Rhapsody in Blue George Gershwin

1Identity & Context

The commission that never existed, and the five weeks that followed.

• Full titleRhapsody in Blue, for piano and jazz band
• ComposerGeorge Gershwin (1898–1937)
• OrchestratorFerde Grofé (1892–1972) — three versions: 1924 jazz band, 1926 theatre orchestra, 1942 symphony orchestra
• ComposedEarly January – 25 January 1924 (two-piano score); orchestration completed 4 February 1924
• Premiere12 February 1924, Aeolian Hall, New York — Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra, composer at the piano
• Nominal keyB♭ major
• Duration≈ 16 minutes uncut; historic recordings run 9, modern improvised readings up to 25

The commission that wasn't

The origin story is almost too good. On 3 January 1924, Ira Gershwin read aloud from the New York Tribune a notice announcing that George Gershwin was "at work on a jazz concerto" for a forthcoming Paul Whiteman concert. Gershwin was not at work on anything of the sort. He and Whiteman had talked vaguely about it; Whiteman, needing publicity and a rival to the Vincent Lopez band, had simply announced it into existence. Gershwin had five weeks, a Broadway show (Sweet Little Devil) in tryouts, and no experience of extended form.

The conception arrived, by his own account, on the train to Boston for that show's opening — "with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang." That word kaleidoscope in his description is the piece's programme note and its formal defence in one. Not symphony, not sonata. A kaleidoscope is a device for producing beautiful arrangements without development.

The title

Gershwin's working title was American Rhapsody. Ira, fresh from a gallery of Whistler — Nocturne in Blue and Green, Harmony in Grey and Green — proposed Rhapsody in Blue. It is the best title in American music: it names a colour, a mood, a harmonic practice (the blue note), and a nationality, in three words.

The occasion

Whiteman billed the afternoon of 12 February 1924 as "An Experiment in Modern Music" — an explicit, slightly pompous argument that jazz had risen from humble origins to respectability. Twenty-three items. Gershwin's rhapsody came second-to-last, after roughly two hours of novelty numbers and comic contrasts; the ventilation had failed and the hall was stuffy and restless. In the audience: Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Stokowski, Kreisler, Heifetz, Godowsky, Sousa, Walter Damrosch, and most of the critical establishment of New York.

Where it sits in Gershwin's output

It is the hinge. Before it: songs, revues, Lady, Be Good! pending. After it: the Concerto in F (1925, which he orchestrated himself, deliberately, to answer the charge that he could not), An American in Paris (1928), the Second Rhapsody (1931), the Cuban Overture (1932), Porgy and Bess (1935). Everything on that list exists because of the afternoon of 12 February 1924. The Rhapsody also made him rich — roughly $250,000 in its first decade, when that was a fortune.

2Formal Structure

Rhapsody is the honest generic label: a chain of thematic blocks, separated and rejoined by solo-piano cadenzas, held together by one recurring refrain.

The five themes

Following David Schiff's useful nomenclature, the piece runs on five distinct thematic ideas — none derived from any other.

Where the themes actually fall

The four blocks

Macro-architecture

The Ritornello is the only structural glue. Remove it and the piece falls into unrelated tunes. Its returns are what make this a composition and not a medley — Gershwin understood, instinctively, that a refrain does the work that development would otherwise have to do.

The proportions are back-loaded and lopsided. The Love theme, the most memorable material, does not arrive until roughly 55% of the way through, and then dominates the remaining 45%. Classical proportion would place a slow movement centrally and give it equal weight; Gershwin instead uses a long, discursive, entertaining first half as delay. It is the structure of a great vaudeville bill, where the headliner comes on late.

3Melodic & Thematic Content

Five themes, no derivation between them — and a kind of unity that nobody in 1924 had a name for.

The opening: what Gershwin wrote vs. what you hear

The most famous seventeen notes in American music were not composed. Gershwin wrote a rising scale — seventeen notes ascending two and a half octaves. In rehearsal, Whiteman's reed player Ross Gorman smeared it into a glissando, partly as a joke. Gershwin heard it, laughed, and told him to keep it, "with as much of a wail as possible."

As notated: seventeen discrete notes climbing two and a half octaves. Correct, competent, and completely forgettable — a curtain-raiser flourish of the kind a hundred other pieces open with.

The themes themselves

The Ritornello. After the trill and the swoop, the theme proper is a compact cell: a rising gesture that reaches up, bends the third and seventh flatward, and sags back. Its rhythmic profile is the essential thing — an unhurried, speech-like drag against the beat, the notated equivalent of a blues singer arriving late to the bar line. Nothing in European concert music sounds like it, because its ancestry is vocal and improvised.

