The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Gershwin · for solo piano and jazz band, in Ferde Grofé’s 1924 scoring for Paul Whiteman’s band · one movement, scored as one work · about sixteen to seventeen minutes uncut · first performed at Aeolian Hall, New York, on 12 February 1924, with the composer at the piano
Mode
A rhapsody for piano and jazz band: a free sequence of episodes and cadenzas in the idiom of the blues, ragtime and stride piano, and the popular ballad
Mythos
The modern American city as a mixture moving at speed; the young man’s longing, held back and then given as an anthem: an arrival in the promised place, used as the rhetoric of climax
Phase
A clarinet’s trill and rise; band statements and piano cadenza in B flat; a chain of episodes joined by sequence and cadenza; the Andantino moderato; the Agitato; the Grandioso return and close in B flat
Presentation
Concert music; one movement for solo piano and a dance band of about two dozen, reeds doubling heavily, with banjo and muted brass; composed in short score for two pianos and scored by Grofé
Register
From vaudeville wit and the speed of the city to the transport of the popular ballad; blue notes, added sixths and parallel chords; no word sung or printed
Scale
One soloist, one band, the city in one idiom; about sixteen to seventeen minutes uncut, fourteen to sixteen as usually cut
Governing Proposition
A Broadway songwriter of twenty-five, with no orchestral work behind him, makes a single movement of sixteen minutes for piano and dance band from the blues, stride piano and the Tin Pan Alley ballad, and shows that the vernacular speech of the American city can carry the public, concerted statement once reserved for the European concerto: one episode after another, the soloist stepping forward between them, until a tune of private longing returns as a public anthem.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins with a single clarinet: a low trill, and then a long run that climbs the instrument and bends at the top into a smear. It is a laugh turned into a call, and it is one of the great entrances in twentieth-century music. By the account of Ross Gorman, the clarinettist of Whiteman’s band, the smear began in rehearsal as a joke and was kept. The band takes up the opening theme in B flat, and a second, jaunty theme on repeated notes follows; then the piano enters, alone, and steps forward in a cadenza. Everything that follows answers that first gesture, and the work will end by returning to its theme.
Rhapsody in Blue was composed in January and early February 1924 for a concert Paul Whiteman billed as an experiment in modern music, and first performed on 12 February 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York, by Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra with the composer at the piano. George Gershwin was twenty-five, a Broadway songwriter, and had written no orchestral work. He wrote the piece in short score for two pianos. Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s arranger, scored it for the band in the weeks before the premiere: a dance band of about two dozen players, reeds doubling heavily, with banjo and muted brass, not a symphony orchestra. By the accounts of the night, parts of the piano solo were not yet written out, and Gershwin played them from memory and invention.
That 1924 scoring is the work as judged here, as it was first performed. Grofé’s later scorings, for theatre orchestra in 1926 and for full symphony orchestra, published in 1942, are the dress in which the work has mostly been heard since, and the 1942 version is the standard concert form. They arrange the same piano part, the same themes and the same order, and they belong to the work’s life. Grofé’s first scoring was made within the campaign of making and is part of the work, credited or charged to the work and not to Gershwin by name. No single performance or recording is the work.
Movement II
After the opening the work becomes a chain. There is an episode on a driving rhythm like a train; a shuffle; band tuttis; a long central solo for the piano, stride left hand and blue-note right; and between them, again and again, a phrase repeated a step or a third higher, or a cadenza that carries the music into the next key. The form is the rhapsody, a free sequence of episodes, and here it is the form of the variety bill and the city street: one thing after another, each turn announced, the soloist stepping forward between numbers. That discontinuity is the work’s subject, and a sonata-form concerto would lose it.
It is also the work’s weakness, and the work’s history exposes it. The first recordings, made with the composer at the piano in 1924 and again in 1927, were each cut to about nine minutes over two sides, a little over half the uncut length. The cuts were forced by the record side and are not charged as such. What is charged is that the cut work stood, then and since, and neither its listeners nor its composer treated it as maimed. Conductors and pianists have cut it ever since, and most performances run fourteen to sixteen minutes against an uncut sixteen or seventeen.
In an essay of 1955, collected in The Joy of Music (1959), Leonard Bernstein argued that the work is a string of separate paragraphs, any of which could be removed or reordered without loss. No one has shown that he was wrong about the middle third. There the joins are made by sequence and cadenza by convenience, and several episodes could go with loss of colour, not of argument; the development is repetition and expansion more than working. The frame resists him. The clarinet opening, the Andantino, the Agitato and the Grandioso return are required, and a century of performance has proved him half right.
