The sexy clarinet glissando that opens Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue introduced a new sound into American symphonic music. The Rhapsody, which turns 100 this year, is now so beloved and symphonic jazz now so commonplace that we forget how controversial and novel the piece was at the time. Gershwin managed to bring down the wrath of two kinds of purists—the disciples of The True Jazz, who criticized Gershwin for trying to codify an improvisatory form, and conservative music critics who, as Edward Jablonski puts it, excoriated him for introducing “all that bawdy-house music into the sacred precincts of Carnegie Hall.”
Audiences, who are often way ahead of the critics, loved the Rhapsody from the beginning, and Gershwin made handsome money from the piece, especially when the residuals began to roll in. At various points in his career, Gershwin enjoyed the admiration of European composers, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ravel. (When Gershwin asked Ravel for composition lessons, Ravel drolly replied, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?”)
Gershwin didn’t know he was writing Rhapsody in Blue until he read about it in the paper. The New York Tribune proclaimed that Gershwin was composing a jazz concerto for an “Experiment in Modern Music” organized by the popular Paul Whiteman dance band. Although he had not agreed to anything of the kind (though he vaguely recalled speaking with Whiteman about a concerto), Gershwin decided to compose the work anyway, despite having basically a month to write it. He banged the piece out on an upright piano in his upper west side apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where he lived with his parents, brothers, and sister. We thus have Paul Whiteman—sneaky but smart—to thank for a game-changing masterpiece.
“I tried to express our manner of living,” Gershwin said of the Rhapsody, “the tempo of our modern life with its speed and chaos and vitality.” Europeans who were drawn to jazz made similar statements, seeing jazz as a marker of modern living. When he wrote his jazz opera Jonny spielt auf in 1925, the year after Gershwin’s Rhapsody, Ernst Krenek proclaimed jazz to be not just the music of Black America but “the note of the times.” Kurt Weill went further, stating that “the rhythm of our time is jazz, the Americanization of the entire way we live.”
The first performance of the Rhapsody, in February 1924, rocketed Gershwin to international fame. Rachmaninoff, Stokowski, Ernest Bloch, and Fritz Kreisler were in the audience, which gave the Rhapsody a loud ovation. Gershwin had not had time to put the piano part on paper, so he played it from memory, improvising parts on the spot. He went on to perform it at Carnegie Hall and in five other cities. Following the success of the Rhapsody, Gershwin wrote more symphonic jazz pieces, such as the Concerto in F and An American in Paris while continuing to turn out Broadway shows, Hollywood movies, and songs, often in collaboration with his brother Ira, his career culminating in the revolutionary opera Porgy and Bess before his tragic death of a brain tumor at age 38.
Unlike Gershwin’s Concerto in F, which largely follows classical structures, Rhapsody in Blue is not a proper concerto, but as Gershwin put it, “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” The opening piano cadenza, a “kaleidoscope” in itself, announces the main tune and other motifs, rising to a crescendo before the orchestra charges in with the main melody. Another exuberant theme follows with piano and orchestra combined, and a second piano cadenza leads to the famous, wistful slow melody, first sung by strings, rising and falling back on itself with melancholy ecstasy before it is taken over by the pianist, who then speeds into a brilliant toccata-like section. A frenetic fragmentation of the slow theme builds to a swaggering coda, grandly restating the opening theme before sweeping breathlessly upward.
—Jack Sullivan
Falling between Beethoven’s “Eroica” and Fifth symphonies, the airy Fourth might be expected to languish in their monumental shadows. Yet the very modesty of the Fourth, its freedom from strife and its focus on refinement of form, has made it a favorite among connoisseurs. Schumann compared the Fourth to a “slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants.” Alexander Wheelock Thayer, one of Beethoven’s biographers, called it “the most perfect in form of them all.” Musicologist Sir George Grove compared its movements to “the limbs and features of a lovely statue; and, full of fire and invention as they are, all is subordinated to conciseness, grace, and beauty.”
The joy that suffuses this symphony is often attributed to the circumstances of its composition. Beethoven wrote the Fourth in 1806 during a happy spring and summer spent as a houseguest in the castle of Count Franz von Oppersdorff, to whom it is dedicated. Beethoven premiered it in 1807 at a private concert in Vienna alongside the first performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto. According to Grove and critic Romain Rolland, this work—often dubbed a “symphony of love”—is secretly addressed to Countess Therese von Brunsvik, who was the subject of Beethoven’s affections. Although Maynard Solomon debunked this story in his 1977 biography of the composer, it is clear that the Fourth Symphony—especially since it was composed during the same period as the Violin Concerto, Fourth Piano Concerto, and “Razumovsky” string quartets—comes from an unusually serene period for a composer whose specialty was conflict and angst.
