When bandleader Paul Whiteman put together his 1924 concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music, he was trying to do much more than make money. He was on a mission to legitimize his field of music: jazz. However, he wasn’t concerned with promoting the interests of jazz’s African American originators. Instead, he sought to convince white audiences that jazz—a suspect genre, due to its origins in the black community and associations with drinking and dancing—could be transformed into legitimate art by white composers and musicians such as himself. His concert, although profoundly racist in intent, is remembered for introducing one of the most beloved concert pieces of the 20th century: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. 

Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin

Although few recognize his name today, Paul Whiteman was the most famous and successful bandleader of the 1920s. He specialized in what was known as “sweet jazz,”1 a kind of lively dance music intended for white consumers. Most modern listeners would have a hard time identifying his music as jazz. Instead, we tend to reserve that term for the more rhythmically interesting performances put on by African American dance bands of the era—a type of music known at the time as “hot jazz.” To hear the contrast, one might compare Whiteman’s biggest hit, “Whispering” (1920), with “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” (1927) as recorded by Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians. Whiteman’s recording is notable for its lively tempo, square rhythms, precise pitches, and instrumentation (his band included a violin section). “Whispering” is suitable dance music, to be sure, but it lacks the spontaneity and excitement of “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.”

Despite his massive success, Whiteman still faced considerable opposition as a jazz musician in the 1920s. Many white people were deeply worried about the dangerous effects that jazz might have on society. The rhythms of jazz prompted dancers to do things with their bodies that were not considered appropriate, while its association with nightclubs meant that it encouraged other immoral behaviors as well. However, the biggest concern—if often unspoken—was with the increasing influence of African American music on mainstream culture. To make jazz acceptable, therefore, Whiteman understood that he needed to make it white. 

The purpose of Whiteman’s concert was to illustrate the evolution of jazz from a rough and untutored product of African American culture into a sophisticated form of concert music. In order to tell this story, however, he needed a special piece with which to end his program—a piece that would combine elements of jazz with the European concert tradition, thereby synthesizing the two traditions and proving the potential for jazz to become art. He decided to approach one of the leading popular song composers of the day, George Gershwin, and requested that he write and perform a jazz-inspired piano concerto. 

In 1924, George Gershwin (1898-1937) was still a young man, but he had already made a name for himself as a Broadway songwriter. Gershwin was born into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants who had settled in Brooklyn. He revealed a talent for music when his parents bought a piano for his older brother, Ira. While Ira had little interest in playing, George was fascinated with the instrument and demonstrated an uncanny ability to pick out familiar tunes on the keys. He subsequently took lessons in piano and composition. 

In 1913, Gershwin left school to take a job as a song plugger with the music publisher Jerome H. Remick. At the time, the principle product of the popular music industry was sheet music, which allowed Americans to perform songs with piano accompaniment in their own homes. (Phonograph records were just beginning to sell in large numbers.) Music publishers, therefore, did whatever they could to build public interest in their products. Consumers were most likely to buy the sheet music for a song that they had heard and enjoyed at a theater or in a nightclub. The role of a song plugger, therefore, was to ensure that the songs published by a given company were heard as frequently as possible. Gershwin’s job was to promote Remick songs to professional singers. Each day, performers would visit the publishing house to try out the latest products, and Gershwin would play new songs for them on the piano. If he was lucky, the performer would add a Remick song to their act, thereby providing valuable advertising for the sheet music. 

Although Gershwin was good at his job, he was not content to play songs written by other people. He began composing his own songs, and had his first big hit in 1919 with “Swanee.” As was always the case, “Swanee” began to sell when it was picked up by a star performer—in this case, the hottest singer of the decade, Al Jolson. The song was perfect for Jolson, for he specialized in blackface performances of numbers written from an imagined African American perspective. “Swanee” joined a long tradition of songs that expressed a nostalgic longing for the South. Indeed, Gershwin took the name “Swanee” from the famous Stephen Foster song “Old Folks at Home” (1851)—an early “plantation song” that used dialect to indicate the race of the narrator. Although the text to Gershwin’s song is not in dialect, its stereotyped references to banjos, Dixie, and “Mammy” made it clear that the narrator was black. None of this proves that Gershwin harbored any racial animosity of his own. Instead, it exemplifies how common racist stereotypes were in mainstream entertainment of the era. 