Movement III
More than halfway through, the speed stops. The Andantino moderato brings in the broad tune the work has been withholding, laid out in strings and saxophones over a slow bass, and then the piano takes it alone and keeps it aloft. It is the transport of the popular ballad brought into the concert hall at full length, and the melodic invention here is of the first order. The work has spent most of its course postponing this tune, and its arrival is the turn on which the whole depends.
What the work discloses can be put in a sentence. The vernacular musics of the American city, the blues third and seventh, ragtime and stride piano, the Tin Pan Alley ballad and the dance band’s reeds and muted brass, form one speech, and that speech can carry a public, concerted statement once reserved for the European concerto. The modern city is heard as a mixture moving at speed, and in the Andantino longing stands inside it. That holds, and it was new to the concert hall. But much of what is disclosed is a temper, exuberance and yearning, more than a condition articulated, and the work shows the mixture without showing its terms: the Black musicians whose idiom it carries are present in it only as sound.
The figures it summons are American ones, the city, the train, the new world as a meeting of peoples, the young man’s longing, and they are summoned as atmosphere. The nearest the work comes to building a myth is the course of this tune: held back, given once as private song, and given again at the end as a public anthem, an arrival in the promised place. That is the shape of a homecoming or an apotheosis, and the work uses it as the rhetoric of its climax rather than as a structure the whole depends on. The particulars, the clarinet’s laugh and the stride left hand, are vivid, and stay particular.
Movement IV
The Agitato breaks the spell with a toccata. The piano drives on repeated-note figures, building to the return, and the music moves back toward B flat. Here the piano writing shows what it is: idiomatic and personal, the stride left hand and the repeated-note figures of the dance-hall pianist made into concert material. The harmony throughout uses blue notes, added sixths and parallel chords with an ear of its own, and Grofé’s scoring is skilled and apt, the reeds doubling across the band’s colours. The costs remain in the joins, where a phrase is lifted a step to get somewhere.
The turn the work made came from two sides at once. From the concert hall, it was a concerted work for piano and dance band built from blues inflection, the ballad and the vaudeville turn, played in Aeolian Hall before the musicians of the classical establishment. From popular music, it was a songwriter of twenty-five writing a single movement of sixteen minutes in about five weeks, for a concert whose premise many expected to fail. The stake was real and public. But the path was not new. James Reese Europe had brought Black orchestral music to Carnegie Hall in 1912; Stravinsky’s Ragtime (1918), Milhaud’s La création du monde (1923) and Debussy had taken ragtime and jazz into the concert work, more radically; the rhapsody form is Liszt’s; and Whiteman’s symphonic jazz was the polished, commercial side of the idiom, not its frontier.
One law governs the work in part. The clarinet’s smear and the final anthem are both blue-inflected song, and the themes share their intervals and their syncopated figures closely. The range under that law is wide, from vaudeville and stride to romantic ballad and toccata. But the law is one of idiom more than of form: the episodes obey the same speech without being required by one another, and the Andantino is reached by juxtaposition, through sequence and cadenza, rather than by a relation the work works out. Narrowness is not coherence, and this work is not narrow. Its law is loose.
Movement V
The Grandioso returns to B flat and gives the Andantino’s tune to the full band: the tune of private longing made public. Then the opening theme comes back as the close. It is the work’s grandeur, and its kind of height is narrow: the transport of the ballad and the exhilaration of speed, never terror or the cold sublime. What the sixteen minutes hold is held in one idiom: the city, its speed and its mixture; the machine; romantic longing; the meeting of Black American, Jewish and European musics; the dance hall and the variety stage as frame. The family, labour, the state, history named as such, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and the figure describes a single movement.
The work made Gershwin a concert composer: Walter Damrosch commissioned the Concerto in F within the year, and An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess followed. It set the model of symphonic jazz and of the crossover concert piece, with Grofé’s own suites, Copland’s Piano Concerto (1926) and Ravel’s Concerto in G in its line, and it became the sound of the American city on film and stage. Its reach on jazz itself, which Armstrong and Ellington moved, is slight. It has stayed in the repertory for a century, recorded constantly and played at public ceremonies; it entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2020. The 1924 band scoring, little heard for half a century, has been performed again since the 1970s, and the question of which version is the work has become part of what keeps it open.
