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Gershwin and the Roaring Twenties
Program Notes
by Michael Allsen
This program, “Gershwin and the Roaring Twenties,” presents music from the era when the line
between Classical Music and Jazz were deliberately blurred by one of America’s greatest
composers, George Gershwin. We open with an orchestral set of pieces from Porgy and Bess,
which Gershwin considered to be his masterwork. Pianist Robert Plano then joins the San Juan
Symphony for Gershwin’s jazzy Rhapsody in Blue. Our closer is Gershwin’s reaction to a visit to
the City of Lights, An American in Paris. The program includes a nod to one of Gershwin’s great
contemporaries, Irving Berlin—a brisk medley of Berlin’s songs. We also include a modern
evocation of the Twenties and the characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, in composer John
Harbison’s “orchestral foxtrot” Remembering Gatsby.
George Gershwin: From Tin Pan Alley to the Concert Hall
George Gershwin (1898-1937) was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Russian-Jewish family.
When the family bought a piano in 1910, young George was immediately smitten, and taught
himself to play. By 1914, he quit school and went to work in Tin Pan Alley, New York’s famous
songwriting district, working as a “song-plugger” for a successful publisher, recording player
piano rolls of the latest hits. In 1919 he scored a huge hit with his own song “Swanee,” and
began began to make a name for himself as a Broadway composer, frequently collaborating with
his brother Ira, a successful lyricist. Though he was becoming famous, Gershwin also realized
the limitations of his own largely self-taught musical background, and continued to seek out
formal lessons on piano and composition. His first public attempt at what he referred to as
“serious” music was Blue Monday, a short opera produced as part of George White’s Scandals of
1922. It got mixed reviews, and was promptly yanked from the show. Despite this early
frustration, Gershwin continued a career that had two tracks. He was best known in his day for
his popular work on Broadway, and later in Hollywood, but continued to write “serious” musical
works throughout his career. This program includes three of them. (Note: the following works
are discussed in historical order rather than their order in the program.)
Rhapsody in Blue
By 1924, Gershwin was a success on Broadway, and well-regarded as a pianist. He had a full
plate of musical theater commitments for that year, beginning with Sweet Little Devil, and the
1924 edition of White’s Scandals. It was at this time that Paul Whiteman conceived one of the
most ambitious concerts of the Roaring Twenties. Whiteman—the self-styled “King of Jazz” and
leader of the Palais Royal Orchestra—announced an “Experiment in Modern Music” for
February 12, 1924, to be held at the venerable Aeolian Hall, a concert that would supposedly
answer the question “What is American Music?” Whiteman planned to bring together Jazz of all
styles with European Classical music, and newly-composed works by American composers such
as Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert. Whiteman and Gershwin had earlier talked about a largescale jazz-style orchestral work, and Whiteman expressed his hope that Gershwin would write
one. This casual commitment became a fait accompli when Gershwin read in the New York
Herald’s January 3 announcement that he would be composing a “Jazz concerto” for
Whiteman’s grand concert!
Composing a concerto in just over a month was a daunting task for a composer who had never
written a work of this scale. Gershwin was also heavily involved with the production of Sweet
Little Devil, set to open in Boston on January 25. At the time, he was insecure about his
qualifications to write a piece of “serious” music—he once joked that, in the early 1920s,
everything he knew about harmony could be put on a three-cent stamp—and he had very little
experience in orchestration. Rather than attempting a traditionally-conceived concerto, Gershwin
settled on a “rhapsody”—a much less rigorous form that would allow him to develop musical
ideas freely. According to a letter by Gershwin: “I heard it as a musical kaleidoscope of America,
of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.” Gershwin
was a very fast composer, but not quite fast enough. He had the accompaniment finished in time
for Whiteman’s staff arranger, Ferde Grofé, to orchestrate it, but left large chunks of the piano
part to be improvised or played from memory at the concert.
Whiteman’s pretentious “Experiment” was a qualified success. All of the most influential New
York critics were in attendance, as were many of the most important Classical musicians on the
day. The concert was an extremely long affair, and by the third hour, the audience’s attention
was beginning to flag. However, Gershwin’s Rhapsody—the 24th work on a program of 25
pieces—stole the show.