Following the success of “Swanee,” Gershwin quickly made a name for himself as a leading composer of Broadway musicals. He worked primarily with his brother Ira, who wrote lyrics. Gershwin moved to Hollywood in 1936 to write music for film musicals, but died suddenly due to a brain tumor in July of 1937, when he was only 38 years old. 

The Concert

Whiteman’s Experiment in Modern Music took place on February 12 at Aeolian Hall in New York City. He intended for the concert to be a significant social and cultural event, so all of the prominent performers, conductors, and critics of classical music were invited. This was not Whiteman’s regular audience of enthusiastic young dancers, but rather an audience of skeptical highbrows whom he hoped to win over. The afternoon began, therefore, with a lecture, in which Whiteman explained how his project would benefit the art music community and bring more listeners to the opera house and concert hall. 

The program itself was divided into two parts. The first ostensibly illustrated the evolution of jazz, while the second presented various syntheses of jazz and classical music, culminating in the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue. The concert opened with a section entitled “The True Form of Jazz.” Unsurprisingly, however, Whiteman’s idea about what constituted “real jazz” was poorly informed.

The first number on the program was “Livery Stable Blues,” a piece that has gone down in history as the first ever to be recorded and marketed as jazz. The record, made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jass Band (the spelling of “jazz” was inconsistent in early years), had been enormously successful, thereby launching the jazz craze in Northern cities. However, there was nothing particularly “original” about the band or the record. To begin with, all of the members of the band were white, while the style in which they played had most certainly originated in the black communities of New Orleans. (The band leader, Nick LaRocca, created controversy in the 1950s when he continued to aggressively push the ridiculous claim that he had personally invented jazz.) Although the members of the band came from New Orleans, they had settled in Chicago and made a living playing music for dances, and they made their first records in New York City—environments far removed from the birthplace of jazz. Finally, the song itself was a particularly hokey example of Dixieland jazz. In it, the instrumentalists imitate various barnyard animals, thereby perpetuating stereotypes of black music as primitive and ridiculous. 

We will not examine the entire program in similar depth. Whiteman did not offer a particularly insightful survey of jazz history, and his concert was clearly designed to showcase the various capabilities of Whiteman’s band above all else. It also served, as we have seen, to erase the black origins of the style that Whiteman was trying to legitimize. 

The second part of the concert began with Victor Herbert’s A Suite of Serenades— another piece that had been commissioned by Whiteman for the concert. Although not particularly jazzy, the suite allowed the band to show off their ability to play highbrow music. The suite’s four movements—Spanish, Chinese, Cuban, and Oriental—reveal that the fascination with exoticism in music that we saw at work in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker had not died away. This was followed by Rhapsody in Blue, while Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1—a piece that we all recognize from high school and college graduations—ended the program. 

Rhapsody in Blue

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue almost never came to be. The composer’s initial response to Whiteman’s request that he write a jazz-inspired concerto had been quite sensible: He said no. After all, Gershwin was a popular song composer, and a busy and successful one at that. He knew that he didn’t have the time to take on the project, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to do it well. However, just five weeks before the concert was to take place, Ira read an announcement in the New York Tribune that his brother was hard at work on a piece to be premiered as part of the program. After that, Whiteman was able to convince Gershwin to join his project, for he would have been publicly embarrassed if he did not produce the concerto that had already been advertised. 

The Compositional Process

Luckily, Gershwin got some help from collaborators. Most importantly, while he composed a version of the concerto for two pianos (solo and accompaniment), he did not have to orchestrate it. That work was done by Ferde Grofé, a composer who was employed by Whiteman to produce arrangements for the band. Grofé was intimately familiar with the ensemble, so he was able to create parts that showed Whiteman’s players to their best advantage. Because he had to use the musicians at hand, Grofé’s initial orchestration was a little strange: He created parts for clarinet, various saxophones, trumpet, horn, trombone, tuba, string bass, percussion, piano, banjo, and eight violins. After the work proved successful, Grofé reorchestrated it, first for a small theater orchestra (1926) and then for full symphony orchestra (1942). When you hear Rhapsody in Blue today, you might be hearing any of these versions, although the last is the most common. 