On this desk it stands level with Ellington at Newport (7.8), the nearest page in idiom, winning on survival and on its turn into the concert hall and losing on form and craft. Kind of Blue (8.8) wins every axis. The Chrysler Building (8.1), New York’s other emblem of the decade, and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.4), the same city and the same music turned into rigorous form, stand above it, as The Great Gatsby (8.9) does. What holds Rhapsody in Blue below Tier IV is a form its composer’s own recordings cut by half, myth evoked rather than built, a disclosure more of temper than of meaning, and a single movement’s span. What it holds, it has held for a century, and it is heard as the city.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is answered by the work’s own history. Its first recordings, with the composer at the piano, dropped nearly half its length and remained recognisably the work, and it has been cut ever since. Leonard Bernstein’s charge, that its paragraphs could be removed or swapped without harm, has never been met by a demonstration that they cannot. The chain of episodes in the middle third is the softest: several could go with loss of colour, not of argument. What resists is the frame: the clarinet opening, which the whole answers; the Andantino, which the work spends most of its length postponing; the Agitato that drives back toward it; the Grandioso return. Length is not charged.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The disclosure is made through sound and is credited as fully as words. It can be stated: the vernacular musics of the American city, the blues third and seventh, ragtime and stride piano, the Tin Pan Alley ballad, the dance band’s reeds and muted brass, form one speech, and that speech can carry a public, concerted statement once reserved for the European concerto. The city is heard as a mixture moving at speed, and the Andantino lets longing stand inside it. That holds, and it was new to the concert hall. Held below the gate because most of what is disclosed is a temper, exuberance and yearning, and because the Black musicians whose idiom it carries are present only as sound.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Height is real and returns. The opening is one of the great entrances in twentieth-century music: a trill and a rise that bends into a smear, a laugh turned into a call. The Andantino reaches the ballad’s transport, the long tune laid out in strings and saxophones over a slow bass, and the piano’s restatement keeps it aloft. The Grandioso return is the work’s grandeur, the tune of private longing made public. The cadenzas, above all the long central solo, rise by brilliance. Held below the top because the kind of height is narrow, the transport of the ballad and the exhilaration of speed, never terror or the cold sublime, and because the middle episodes are high spirits more than height.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth is evoked, not built. The work summons a set of American figures as atmosphere: the city, the train, the new world as a meeting of peoples, the young man’s longing. None of them bears weight as archetype. The nearest to construction is the course of the Andantino, held back across most of the work and then given in full twice, first as private song and then in the Grandioso as public anthem: an arrival in the promised place. That is the shape of a homecoming or an apotheosis, and the work uses it, but as the rhetoric of climax more than as a structure the whole depends on. The particulars are vivid, the clarinet’s laugh, the stride left hand, and they stay particular.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The turn is from two sides at once. From the concert hall: a concerted work for piano and dance band, built from blues inflection, the popular ballad and the vaudeville turn, played in Aeolian Hall to the musicians of the classical establishment. From popular music: a Broadway songwriter of twenty-five, with no orchestral work behind him, writing a single movement of sixteen minutes in about five weeks, for a concert whose premise many expected to fail. Held below the gate by precedent and cushion: James Reese Europe at Carnegie Hall in 1912; Stravinsky’s Ragtime (1918) and Milhaud’s La création du monde (1923), more radical; the rhapsody form Liszt’s; and Whiteman’s symphonic jazz the polished side of the idiom.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and part of what the work knows is lost, part not. The rhapsody, a free sequence of episodes and cadenzas, is the form of the variety bill and the city street: one thing after another, each turn announced, the soloist stepping forward between numbers. Recast as a sonata-form concerto, as Gershwin’s Concerto in F (1925) partly tried, it would lose that discontinuity, which is its subject. The 1924 band scoring is form too: saxophones, banjo and muted brass place the work in the dance hall, and the 1942 symphonic dress keeps the notes and loses part of that placement. What holds the axis is Bernstein’s point: in the middle third the joins are convenience, and the form there is a container.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and a century of it, of a particular kind. What keeps yielding is the question of what the work is: the uncut 1924 band scoring or the 1942 orchestra; how much was improvised; whether it is jazz at all; whose music it carries. Scholarship has come to treat the work as a set of arrangements, and performance keeps answering the question differently: Gershwin’s own rolls and recordings, the abridged and the uncut, the band scoring revived since the 1970s against the orchestral dress, and jazz pianists who rework it. The musical surface yields less. Its themes are fully grasped at first hearing, the harmony is direct, and return deepens affection more than understanding.