In this context, the mysterious Adagio that opens the Fourth, with its gloomy minor chord and portentous plucking, turns out to be a musical joke in which a surprise crescendo leads to an Allegro vivace of uninhibited high spirits. As Berlioz—one of the most passionate admirers of the symphony—has pointed out, the second part of the Allegro vivace is even more “astounding” than the first, offering another crescendo that is “one of the most skillfully conceived effects we know of in all music.” Yet the sternness of the opening never quite leaves our heads, and the constant rhythmic tension reminds us that the Fourth is from the same period as the Fifth.
Of the slow movement, which critic Richard Gilman believed is “unmatched in Beethoven’s scores,” Berlioz writes that it “eludes analysis. Its form is so pure and the expression of its melody so angelic and of such irresistible tenderness that the prodigious art by which this perfection is attained disappears completely. From the very first bars we are overtaken by an emotion which, toward the close, becomes overpowering in its intensity … Only among the giants of poetry can we find anything to compare with this sublime page of the giant of music.” Again, however, we get emotional complexity and counterpoint. Schumann, for example, cited the obstinate bass and timpani accompaniment in this otherwise lyrical movement as providing Falstaffian humor.
Regarding the sprightly cross-rhythms in the third movement, Berlioz commented that they make the melodic outlines “sharper and more surprising.” Berlioz was especially fond of the trio, with its “delicious freshness.” So was Beethoven himself, for as in the scherzo of the Seventh Symphony, he asks for it to be played twice.
The moto perpetuo final movement is a final burst of exuberance—in Berlioz’s words, “one animated swarm of sparkling notes” interrupted by “the angry introspections which we have already had occasion to mention as peculiar to this composer”—a final reminder that Beethoven’s music is rarely free of emotional contrasts.
—Jack Sullivan
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist, composer, and improviser. He is well known across the globe through an extensive recording catalog spanning nearly 50 years and more than 100 albums. His 1975 album The Köln Concert remains the best-selling solo piano record of all time.
Book of Ways was recorded for ECM on July 14, 1986, in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Jarrett reflected on the process:
“We had three clavichords in the studio, two of which were angled together so that I could play them both simultaneously, and the third off to the side. Also we miked the instruments very closely so that the full range of dynamics could be used (clavichords are very quiet and cannot be heard more than a few feet away). […] No material was organized beforehand. Everything was spontaneous. The recording was done in four hours.”
The result is an impressive series of 19 separate improvisations totaling 100 minutes. Jarrett takes the clavichords through a vast range of styles, ranging from Neo-Baroque to avant-garde. He creates totally unique resonances and techniques within complex polyphonic musical structures, many of which have symphonic qualities, which is what sparked my interest as an arranger.
Three of these improvisations are presented here in a concerto grosso setting, with the harpsichord playing a continuo-like role in the outer movements, and primary soloist in the middle movement.
—Michael P. Atkinson
In my rhapsody, I set out not to create a pastiche of Gershwin’s New York, but rather to take the context of his rhapsodic project as impetus to reckon with the here and now, availing myself of the embarrassment of riches in working with The Knights and Aaron Diehl, collaborators as fearless and generous as one could dream up.
Through these priorities and more, my piece came to life as a proper, old-school rhapsody, an extension of a through-line from Liszt through Bartók and Gershwin to the Beatles, Queen, and Radiohead: a single-movement work, tuneful and vernacular, moving more by the hot thrill of impulse than the cool logic of austere design.
Across the escalation of themes and grooves, the piano and orchestra examine what it means to make acoustic music—vibrations, bodies, resonance in a space together—in the digital age, with the internet dissolving time- and place-based locality, the history of the world’s music in our pockets, and the rise of social media / short-form “content” evoking a pendulum swing back to the variety show of the vaudeville/silent era. And in loving rebuke to Gershwin, who spoke of freeing the rhapsody from “cling[ing] to dance rhythms,” encouraging piano and orchestra to embrace the ecstatic flow state that only arises through the deep embrace of rhythmic pocket and dance.
The title Being and Becoming refers not only to the kaleidoscopic form of the rhapsody, but more broadly to the inescapable interplay between presence and transience. In a sense, each of us is a collective—a partnership of particles and spirit, held together in that dynamic combination of consistency and change that we call the self, experiencing an impulsive, episodic assortment of infinite present moments, until we eventually dissipate and return to the source.
We know little. But we do know that we are here, together, now. Being, and becoming.
This piece is dedicated to Aaron Diehl for his artistry and grace; Faina and Aaron Kofman for dooming me to a life in music; my parents, the original “B&B” for everything I am; and Allie, Ronan, and Elliott for everything I have and will become.
—Michael Schachter