Grofé’s contribution was the most important—especially since the young Gershwin did not yet have the skills necessary to write for a 23-part ensemble like Whiteman’s. However, he was not the only collaborator to leave his mark on the concerto. The famous opening clarinet glissando was in fact the idea of the man who first played it, Ross Gorman. Although Gorman first added the glissando in rehearsal as a joke, Gershwin liked it and asked him to keep it for the performance. Finally, the concerto was given its name by Gershwin’s brother Ira, who had recently seen an exhibition of paintings by James McNeill Whistler and was inspired by his color-centric titles (e.g. Nocturne: Blue and Silver). 

The process by which Rhapsody in Blue came into being is interesting because it sheds light on the collaborative nature of artistic production. We like to think of the composer as a puppet master, controlling all elements of the creation of a new work, but that is almost never the case. It is much more common for musical works to develop through a process of give and take between various creative personalities. This is particularly true in the world of musical theater and opera, where Gershwin himself felt most at home. 

All the same, it was Gershwin who came up with the melodies and decided how to use them. In 1931, Gershwin described how the idea for the concerto came to him: 

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. 

To create the concerto, it seems that Gershwin turned to his store of tune ideas left over from previous projects. This was a typical way for popular song writers to work. As Gershwin was developing songs for the musical theater stage, he would write dozens of melodies, although only some would end up in the final compositions. He never discarded a melody, however. Instead, he set it aside for future inspiration. This approach would have helped him to put together his concerto relatively quickly, since he wasn’t starting from scratch: He already had the five themes that were to constitute the new work. 

The Themes

For the sake of facilitating discussion of the music, analysts have named Gershwin’s five themes, and they are known today as the “ritornello,” “train,” “stride,” “shuffle,” and “love” themes. A ritornello, as you might recall from Chapter 4, is a theme that returns frequently throughout a work. The other themes are named after associations: the train theme has the propulsive rhythms of a train, the stride theme has the characteristics of stride-style piano playing (a descendent of ragtime piano playing), the shuffle theme would have been suitable for the contemporary dance of that name, and the love theme is slow and romantic. 

All five themes are in major, but feature the added scale degrees—a flat third and seventh and a raised fourth—that are often heard in jazz. (This set of pitches is referred to as the blues scale.) The themes also contain syncopated rhythms, unexpected accents, and surprising shifts between duple and triple subdivisions. All of this, combined with the orchestration of the accompaniment, brings the sound of “jazz” to the concerto. What draws Rhapsody into the “classical” world is its length, internal variation, and formal complexity, for Gershwin used these themes to craft a 16-minute work that explores a variety of emotional states. 

Although it is performed without any pauses, Rhapsody in Blue is in four distinct parts. The opening section features the ritornello theme. A second section brings in the train, stride, and shuffle themes. A third, slow section focuses on the love theme, and an exciting finale revisits the stride and love themes before concluding with the ritornello theme. 

Reception

Following its premier, many critics accused Rhapsody in Blue of not having form. What they meant, however, was that it didn’t meet their expectations for concert music. Writing in 1955, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein suggested that Rhapsody was not a real composition because it lacked the sense of inevitability that is communicated by Beethoven’s music. While a work like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 seems to move inexorably forward from beginning to end, Bernstein argued, the sections of Rhapsody could be reordered, rearranged, or even eliminated without damaging the overall work. Indeed, Rhapsody has been published, performed, and recorded in many different versions of various lengths, while Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is a fixed work for a specific cast of players. Gershwin, however, was coming from a different musical world, and his values were not those of Beethoven (although he certainly knew much about the classical tradition). 

Despite some pushback from critics, Whiteman’s Experiment in Modern Music was a hit. After repeating the concert in various upscale New York venues, Whiteman took it on a national tour. (Pomp and Circumstance, which reviewers found anticlimactic and gratuitous, was eliminated from the program.) The recording of Rhapsody in Blue sold millions of copies, and the work soon became a concert standard for piano soloists. In 1980, United Airlines negotiated for the use of Rhapsody in advertisements, and in 1999 the work was featured in the Disney film Fantasia 2000. Although Rhapsody’s enormous popular success caused early critics to be suspicious of its status as art, it is recognized today as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. However, we should not forget the disturbing racism of the concert project that brought this piece into existence.