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is American concert and popular music of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the work showed that the dance-band idiom and the songwriter’s melody could hold a concerted work and win the concert public; it did not reorganise how music is built, and its means were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it made Gershwin a concert composer, with the Concerto in F commissioned by Walter Damrosch within the year, An American in Paris and Porgy and Bess; it set the model of symphonic jazz and the crossover concert piece, with Copland’s Piano Concerto (1926) and Ravel’s Concerto in G in its line; and it became the sound of the American city on film and stage. Its reach on jazz itself is slight.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over 102 years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form survives whole: Gershwin’s piano part, the themes and the order are in score; his own recordings and piano rolls of 1925 preserve his playing; and Grofé’s 1924 scoring survives and has been performed again since the 1970s. Presence has been continuous for a century and is as wide as any concert work of its time: in the repertory, recorded constantly, played at public ceremonies, carried into film and advertising. The charges: the band scoring was little heard for half a century while the work lived in later dress and cut form, and some of its presence is excerpt and jingle. The dance band’s fabric is fixed to 1924, now heard as the work’s world.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium: melody, harmony, form, the piano writing and the scoring. The melodic invention is of the first order, the Andantino above all, and the piano writing is idiomatic and personal, the stride left hand and the repeated-note toccata figures made into concert material. The harmony uses blue notes, added sixths and parallel chords with an ear of its own. Grofé’s 1924 scoring, part of the work, is skilled and apt, the reeds doubling across the band’s colours. The costs are in the joins. Transitions are mostly sequence, a phrase repeated a step or a third higher, and cadenzas used to get from one key to the next; the development is repetition and expansion more than working. A gifted making with a known weakness.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the clarinet’s laughing smear and the Grandioso’s broad anthem. One law governs them in part: both are blue-inflected song, and the themes share their intervals and their syncopated figures closely. The range is wide, from vaudeville and stride to romantic ballad and toccata, and this work is not narrow. But the law is one of idiom more than of form. The episodes obey the same speech without being required by one another, and the Andantino is reached by juxtaposition, through sequence and cadenza, not by a relation the work works out. Kind of Blue, at 8.9 here, keeps one law across five forms; this work keeps a speech across many episodes, and its law is loose.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Judged on what sixteen wordless minutes hold, with no discount for the form. The city is held, its speed and its mixture; the machine, in the train rhythm; romantic longing, in the Andantino; the meeting of peoples, in the idiom itself, Black American, Jewish and European; popular entertainment, the dance hall and the variety stage, as the work’s frame. They are held in one idiom, which integrates them rather than listing them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, history named as such, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and consciousness is present as feeling rather than as a mind. A single movement of this length holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Sublime at 8.3. A form surviving whole for 102 years, in score, in the composer’s recordings and rolls and in the revived band scoring, with a presence as wide as any concert work of its time; a reach that made its composer a concert composer and set the model of the crossover concert piece; and height that returns, in the clarinet’s entrance, the Andantino and the Grandioso.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.7: the city, the machine, longing, the meeting of peoples and popular entertainment held in one idiom, and the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2: a form its own first recordings cut by nearly half and its middle episodes joined by sequence that does not require what follows; and American figures summoned as atmosphere, the homecoming of the tune used as the rhetoric of climax.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.1, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.2, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.7. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the work for solo piano and jazz band as composed by George Gershwin in January and early February 1924, in short score for two pianos, and scored by Ferde Grofé for Paul Whiteman’s band, as first performed at Aeolian Hall, New York, on 12 February 1924, by Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra with the composer at the piano. The unit is that 1924 jazz-band scoring, one work in one movement. Grofé’s scoring for theatre orchestra (1926) and for full symphony orchestra (published 1942), the standard concert version, arrange the same piano part, themes and form; they belong to the work’s life and are weighed as evidence for survival, yield and reach, not as the object. Grofé’s 1924 scoring is part of the work and is credited or charged to it. No single performance or recording is the unit. Read from knowledge of the score and its performance history under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, recording or text was in hand. There are no words, and nothing is quoted. Running times are a range across the uncut recorded tradition, not a measurement; the abridgement of the first recordings, at a little over half the uncut length, was reckoned by script. The accounts of the clarinet’s smear and of the unwritten piano part are reported, not documented. Facts that could not be verified, among them the keys of the episodes and the Andantino, the exact pitches of the opening run, the band’s full roster, the provisional title and the origin of the final one, how Gershwin learned of the commission, the names in the audience, the order of the programme, the place of the work’s conception, the dates of several later recordings and reconstructions, and an analytic derivation of the themes from common cells, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.