Rhapsody in Blue is a 1924 musical composition written by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band. It premiered at Aeolian Hall NYC on 12 February 1924, 100 years and one day ago today, and for that reason its your Phantom Dancer feature this week. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the famous opening clarinet glissando has become as instantly recognizable to concert audiences as the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

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RHAPSODY

Following the success of an experimental classical-jazz concert held with Canadian singer Éva Gauthier in New York City on November 1, 1923, bandleader Paul Whiteman decided to attempt a more ambitious feat.

He asked composer George Gershwin to write a concerto-like piece for an all-jazz concert in honour of Lincoln’s Birthday to be given at Aeolian Hall.

Whiteman became fixated upon performing such an extended composition by Gershwin after he collaborated with him in The Scandals of 1922.

He had been especially impressed by Gershwin’s one-act “jazz opera” Blue Monday.

Gershwin initially declined Whiteman’s request on the grounds that he would have insufficient time to compose the work and there would likely be a need to revise the score.

Soon after, on the evening of January 3, George Gershwin and lyricist Buddy DeSylva played a game of billiards at the Ambassador Billiard Parlor at Broadway and 52nd Street in Manhattan.

George’s brother, Ira Gershwin, interrupted their billiard game to read aloud the January 4 edition of the New-York Tribune. An unsigned Tribune article entitled “What Is American Music?” about an upcoming Whiteman concert had caught Ira’s attention. The article falsely declared that George Gershwin had begun “work on a jazz concerto” for Whiteman’s concert.

The news announcement puzzled Gershwin as he had politely declined to compose any such work for Whiteman. In a telephone conversation with Whiteman the next morning, Whiteman informed Gershwin that Whiteman’s arch rival Vincent Lopez planned to steal the idea of his experimental concert and there was no time to lose. Whiteman thus finally persuaded Gershwin to compose the piece.

IN

With only five weeks until the premiere, Gershwin hurriedly set about composing. He later claimed that, while on a train journey to Boston, the thematic seeds for Rhapsody in Blue began to germinate in his mind.He told 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 began composing on January 7 as dated on the original manuscript for two pianos. He entitled the piece as American Rhapsody during its composition.

Ira Gershwin suggested the revised title of Rhapsody in Blue after his visit to a gallery exhibition of James McNeill Whistler paintings, which had titles such as Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and Arrangement in Grey and Black.

BLUE

After a few weeks, Gershwin finished his composition and passed the score, titled A Rhapsody in Blue, to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s arranger. Grofé finished orchestrating the piece on February 4, eight days before the premiere.

Rhapsody in Blue premiered during a snowy Tuesday afternoon on February 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall, Manhattan.

Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” the much-anticipated concert held by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra drew a packed audience.

The excited audience consisted 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.”

Many influential figures of the era were present, including Carl Van Vechten, Marguerite d’Alvarez, Victor Herbert, Walter Damrosch, Igor Stravinsky, Fritz Kreisler, Leopold Stokowski, John Philip Sousa, and Willie “the Lion” Smith.

In a pre-concert lecture, Whiteman’s manager Hugh C. Ernst proclaimed the purpose of the concert to be “purely educational”.

Whiteman had selected the music to exemplify the “melodies, harmony and rhythms which agitate the throbbing emotional resources of this young restless age.”

The concert’s lengthy program listed 26 separate musical movements, divided into 2 parts and 11 sections, bearing titles such as “True Form Of Jazz” and “Contrast—Legitimate Scoring vs. Jazzing.”

The program’s schedule featured Gershwin’s rhapsody as merely the penultimate piece which preceded Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.

Many of the early numbers in the program underwhelmed the audience, and the ventilation system in the concert hall malfunctioned.

Some audience members had departed the venue by the time Gershwin made his inconspicuous entrance for the rhapsody. The audience purportedly were irritable, impatient, and restless until the haunting clarinet glissando played the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue. The distinctive glissando had been created quite by happenstance during rehearsals:

“As a joke on Gershwin…. [Ross] Gorman [Whiteman’s virtuoso clarinetist] played the opening measure with a noticeable glissando, ‘stretching’ the notes out and adding what he considered a jazzy, humorous touch to the passage. Reacting favorably to Gorman’s whimsy, Gershwin asked him to perform the opening measure that way…. and to add as much of a ‘wail’ as possible.”

Whiteman’s orchestra performed the rhapsody with “twenty-three musicians in the ensemble” and George Gershwin on piano.

In characteristic style, Gershwin chose to partially improvise his piano solo.

The orchestra anxiously waited for Gershwin’s nod which signaled the end of his piano solo and the cue for the ensemble to resume playing.As Gershwin did not write the solo piano section until after the concert, it remains unknown exactly how the original rhapsody sounded at the premiere on 12 February 1924

13 February PLAY LIST