The Rhapsody opens with a famous clarinet glissando, the trademark lick of Ross Gorman,
Whiteman’s lead clarinetist, which Gershwin adopted as the perfect lead-in to the first theme.
The piece develops freely, with one theme flowing naturally into the next, and with increasing
intensity, until the piano takes a long solo and slows the tempo. The central section is based upon
a Romantic melody that sounds like a nod to Tchaikovsky with a bit of Jazz punctuation. There
is a recapitulation, and the piece ends aggressively, with the piano playing its loudest.
An American in Paris
Rhapsody in Blue was a career-making event for Gershwin. Within a year he was approached by
Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Society. Damrosch, who had been at
Whiteman’s “Experiment in Modern Music,” gave Gershwin a commission for a “New York
Concerto.” The result, the Concerto in F, is a more ambitious piece than the Rhapsody, and has
become the most successful of all American piano concertos. In 1928, Damrosch offered a
second commission, this time for an orchestral work.
In March, George and Ira Gershwin, left for a European tour, spent mostly in Paris. Paris of the
1920s could still boast of its place at the center of the artistic universe: Gershwin, who was still a
bit self-conscious about his reputation as a “serious” composer, took every opportunity to
schmooze the composers he admired most: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Ravel, and Milhaud.
He brought the unfinished score for the new orchestral piece with him to Europe, and sketched
out much of the score in Paris that spring. Reviews of the first performance were decidedly
mixed, but once again the best answer to the critics was success: An American in Paris became a
standard of the orchestral repertoire almost as soon as it was premiered. Gershwin provided the
following outline of the work:
“The opening gay section is followed by a rich blues with a strong rhythmic undercurrent.
Our American friend, perhaps after strolling into a café and having a couple of drinks, has
succumbed to a spasm of homesickness. He harmony here is both more intense and simple
than in the preceding pages. This blues rises to a climax, followed by a coda in which the
spirit of the music returns to the vivacity and bubbling exuberance of the opening part, with
its impressions of Paris. Apparently the homesick American, having left the café and reached
the open air, has disowned his spell of the blues, and once again is an alert spectator of
Parisian life. At the conclusion, the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”
Gershwin’s use of the orchestra in this work is much more confident than in either the Rhapsody
(which, after all was arranged almost entirely by Grofé) or the Concerto. The influence of Jazz is
clearly audible, but the most prominent element is the variety of orchestral moods he projects
and the ingenious ways he achieves them. The standard orchestra is augmented by saxophones, a
huge array of percussion, and—one of Gershwin’s most prized souvenirs from his 1928 trip to
Paris—a set of four French taxi-horns.
Porgy and Bess: Selections for Orchestra (arr. Robert Russell Bennett)
The beginnings of Porgy and Bess date to 1926, when Gershwin read DuBose Heyward’s novel
Porgy, inspired by characters and situations Heyward observed in the black community of his
home town, Charleston, SC. Gershwin quickly wrote to Heyward proposing a collaboration, but
it would be nearly six years before Gershwin would return to the work. Heyward was
uncomfortable in New York, and Gershwin was unable to leave, so much of their collaboration
was carried on by mail and telegram. Eventually Ira Gershwin was brought into the project. Ira
was responsible for the majority of the song lyrics, though Heyward was solely responsible for
one of the show’s finest songs, “Summertime.”
By the end of 1934, Gershwin was looking for a producer and beginning to cast the production.
Both Gershwin and Heyward agreed that Porgy and Bess was to be a serious work, produced
with an all-black cast, dealing in a sympathetic and realistic way with its characters. The show
was a success in its off-Broadway tryouts, and the New York audience was just as enthusiastic as
the Boston audience had been, but Porgy and Bess closed after a respectable, but hardly
profitable run of 124 performances. Though several of the individual songs quickly became hits,
Gershwin did not live long enough to see his proudest creation universally acclaimed as one of
the masterworks of American music.
Gershwin seems to have been a bit uncomfortable about Porgy and Bess’s “operatic” nature: he
described it as “folk opera.” Several critics charged that Gershwin had simply created a
somewhat dressed-up Broadway show, grouped around a series of popular-style songs.
Gershwin answered by stating: “It is true that I have written songs [as opposed to arias] for
Porgy and Bess. I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs.”