The Train. Reduced almost to nothing melodically — a dotted figure obsessively repeated at a fixed pitch level. Gershwin uses it as texture, not tune. It is the closest the piece comes to Stravinskian ostinato thinking, and it supplies the first block's forward pressure.

Stride and Shuffle. Both are Broadway/Harlem vernacular through and through. Stride borrows the left-hand oom-pah of James P. Johnson and Luckey Roberts, whose playing Gershwin had absorbed uptown; Shuffle is essentially a dance chorus — a thirty-two-bar song idea that never quite becomes a song.

The Love theme. Its genius is its simplicity: a slow descending line, mostly stepwise, with a long-held note at the top of each phrase and an appoggiatura that leans and resolves. Everything about it is the opposite of the Ritornello — diatonic where that was blue, symmetrical where that was speech-rhythmic, string-borne where that was reed-borne. It is the contrast, not the tune itself, that lands. Played out of context it can sound sentimental; arriving after eight minutes of metropolitan clatter, it sounds like the lights of the city seen from across the water.

Andantino (≈9:00): strings, mid-register, narrow dynamic band, the phrase allowed to sag inward at each appoggiatura. Confiding rather than declamatory — you lean toward it.

4Harmony & Tonality

The blue note is not decoration in this piece. It is load-bearing — and it is what makes the impossible modulation possible.

The blue note as structure

The flattened third and seventh here are not ornaments dropped onto major-key tunes. Gershwin's habitual sonority is a dominant seventh or ninth used as a stable chord — a colour to sit on rather than a tension to resolve. That is the single most consequential harmonic import from blues into concert music in the 1920s: once a dominant seventh no longer needs to resolve, functional harmony becomes optional, and you can go anywhere.

The tritone at the heart of the piece

The home key is B♭ major. The Love theme is in E major — the maximally remote key, a tritone away. In a Classical work this would be a crisis requiring elaborate preparation. Here it is barely an event, and this is the piece's cleverest structural stroke, whether Gershwin arrived at it by theory or by ear.

Other devices

Dissonance treatment

Almost none of the dissonance in this piece is treated as dissonance. Ninths, elevenths and thirteenths appear as decoration on stable harmonies. Harmonically the Rhapsody is far less adventurous than Le Sacre (eleven years earlier) or Schoenberg's Op. 11 (fifteen years earlier) — and completely uninterested in being. Its radicalism is sociological, not syntactic.

5Rhythm, Meter & Tempo

A near-constant 4/4 — and that stability is the point. It is the fixed grid against which everything else is displaced.

• Ragtime and Charleston syncopation — accents on the second half of beats 2 and 4, the American rhythmic signature of the decade.
• The Scotch snap and its reverse, giving the Ritornello its speech-like limp.
• Ostinato in the Train material — mechanical repetition as a structural device rather than an accompaniment.
• Rubato as a compositional instruction, not a liberty. The score is peppered with tempo markings that assume elasticity, and the piano cadenzas are notated approximations of improvisation.

Tempo relationships between blocks are rhetorical rather than proportional: each new section announces itself with a new speed, and the transitions are usually made by a solo-piano passage that has no fixed tempo at all. This is the rhapsody principle — tempo as punctuation.

6Orchestration, Texture & Timbre

Three orchestrations, one piece — and the version almost everyone knows is the one that suits it least.

Grofé's original score was written for specific players by name. Ross Gorman alone covered clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano, alto and baritone saxophone, oboe and heckelphone. That is why the 1924 version has such an odd, mercurial wind colour: it is one virtuoso changing costume, not a section.

Texture: not a concerto

Predominantly homophonic with a soloist — but the relationship between piano and ensemble is unusual. There is no contest here, no dialogue of equals, no double exposition. The piano is more like a compère: it introduces, comments, links, vamps, and occasionally takes over completely. Long stretches of the score are unaccompanied solo piano with the band sitting silent. The texture of this piece is the texture of a nightclub set.

7Emotional Arc & Dramaturgy

No story, but unmistakably a place — and one very sophisticated decision in the final minute.

• 0:00The city by day — noise, comedy, machinery, crowds. Extroverted, unsentimental, funny.
• 5:20Restlessness — material fragments, harmony darkens, nothing settles. The least entertaining stretch, and the one that earns what follows.
• 9:00The city at night — the Andantino. Interiority arrives for the first and only time.
• 11:30Accumulation — daytime material returns, faster and harder.
• 14:30Grandioso peak — the Love theme at full weight, piano and full ensemble.
• 15:30The slam B♭ — Ritornello in stretto, and a hard close. No coda, no reflection.

8Historical Significance & Influence

What was radical was not the harmony or the form. It was the claim.

The claim was that the vernacular idiom of American dance bands could sustain a seventeen-minute concert work and be taken seriously by the audience that took Rachmaninoff seriously. It won that argument in one afternoon, and the argument has stayed won.

