Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’

By Thomas May | From the November/December 2024 issue of Strings

The date immortalized in music history is February 12, 1924: a snowy Tuesday in New York, when Rhapsody in Blue was first introduced to the public near the end of a long and unusual concert. Accordingly, the music world has been celebrating the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s epochal work throughout the year—not only with performances (even more than would be usual for this ever-present, popular staple), but with responses by contemporary composers, imaginative programming juxtapositions, and provocative think pieces about Rhapsody’s lasting impact.

Still, beginnings have beginnings: already in November of the previous year, Gershwin had participated in an experimental concert featuring the Canadian-American mezzo-soprano Éva Gauthier, whose program (“Ancient and Modern”) boldly combined “serious” recital fare from European composers with Broadway songs and other popular material—including four songs by the young Gershwin.

“In retrospect,” writes Richard Crawford in his biography Summertime, “Gauthier’s recital also brought to mind the possibility that Gershwin the Broadway songwriter could produce a major instrumental composition.” He notes that the enthusiastic audience response—for what, incidentally, was Gershwin’s first-ever appearance on a concert stage—must have left its mark: “That popular songs could earn attention and foster delight on musical grounds in a classical context was no small discovery.”

An Experiment in Modern Music

Several origin stories mixed with lore have emerged ever since Rhapsody in Blue became an instant sensation—including the famous anecdote that Gershwin only began work on the piece after reading a newspaper article announcing the forthcoming premiere to take place in a little more than a month. In any case, there is no question that he composed the piece quickly, starting on January 7 and producing a two-piano score—one with the solo part, the other for the orchestral contribution—for the landmark concert of February 12, 1924.

Hitherto known to the public as a popular songwriter and tunesmith, Gershwin had already ventured into longer forms with the one-act opera Blue Monday (1922), which applied jazz idioms to a tragic verismo story set in Harlem. In fact, the very first “classical” piece that Gershwin is known to have composed was for string quartet: a harmony exercise called Lullaby, written around 1919.

The immediate catalyst for Rhapsody in Blue was a project organized by Paul Whiteman, a dance band leader and composer who had gotten his start early in the century as a violist in the Denver and San Francisco symphonies. Intent on inspiring greater awareness of the artistic potential of jazz, Whiteman designed a program, to take place on Lincoln’s birthday and billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” that set out to combine jazz with the classical concert tradition from Europe. Whiteman later stated: “I sincerely believe in jazz. I think it expresses the spirit of America.”

Whiteman had first collaborated with Gershwin a few years before: in 1922, he conducted Blue Monday for a popular Broadway revue. For that project—subtitled “Opera à la Afro-American” and a precursor to the idea behind Rhapsody—Gershwin’s music was orchestrated by Will Vodery, one of the few Black composers and arrangers active in the Broadway scene during that era (a figure whose legacy remains sadly unsung).

Whiteman was also in the audience for Gauthier’s experimental recital in November 1923 and reportedly went backstage to ask Gershwin to write a piece for his orchestra, with a piano solo part to be played by the composer. Already secure in the commercial success of his jazz orchestra, Whiteman was now interested in proving that “the kind of music he and his ensemble played was not just commercially appealing but artistically sound,” according to Crawford.

Since Carnegie Hall was unavailable, another prominent concert venue of the time was selected: the 1,100-seat Aeolian Hall near Times Square (which also hosted the studios for WJZ). Whiteman made it a point to include luminaries from the classical world among the overflow audience that braved the bitter winter weather: Jascha Heifetz, Igor Stravinsky, Mary Garden, and Leopold Stokowski among them. He later described the audience as a motley mix of “vaudevillians, concert managers come to have a look at the novelty, Tin Pan Alleyites, composers, symphony and opera stars, flappers, cake-eaters, all mixed up higgledy-piggledy.”

With around two dozen pieces on the lengthy two-part program, they began to lose interest along the way but pricked up their ears when the second-to-last item began with an outrageously extended clarinet glissando. Their resounding applause for Rhapsody in Blue marks an instance of a key work of the modern era being greeted not with scandalous rejection but frenzied enthusiasm.

Critical Reception, Then and Now

The critics, meanwhile, vented a wide range of assessments representing the perspectives of the classical and show business beats, respectively. Variety’s critic pronounced Rhapsody “a gem” and later remarked that it “made a deep impression.” The New York Times’ Olin Downes praised Gershwin’s achievement as “fresh and new and full of future promise.” But a decade later, The New Republic critic Paul Rosenfeld betrayed a bias typical of the time when he denounced Rhapsody as “not so much music, as jazz dolled up.”

