In early 1924 George Gershwin
was a successful young songwriter in New York’s Tin Pan Alley when he
accepted a commission to write a “jazz concerto” for bandleader Paul
Whiteman’s ambitious concert, An Experiment in Modern Music. Whiteman was interested in blending jazz with European-style orchestral music and was impressed by Blue Monday, Gershwin’s
1922 jazz opera.
Under intense deadline pressure, the 25-year-old
Gershwin produced one of the most popular works of 20th century music: Rhapsody in Blue.
The composition came together during a train ride from New York to
Boston. As Gershwin told his biographer Isaac Goldberg in 1931:
It was on the train, with its steely
rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a
composer–I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise…. And
there I suddenly heard–and even saw on paper–the complete construction
of the Rhapsody from beginning to end. No new themes came to
me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried
to conceive the composition as a whole.
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.
Gershwin wrote the piece for piano and then handed it to Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé for orchestration. Gershwin published Rhapsody first
in a version for two pianos and four hands, with the second piano part a
reduction of Grofé’s orchestration.
A year later Gershwin recorded his
own performance of that version in two parts for the Aeolean Company
in New York. Part II, with its famous slow theme, or “Adante”
(beginning at 9:07 above), followed by the piece’s bravura finale, was
released to the public in May of 1925, but the longer Part I wasn’t
released until January of 1927.
According to David Schiff in Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, the piano roll performance corresponds closely to the two-piano, four-hand score, with minor deviations. The Rhapsody in Blue sessions were among the very last of some 140 piano roll recordings that Gershwin made, beginning when he was 17 years old.
In 1989 the pianist and scholar Artis Wodehouse received
a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to make a
comprehensive study of Gershwin’s piano rolls. She digitally reunified
Parts I and II of Rhapsody in Blue on a Yamaha Disklavier piano for the 1993 Nonesuch Records release, Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls. You can listen to the reconstituted piece above. Although Wodehouse says that Gershwin’s piano-roll version of Rhapsody
is less authoritative than his phonograph recordings with Whiteman’s
orchestra, it does give a good sense of the young composer’s
unsentimental playing style. In her essay ‘Tracing Gershwin’s Piano
Rolls,” Wodehouse puts Gershwin’s playing in perspective:
Threading one’s way through the performance documents of rolls and discs of Rhapsody in Blue,
one is hard-pressed to say which rendition most represents a live,
unfettered Gershwin performance.
However, all of Gershwin’s recordings
and especially his rolls reinforce the impression that the composer’s
approach to playing his songs and the Rhapsody have little to
do with later, more romanticized readings.
His was surely an
aggressively confident and livelier way, based in the raggier dance
performance style of the era and completely devoid of sentimentality. Of
course, it could not have been otherwise: as a tracing of his piano
rolls makes clear, Gershwin cut his teeth on the exhilarating popular
music of the late 1910s and early 1920s.
He flowered in that rich and
frenetic time when ragtime and the syncopated dance craze peaked and
when jazz and the blues would change America’s musical landscape
forever.
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