His use of recitative and his sophisticated use of the orchestra were certainly closer to the
operatic world than anything else on Broadway at the time.
Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) created this arrangement of Porgy and Bess’s music.
Bennett was the greatest of the Broadway and Hollywood orchestrators, scoring hundreds of
Broadway shows, including Gershwin’s Girl Crazy and Of Thee I Sing. He had also been a close
friend of Gershwin’s during the composition of Porgy and Bess. Bennett was responsible for two
versions of Porgy and Bess. The first of these, is the Symphonic Picture he created in 1943, a
lengthy tone poem based on several of Gershwin’s songs and orchestral interludes. The
Selections heard here is a much more straightforward medley of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
songs, masterfully transformed into orchestral music by Bennett in 1962. Excerpts from the show
in this medley include: “Clara,” “A Woman Is A Sometime Thing,” “Summertime, “I Got Plenty
O' Nuttin’,” “Bess You Is My Woman,” “Oh I Can't Sit Down,” “There's a Boat Dat's Leavin'
Soon for New York,” “It Ain't Necessarily So,” and “O Lawd I'm on My Way.”
Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
A Symphonic Portrait of Irving Berlin (arr. Hawley Ades)
Irving Berlin is surely among America’s great immigrant success stories—and one of America’s
greatest songwriters. Berlin’s family emigrated from Russia to New York City when he was just
five. Berlin published his first song in 1907, and just four years later scored the first of many
huge hits with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Berlin died at age 101, after a celebrated career that
extended over 60 years, during which he wrote music for dozens of movies and Broadway
shows, and produced a catalog of over 1500 songs. Though he never learned to read music,
Berlin’s songs and lyrics are witty and inventive: with dozens of them recognized today as
“standards” and many, like “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” have simply become a
part of our shared musical culture. (Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn once joked: “Somebody
once said you couldn’t have a holiday without [Berlin’s] permission.”) Berlin was a good
businessman as well, and while he became enormously wealthy, he also believed in giving back
to the country that he felt had given so much to him. His famous “God Bless America” is but one
example. He had written it during World War I as an expression of pride and patriotism, and
when he revised the song in 1938, it became a hit for the Broadway belter Kate Smith—and a
patriotic favorite ever since. Berlin donated all of the royalties for the song—amounting to
several million dollars over the next half century—to the New York City Boy Scouts and Girl
Scouts.
The Symphonic Portrait of Irving Berlin heard here was published in 1972 by Hawley Ades.
Ades worked as an arranger for Berlin in the 1930s, later working for bandleader Fred Waring,
and Waring’s publishing company. Ades’s Symphonic Portrait is a fast-paced medley of several
of Berlin’s best-loved songs: “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Say It With Music,
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” and “God Bless America.”
John Harbison (b. 1938)
Remembering Gatsby
John Harbison stands in the first rank of today’s American composers. He has composed in
virtually every genre of art music from opera to chamber works, and he also remains active as a
jazz pianist. Harbison’s style is notable for its adaptability—freely adopting musical influences
that suit the context of the piece, and evolving substantially from work to work—in his words,
“to make each piece different from the others.” His grand opera The Great Gatsby was
completed in 1999, but the genesis of this work extended back to the early 1980s, when he first
sketched sections of an operatic version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the Roaring
Twenties. He was obliged to drop the project when permission for an operatic adaptation was not
forthcoming, but in 1985, he produced a short “orchestral foxtrot” titled Remembering Gatsby
from his sketch material. Permission was finally granted for a Gatsby opera, and a revised
version of Remembering Gatsby became the opera’s overture. Harbison provides the following
description:
“The piece, which runs about eight minutes, begins with a cantabile passage for full
orchestra, a representation of Gatsby's vision of the green light on Daisy's dock. Then the
foxtrot begins, first with a kind of call to order, then a twenties tune I had written for one
of the party scenes, played by a concertino led by a soprano saxophone. The tune is then
varied and broken into its components, leading to an altered reprise of the call to order,
and an intensification of the original cantabile. A brief coda combines some of the
motives, and refers fleetingly to the telephone bell and the automobile horns, instruments
of Gatsby's fate.”
Notes ©2016 by J. Michael Allsen