Leonard Bernstein, a fervent admirer of Gershwin, also had a complicated relationship with his predecessor and dismissed Rhapsody in Blue in a famous diatribe as “not a composition at all” but “a string of separate paragraphs stuck together—with a thin paste of flour and water.” Bernstein himself, of course, would face similar charges in his attempts to move between what were perceived as the inherently separate musical spheres of classical, Broadway, and jazz.

From a modern perspective a century on, the most substantial critique has to do with Paul Whiteman’s project at large. The narrative imparted by “An Experiment in Modern Music” amounted to an unapologetically white-washed history of jazz. Not a single Black artist was included among the composers Whiteman commissioned for his concert. Worse still, his basic premise was that jazz, the great American art form created by the Black community, needed to be “legitimized.” 

In October 1923, just a few months before Rhapsody was unveiled, the musical comedy/revue Runnin’ Wild opened, featuring a score by Black composer James Price Johnson(which included the era-defining number “The Charleston,” whose rhythm Gershwin later incorporated into his Concerto in F). Johnson became known for his versatile command of different keyboard styles, and, like Gershwin—both composers knew and admired one another—experimented with combining jazz and classical idioms.

“Like myself, [Gershwin] wanted to write [rhythm and blues] on a higher level,” Johnson later recalled. “We had lots of talks about our ambitions to do great music on American themes.” Johnson’s Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1928, is uniquely important as a contemporary Black response to the success of Rhapsody in Blue. The music was advertised as “not a Rhapsody in Blue, but a Rhapsody in Black and White (Black Notes on White Paper).”

The jazz musician Ethan Iverson sparked much controversy with his New York Times essay on Rhapsody in Blue at 100, provocatively titled The Worst Masterpiece. He argues that “the promise of 1924 hasn’t been honored”—the promise of genuinely fusing the rich heritage of jazz with the classical sphere—with the result that “100 years later, most popular Black music is separate from the world of formal composition, while most American concert musicians can’t relate to a score with a folkloric attitude, let alone swing.”

But there have been counterweights to this development. In 1995, Marcus Roberts and his Trio performed their own version of Rhapsody in Blue, which is expanded with sections of extended improvisation that offer radically altered perspectives on Gershwin’s material.

The iconoclastic pianist Lara Downes has collaborated with Puerto Rican composer Edmar Colón to create a fresh arrangement of Rhapsody (premiered in 2023) that reflects on the century of immigration and multicultural transformation since Gershwin’s icon was introduced.

Rhapsody’s Legacy 

Written at breakneck speed, Rhapsody was the product of a 25-year-old, non-conservatory-trained artist embarking on his first large-scale instrumental composition. Yet the implications of Gershwin’s exuberantly inventive music continue to reverberate. To find a work of similar long-lasting influence—and palpably enduring freshness—from early in the 20th century, you’d have to turn to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. For Richard Crawford, the “expressive linchpin” of the score is to be found in “the variety of its musical materials: its rhythms, sonorities, and most of all melodies, both classical and jazz-oriented.” 

Related to this is the phenomenal adaptability of Rhapsody in Blue, which nonetheless retains its core identity in multiple guises—such as Béla Fleck’s threefold set of variant takes on the original, “Rhapsody in Blue(grass),” “Rhapsody in Blue(s),” and the classic Ferde Grofé orchestration, but with the banjo foregrounded in place of the piano.

Gershwin’s audacious creativity caught the attention of fellow artists outside the realm of music. In another era-defining work, The Great Gatsby, which was published the year after Rhapsody, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes a fictional “Jazz History of the World” by the composer Vladimir Tostoff, which is heard playing during the crucial scene in which the elusive Gatsby first appears in the novel.

Gershwin anticipated several waves of attempts to tear down the walls separating musical genres and even concepts of the role of the “author” in a composition. “He wanted to bridge musical worlds that were separate,” says cultural historian Joseph Horowitz. Perhaps tellingly, “prominent musicians who spoke up for Gershwin were invariably foreign-born,” he notes, citing such names as Schoenberg, Klemperer, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. “American-born classical musicians typically disparaged Gershwin as a dilettante interloper.”

Still, as Lara Downes said in an interview earlier this year on NPR: “I don’t hear Rhapsody in Blue anymore as just a piece of entertainment. I think it’s a little bit of an act of rebellion, or at the very least, it’s a statement about what America should be and what that sounds like.