came to be known with a curl of the lip as pops so the workers found itself in a curious limbo four jazz musicians it doesn't really fit the narrative of a genre that became centered on improvisation but the piece holds an even bigger challenge for classical music where the veneration of both composer and score still holds firm to this day which one of the many versions of the piece that exists count as the real thing so the version of the piece most often heard in concert halls today was the one orchestrated in 1942 five years after Gershwin's death by ferde grofe a who also orchestrated the 1926 theater orchestra version and the original 1924 jazz band version Gershwin himself only wrote a to piano score in the version for jazz band the pianist with all those cadenzas and rubato seems more like an interloper from the classical world but in the orchestral version which many people feel goes too far in smoothing out the jazzier colours of the ensemble the pianist seems more like the one true jazzy element so which of these is the real rhapsody in blue and it's equally confusing when it comes to the pieces of form Gershwin's original score lasts about 15 minutes but the two times he recorded it in his lifetime it was in an abridged version lasting only eight or nine minutes of course that was mainly so that it would fit on two sides of a 78 rpm record but still in some sense you could say it has more of the composer's official stamp of approval than the sprawling orchestral version were used to and which pierpon says sounds less like 20s symphonic jazz then like 50s symfon eyes droid Gershwin's giddy clarinet has become a cat in heat his lilting central melodious swollen him to eros the locky gaiety of the original is a wholly different experience so all of this poses a terrible dilemma for possible critics and commentators how can you analyze and judge your work when you can't even agree what the work is so to continue with Bernstein's quote from earlier Rhapsody and blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable you can cut parts of it without affecting the whole you can remove any of these stuck together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before it can be a five-minute piece or a 12-minute piece and in fact all these things are being done to it every day and it's still the Rhapsody in Blue so according to Bernstein Gershwin failed at the very thing he set out to do he didn't manage to meld those great melodies into a meaningful larger structure and yet he must have done something right as David Schiff says in his excellent Cambridge handbook to the piece if a musical work continues to be played for three generations after its premiere just how flawed can its form be and in studying the piece for this video I've come to appreciate how much care Gershwin put into creating a coherent piece so while he does all that work to break up his melodies Gershwin is at the same time constantly looking for ways to bind them together so for example the bass line we heard earlier under the stride theme [Music] is a kind of pre echo of the lofty and the themes themselves have many features in common they all have a similar kind of bluesy harmony and emphasis on the flattened seventh and a lot of use of major and minor thirds or look here how Gershwin connects to different themes the shuffle theme and the love theme through a common rhythm that dub prepared but but in the pieces a connecting passage that links the two themes and keeps the rhythm in our ears as the music slows down so that when the love theme arrives it sounds not really like a new theme that like something emerging naturally out of what's come before [Music] but lesson by going right back to the start if you listen to the 1924 recording you can hear the original clarinetist Ross Gorman who apparently was just locking around with the opening b-flat major scale Gershwin had written and because Gershwin liked what he did he'd inadvertently turned it into the iconic Lysander that we all know [Music] [Music] so one of the most familiar iconic aspects of the piece was just an afterthought if you listen to that recording there's also far more of the sound of traditional klezmer music in the sound of the clarinet than you hear in most modern interpretations although gorman wasn't Jewish and Gershwin himself apparently had little knowledge of klezmer despite his own Jewish origins [Music] but perhaps that confusing pileup of cultures and styles offers the best metaphor for the piece as a whole maybe as some say Gershwin wasn't a true jazz musician and yet as we've seen many of his songs went on to become standards that form the very DNA of jazz maybe rep CD in blue is not a classical piece but it's one of the most performed by classical orchestras around the world something that doesn't easily fit into a category can be easy to pour scorn on it's confusing it doesn't do things the way they've always been done but if it has something of value as Rhapsody in Blue clearly does it'll just pick itself up brush up its shoulders and carry on it's a melting pot piece with all the joys contradictions disappointments and excitements that that entails and I would say if the composer just like the great city he was born in if you're tired of Gershwin you're tired of life oh okay what so part of the reason I wanted to do this film was that 2020 marks 95 years since at least the original Gershwin - piano piece is I think some of the illustrations may still remain in copyright the Gershwin estate was one of the signatories behind the copyright extension Act Sonny Bono act and everyone was worried that it would keep getting extended indefinitely so it's been it's great for now at least it's back in it's in the public domain where it belongs whether at some point they'll try and claw it back it's quite possible that's been done before but for now we're all free to enjoy and rearrange the to piano version and do what we like with it anyway if you enjoyed the video do please like and subscribe and forget to hit the notification bow so that you get reminders of forthcoming videos if you'd really like to support the channel then do consider joining my patrons over at patreon because they really do have make the channel possible thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time I'm going back indoors now you [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 203,086

Rating: 4.9674082 out of 5

Keywords: george gershwin, rhapsody in blue, analysis

Id: vv6GcsLxMiQ

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020

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[u/uhhhclem]

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[u/happybadger]

yes.