A Century Ago Today: The Premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue”

I’ve little original to say upon the the topic, but I cannot let it go unobserved: today marks 100 years since George Gershwin premiered his Rhapsody in Blue at Aeolian Hall in New York (February 12, 1924). Popular bandleader Paul Whiteman, the self-styled “King of Jazz” commissioned the work as the keystone in his “Experiment in Modern Music” concert, symbolically held on Lincoln’s Birthday. Falling somewhere between “Jazz” and “Serious Music”, Gershwin’s novel work came to represent for many something like the sound of a bustling America, full of urban rhythms and dissonances.

Gershwin played the piano himself for the performance, which was scored and arranged for an ensemble of about two dozen musicians by Ferde Grofé. Critics of the time bemoaned its lack of traditional organization and its repetitiveness, but one could just as easily counter that as a work of Modernism, so what? The same could be said about Cubism, about Nude Descending a Staircase. It was a patchwork, just like America at the dawn of the 20th century. One can hear elements of ragtime, Latin rhythms, klezmer, and that omnipresent, recurring blue note that gives the blues, and this work, its name.

Gershwin was young when he died, but he was much younger when he composed this. America was to benefit from a further dozen productive years from this composer. After he passed in 1937, his acolyte Oscar Levant became his primary interpreter. The piece is periodically revived and reinterpreted in different contexts: Albertina Rasch choreographed a dance to it, it was an inspiration for Brian Wilson’sSmile (1967), Woody Allen used it as the soundtrack to Manhattan (1979), it’s juxtaposed with Al Hirschfeld drawings in Disney’sFantasia 2000, and Baz Luhrman used it in his 2013 version of The Great Gatsby. Nowadays, it’s so old that it’s in the public domain. If you want to cut your own record of it, you can! I haven’t heard it played yet on water glasses!