Rethinking the Rhapsody

by Richard Crawford

In the late 1950s, when I decided to become a musicologist, Gershwin was a figure who didn't fit very easily into what we would have called the historical narratives of American music, if we had known that term. In 1964, I had my first chance to teach American music at the University of Michigan, and I used as my basis an outline prepared by H. Wiley Hitchcock for a course I myself had taken at Michigan in 1958. I don't remember Gershwin playing much of a role in Wiley's course, and I know he didn't in mine. I do remember, though, that by the early 1970s I had banned the Rhapsody in Blue as a term paper topic. By then, I had received enough shallow, unreflective papers on the subject to judge that a desire to write on the Rhapsody was a sign of an incurious mind–at least in that day and age.

Admittedly my own image of Gershwin was thoroughly unoriginal: Gershwin was a great songwriter who tried to cross over into the concert hall and wasn't quite up to it. I was still capable of getting goose bumps from the Rhapsody and the Concerto in F; but as a trained musicologist, I recognized them as the sign of a weakness that might still be outgrown. What inspired me to start thinking of Gershwin in a different light was reading The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) by Harold Cruse. This powerful work argues for the need of black American artists and intellectuals to take control of the economic infrastructure in which they work. Well into the book, Cruse brings up Porgy and Bess, with its black subject and cast, and its white creative and economic ownership, as a symbol of his main complaint. And he calls for black performers to boycott the work. Up to this point, I had been persuaded by Cruse's argument. But the boycott idea seemed wrong, and it made me want to write about Gershwin's opera, which I eventually did.¹ Some thirty years later I find myself again pondering Gershwin, this time for America's Musical Life: A History, a survey I am writing for Norton, to be published in the year 2000.

A chapter of the survey will be called "Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Its Context." This is the only chapter built around a discussion of one work. (It seems that those supposedly dumb students back in the 1960s knew something I didn't know.) During the last several decades, the Rhapsody has moved in my own view from the historiographical periphery to the center: a work that offers a unique perspective on the American musical scene in the early 1920s. Into the Rhapsody in Blue flow three separate currents. First is the folk tradition, in the form of the blues. If anyone has written a sentence that evokes more eloquently what American music makers have achieved than the novelist Ralph Ellison's definition of the blues, I have yet to find it. The blues, says Ellison, is "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's . . . consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."² Ellison's words reach right down to the basics of human life: the impact of pain, the refusal to shrink from that experience, the determination to poke around down there, the knowledge that some people, though formally untrained, have made enduring art from that poking around. Blues songs seek to locate the knife-edge between tragedy and comedy, and their performance can evoke the zone where crying and laughing are close kin. Gershwin was one of a number of American tunesmiths who mined blues materials for popular Tin Pan Alley and Broadway hits. But no other white American composer in those years was more successful at infusing orchestral music with genuine blues feeling.

The second current that flows into the Rhapsody is that of popular music, in the form of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley songs and jazz. Like blues, jazz is rooted in southern black folk traditions. During the 1910s, a new way of playing dance music that had apparently originated in New Orleans gradually found its way into the dance halls, clubs, and theaters of New York and Chicago–and, from 1917 on, was recorded. This energetic form of now popular music, at first called jazz only in the North, was taken as evidence that Victorian values were declining in the years after World War I, which the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the Jazz Age. For many white Americans, the music called jazz in the early 1920s was linked less to black origins and improvisation than to current popular fashion and youthful identity, challenging older standards of personal and musical decorum. Thus Paul Whiteman's orchestra was considered a leading jazz ensemble when it premiered Gershwin's Rhapsody in 1924.

