George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was introduced on Feb. 12, 1924 by Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, with the composer at the piano, in “An Experiment in Modern Music” at Aeolian Hall in New York. The piece is, by most any measure, the most popular classical composition produced by an American in the past 100 years – or most popular ever, if we (unjustly) disqualify John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as classical.
Whether the rhapsody is a classical work comparable with Richard Strauss’ Burleske or Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Africa,” to cite two other non-concertos for piano and orchestra, is a complicated issue.
The tunes and structure of “Rhapsody in Blue” are Gershwin’s; for the 1924 performance, Ferde Grofé orchestrated the piece for Whiteman’s band, a “jazz orchestra” of the kind heard in dance halls and ballrooms in the 1920s and ’30s. Grofé’s more familiar symphonic orchestration of the rhapsody dates from 1942, five years after Gershwin died. The original jazz-orchestra version was not widely heard until the mid-1970s.
Nowadays, pianists playing the original version often add improvisations (cadenzas, in classical parlance). The most stylistically informed interpreters – such as Aaron Diehl in his September 2020 performance with the Richmond Symphony – improvise in the manner of James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith and other post-ragtime/ pre-swing “stride” pianists of the 1920s, whose playing greatly influenced Gershwin.
Those added touches are not fanciful musical historicism. You can hear Gershwin doing the same thing in his solo piano roll of the rhapsody, recorded in 1925-27:
Compare that with André Previn’s 1971 recording of the symphonic version:
And compare that with Kirill Gerstein’s 2017 recording of the jazz-orchestra version:
So, in assessing “Rhapsody in Blue,” the first issue to address is, which rhapsody are we talking about?
Only then should we get into the more present-tense issue of “cultural appropriation” of a Black musical style, jazz, by a White musician, or the relevant but more nerdy question of whether classically trained musicians can handle the rhythmic language of Black and Afro-Latin music.
The composer and pianist Ethan Iverson, in an essay for The New York Times, faults Gershwin’s rhapsody, writes that it has “clogged the arteries . . . . The promise of a true [jazz-classical] fusion on the concert stage basically starts and ends with it. A hundred 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.”
The Times columnist John McWhorter rebuts Iverson, writing that “[t]o Gershwin, the rhapsody was precisely what it needed to be. He specifically sought to avoid straitjacketing it with the unchanging peppiness of a dance beat as if that was all jazz was or could be. He revealed his purpose in a subsequent letter: ‘Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow.’ So while the rhapsody certainly has its foot-tapping sections, it also sails, rests, jolts and soars.”
McWhorter acknowledges that “the rhapsody was, by our modern standards, cultural appropriation. Although he did it with sincere artistic intent, Gershwin adopted Black musical forms and as a result gained the fame and fortune that racism at the time made impossible for actual Black American composers.”
Iverson rates “Rhapsody in Blue” as “a flawed classic that exemplifies our nation’s unsettled relationship with the originators of African American music and technique.” It is that. It’s also a musical snapshot in time, an elaborated echo of the “hot jazz” style of the 1920s, and its original version(s) can be heard today as a tribute to, rather than a ripoff of, that style.
Is it a work of cultural appropriation? Undoubtedly – but Gershwin is one of many, many offenders. An eternal truth of music: Everyone steals from everyone else, and always has.
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