Rhapsody in Blue

Ross Gorman’s clarinet rises from a low trill to a high B♭ in one continuous glissando. Gershwin had written a scale. Gorman turned it into a glissando during rehearsal, and Gershwin kept it.

On 12 February 1924 Gershwin played the piano in New York’s Aeolian Hall while Whiteman’s band gave the première of his new Rhapsody. The concert was called “An Experiment in Modern Music”. They made this record four months later, on 10 June 1924.

The faster section combines repeated train-like rhythms with stride piano, in which the left hand jumps between bass notes and chords. To fit the music onto two sides, the record omits the “Shuffle” tune and the third cadenza. After the piano’s stride solo it moves almost directly to the slow melody.

Ferde Grofé turned Gershwin’s two-piano draft into parts for Whiteman’s players, taking pages as Gershwin finished them. He knew their instruments and their individual strengths. The clarinet and trumpet solos were written for a band whose players also made dance records.

The slow section opens with a long melody in E major, which the band sustains across whole phrases. The piano later takes the melody over before the closing return of earlier themes.

Victor advertised the two-sided Rhapsody for $1.50 in the Chicago Tribune on 5 September 1924. The record lasts about nine minutes. Roughly a third of the score was cut to fit the two sides.

A low trill on the clarinet grows louder and leads into a long glissando up to concert B♭. The tune that follows mixes major and minor thirds. Piano cadenzas interrupt the band, extend the phrases and move them in new directions.

In Gershwin’s own writing the opening was a rising scale. At a rehearsal Whiteman’s clarinettist, Ross Gorman, played it as the glissando that now opens the piece, to Gershwin’s delight.

On 4 January 1924 a short item in the New York Tribune announced that George Gershwin was writing a “jazz concerto” for Paul Whiteman’s concert on 12 February. Whiteman had asked him months before, and Gershwin had forgotten. According to legend, his brother Ira showed him the item over a game of pool.

On 10 July 2018 the Marine Band marked its 220th anniversary with a concert at the Music Center at Strathmore. Bramwell Tovey was the evening’s guest conductor, composer and piano soloist, and he played the piano part in the Rhapsody.

The faster music begins at rehearsal 9 with the train theme, a short, repeated figure. Stride piano enters at rehearsal 12, with the left hand moving between bass notes and chords. The band and the solo piano then alternate in playing these themes.

The morning after the première, Lawrence Gilman wrote in the Tribune of “how trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are”. He also praised “the rich inventiveness of the rhythms, the saliency and vividness of the orchestral color”.

This performance uses Grofé’s 1924 jazz-band version. He chose its reeds, brass, banjo and violins for Whiteman’s particular players. The familiar symphonic orchestration, for a larger orchestra, followed in 1942.

Gershwin wrote the Rhapsody as a two-piano score, with one piano for the soloist and the other standing for the band. Ferde Grofé took the pages away as they were finished and wrote out parts for each of Whiteman’s players.

Gershwin wrote several cadenzas into the Rhapsody, passages in which the solo piano sets the tempo and the length of the pauses between phrases. Between them the themes return, in new keys or played by the band.

Thirty-one years after the première, Leonard Bernstein wrote that “the themes are terrific, inspired, God-given”. He also called the Rhapsody “a string of separate paragraphs stuck together” and said parts of it could be cut without affecting the whole.

After the piano’s solo passage, the band plays the broad melody in E major in long phrases. Later the piano takes the tune alone in a more decorated version. Earlier themes return in the final section.

Bramwell Tovey began in Salvation Army bands and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He played jazz and classical piano and the tuba. He led the Vancouver Symphony for eighteen years from 2000, became principal conductor of the BBC Concert Orchestra in January 2018, and died in 2022.

Gershwin’s own 1924 record lasts about nine minutes. Roughly a third of the score was cut to fit one two-sided disc, including the “Shuffle” tune, the third cadenza and most of the grand cadenza.

In 1927, three years after the first record, Victor brought Gershwin and Whiteman together again to record the work electrically, using Grofé’s slightly larger scoring. Gershwin was unhappy with some of Whiteman’s conducting, and Nathaniel Shilkret conducted. Side one needed nine takes, side two six.

The opening theme returns in the closing pages, at rehearsal 40, and the work ends in B♭ major. Piano and band exchange shorter phrases in the final flourish.