The third current flows from the classical sphere. The struggle to establish "modern music" in the concert hall was a two-pronged process: the introduction of such European modernists as Schoenberg and Stravinsky into the United States, and the emergence of modernist composers in this country, from Leo Ornstein and Edgard Varèse to the homegrown generation of the 1920s, led by Aaron Copland. As Carol J. Oja has argued, the issue of an American modernism, as opposed to European modernism, was very much up for grabs in 1924, and Gershwin's Rhapsody figured prominently in that discussion.³ But Gershwin got cut out of the discussion in the latter 1920s, when critics like Paul Rosenfeld linked the modernist credentials of Copland's Piano Concerto of 1927 to art and Gershwin's concert music to the commercial marketplace. The prejudice against classifying Gershwin's music as art remained strong in the 1960s, when I recall reading in Copland's Our New Music (1941) his list of almost three dozen composers who made up the lively contemporary music scene of the 1920s. The "new generation" of Americans mentioned there includes George Antheil, Robert Russell Bennett, Nikolai Berezowsky, Marc Blitzstein, Theodore Chanler, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Colin McPhee, Douglas Moore, Walter Piston, Quincy Porter, Bernard Rogers, Roger Sessions, Leo Sowerby, William Grant Still, Randall Thompson, Virgil Thomson, and Bernard Wagenaar. But it does not include George Gershwin. Gershwin's omission, which today seems curious indeed, did not then strike me as strange. In those days, finding hierarchies and teaching them still seemed a key part of the musicological enterprise.

The Rhapsody in Blue is a piece of music that wears its checkered ancestry proudly, even to the point of flaunting it. The folk tradition leaves its mark especially in the realm of pitch, with blue notes fundamental to many of the themes, and perhaps also in call-and-response dialogue. The popular sphere's impact is felt from the jazz side especially in rhythm–syncopation and sections with dance-based beats–and in timbre, with such jazz sounds as the clarinet glissando, the use of muted trumpet for voice-like sounds, and the key melodic role of wind instruments. And the Rhapsody's melodic impulse is grounded in popular song: especially the four-plus-four, and eight-bar section structure, and Gershwin's fondness for casting his tunes in the form of statement, restatement, and contrast. As for the classical sphere's influence, one may point to the title, the fourteen-minute length, the genre of jazz concerto, the cadenza-like passages, and the sweep of the last big theme, which breathes the spirit of nineteenth-century Romanticism.

Gershwin's Rhapsody does not try to fuse the classical, popular, and folk spheres of American music making; rather it plays on the boundaries that separate them. Constant rehearing has given the work a semblance of unity for many listeners. But formally speaking, the Rhapsody in Blue is a parade of references and unexpected contrasts. Even when you know what's coming, the impulse to ask "What is that doing in this piece?" never entirely disappears. Gershwin's references are not borrowed tune quotes but different musical styles. The Rhapsody in Blue has often been criticized for lacking a more organic form. But it is precisely in the way the stylistic references are juxtaposed–almost as if Gershwin were a film director, cutting from one scene to another–that the work's eclectic essence shines through: music of a composer who believed in the artistic worth of all three spheres of American music making, and who knew how to write convincingly in each.

In "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain," Wallace Stevens writes about a text that showed the protagonist where to locate himself to see what he needed to see. The poem reminded him:

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they
had edged . . .

Encountering this poem several years ago, I took it as a metaphor for the kind of observing historians do. Since our observations are of the past, we do our present-day research, and quite a bit of groping around too, to find the best vantage point–"the outlook that would be right"–for seeing the past more clearly.

For me, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue turns out to be "the exact rock" on the mountain from which my own inexactnesses as an observer of the 1920s managed to locate "the view toward which they had edged." The Rhapsody is an emblem of its time and a work with an enduring presence; a composition that has never gone out of style. It brings together elements from all three American musical spheres. And in line with the historiographical position taken in the forthcoming America's Musical Life it questions a hierarchical view that assigns the classical sphere (and composers' control) higher value, and the popular and folk spheres (and performers' control) lower value.

–University of Michigan

Notes

¹ Richard Crawford, "It Ain't Necessarily Soul: Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as a Symbol," Yearbook for Inter-American Musical Research 8 (1972), 17-38, is the first of several articles.
² Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 78.
³ Carol J. Oja, "Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s," The Musical Quarterly 78 (1994), 646-68.

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