Rhapsody in Red, White and Blue

The Australian visits this year of two of the contemporary icons of American concert jazz – Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, followed by his saxophonist brother Branford, touring this month with the ACO – remind us that jazz is the signature sound and identity of American music. The fusion of symphonic music with ‘syncopated music’ (i.e. jazz) can be recognized in music of the early 20^th century, but many historians maintain that American music burst onto the concert stage on 13th February 1924. That afternoon, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, the renowned band leader Paul Whiteman presented ‘an educational event’ in the Aeolian Hall entitled “Experiment in Modern Music”. Whiteman wanted to show his standing-room-only audience – among its number were John Philip Sousa, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Fritz Kreisler and Leopold Stokowski – that jazz should be regarded as a serious and sophisticated art form. The climax of the program was a new work composed and played by the 34-year-old George Gershwin. The ‘king of Broadway’ had barely five weeks to create his Rhapsody in Blue. The piano part was largely improvised, and the notorious clarinet glissando at the opening was a joke on the part of the clarinettist. The work was a sensation and set Gershwin off as a composer who had successfully married the Broadway stage and the concert hall. In so doing, it opened the door for successive generations of ‘serious’ American composers – from Aaron Copland, to Leonard Bernstein, to John Adams, to the Marsalis clan – to draw on jazz elements in their own works. A century later, we see that George Gershwin’s Rhapsody had given voice to a new music of ‘the American century’.