Reception

Gilman's review is worth keeping in view because it is not stupid. He was measuring the piece against a standard it was not attempting to meet. That mismatch — great music judged by the wrong yardstick — has characterised the criticism of American vernacular art for a century.

The appropriation question

It must be addressed, and honestly. The Rhapsody's idiom is African American: the blue notes, the syncopation, the stride bass, the whole harmonic universe of the dominant seventh as a resting place. It was premiered by a white bandleader billed as the "King of Jazz," at a concert whose implicit thesis was that jazz needed elevating, before an audience that would not have travelled uptown to hear the musicians who invented the language. Duke Ellington was later pointed about what he regarded as white composers' second-hand versions of Black music.

The fair account, I think, is this: Gershwin was not a tourist. He went to Harlem, learned from James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts and Will Vodery, credited them, and wrote music a mediocre imitator could not have written. But he was also the beneficiary of a structural injustice — that his version of the idiom could fill Aeolian Hall while its originators could not. Both facts are true, and the piece is not diminished by holding them together.

Influence

A direct line runs to Copland's jazz-inflected 1920s works, to Bernstein (whose entire career is unimaginable without this precedent), to the symphonic language of Hollywood, and to every subsequent attempt at a "third stream." Culturally it became shorthand for America itself: the opening of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), United Airlines' campaign from 1987, and eighty-four pianists playing it at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Very few concert works have become a national logo.

9Performance Practice & Notable Recordings

Five questions every performance has to answer — starting with which piece it is playing.

1. Which version? 1924 jazz band, 1942 symphonic, or Gershwin's own solo-piano arrangement. The single largest interpretive decision.
2. Improvise or not? The premiere was partly improvised. Almost all classical pianists now play a fixed text. Jazz pianists who restore improvisation reveal how much the notated version is a transcription of a habit.
3. Cuts. The 1924 and 1927 recordings are savagely abridged to fit 78rpm sides; many mid-century performances retained traditional cuts in Block II. Uncut is now standard, and correct.
4. The glissando. Duration, dynamic, and vulgarity. There is no right answer; there is only conviction.
5. Rubato in the piano solos. These are notated improvisations and must sound improvised.

How long is this piece, actually?

Duration on record varies by a factor of nearly three — not because of tempo, but because performers disagree about what the text is. Filter by tradition:

Durations approximate and rounded. Note that the two shortest and the longest performances are all defensible readings of the same score — the short ones because 78rpm sides forced cuts, the long one because the score's blank spaces were originally meant to be filled by the player.

Landmark recordings

10Listening Guide

Timings approximate, based on an uncut performance of ≈16½ minutes. Filter by block.

• 0:00Clarinet trill, then the glissando I — two and a half octaves up to B♭. Notice that the arrival is timed, not measured.
• 0:15Ritornello theme I — flattened third and seventh; a rhythm that drags behind the beat.
• 0:40The band answers I — muted brass, banjo, saxophones. Tart and nasal in the 1924 scoring; plush in 1942.
• 1:00Train theme I — the dotted, mechanical figure. Ostinato, not melody.
• 1:30Piano's first entrance I — as interruption. Note that it does not arrive with a theme of its own.
• 2:20Stride theme I — left-hand oom-pah, Harlem via Broadway.
• 4:00Shuffle theme I — lazy, syncopated, the dance-floor tune.
• 5:20Orchestral tutti II — the most episodic stretch begins.
• 7:00Ritornello returns II — the glue doing its work. Ask yourself what would hold the piece together without it.
• 8:00Agitato e misterioso II — harmony darkens, whole-tone colour, harmonic rhythm slows. The modulation is being prepared.
• 9:00THE ANDANTINO — Love theme, E major, strings III tritone — a tritone from home, and it sounds like arrival.
• 10:30Piano takes the Love theme alone III — freer, more intimate; the one moment of genuine solitude in the piece.
• 11:30Molto agitato IV — acceleration begins; earlier material returns compressed.
• 13:00Stride and Shuffle stack up IV — momentum becomes irreversible.
• 14:30CLIMAX — Love theme Grandioso IV peak — piano and full ensemble at maximum weight.
• 15:30Ritornello in stretto IV — the refrain one last time, compressed.
• 16:10Hard B♭ close IV — no decompression, no coda. Lights up.

Three passes

First listen: just follow the two poles — the clarinet at 0:00 and the strings at 9:00. Everything else is the journey between them.

Second listen: track the Ritornello's returns. Ask whether the piece would survive without them. It would not — and that is the answer to the charge that it has no form.

Third listen: hear the 1924 jazz-band version, and notice how much of what you took for sentiment was actually upholstery.

11Must-Listen

If you have fifteen minutes with this piece, spend them here.