AMERICAN ORIGINALS



George Gershwin
1898-1937

George Gershwin
Rhapsody in Blue

The musical idiom of jazz evolved in New Orleans in the early part of this century from ragtime and the blues. The origin of the term jazz is obscure, but it first appeared in print in 1913 in a San Francisco newspaper, in reference to enthusiasm at a baseball game. The application of the term to the specific kind of music occurred during World War I.
It was in Europe, however, where American dance bands were popular, that classical composers first incorporated the new idiom into their compositions: Claude Debussy in Golliwog's Cakewalk (1908); Igor Stravinsky in Ragtime (1918); and especially Darius Milhaud in the ballet La création du monde (1923).

George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to the classical music audience. The son of poor Jewish immigrants in lower Manhattan, he was a natural-born pianist and left school at 16 to become a pianist with a Tin-Pan Alley firm, plugging their new songs. He soon commenced writing songs himself, eventually teaming up with his brother Ira as lyricist to become one of the most successful teams of song and musical comedy writers on Broadway. They created a string of immensely successful musicals from Lady be Good in December 1924 to Let ‘em Eat Cake in October 1933. The opening night of a George Gershwin musical comedy was a social and media event with Gershwin himself usually leading the orchestra.

Gershwin received the commission for an extended jazz composition from a conductor of popular music, Paul Whiteman, who promoted concerts of jazz music in New York’s Aeolian Hall. Whiteman was the self-styled “King of Jazz” who attempted to make jazz more symphonic and more respectable. He tried to adapt it from dance music to concert music. Whiteman’s commission followed an Aeolian Hall concert in the fall of 1923, at which Gershwin had played piano arrangements of a few of his songs.

Gershwin composed the Rhapsody in a mere three weeks early in 1924, in a two-piano version. It was immediately orchestrated for piano and jazz orchestra by Ferde Grofé, a popular composer, pianist and arranger, who served as Whiteman’s factotum. Grofé practically lived in Gershwin’s house, orchestrating the work page-by-page as they came from the composer’s pen. He also rescored the Rhapsody two years later for full orchestra.

The premiere, on February 12 1924, was a smashing success. Although the critics – true to form – mostly panned it, the audience loved it. Virtually overnight, jazz became respectable. Gershwin himself played the piano part, becoming an instant celebrity. Significant credit for the success must go to Grofé’s imaginative orchestration, which has ended up as his most enduring musical contribution, along with his Grand Canyon Suite.

It is useful to be aware that the rhapsody and fantasia of the classical tradition were the genres most related to jazz in that they embodied both freedom of form and improvisation or improvisatory writing. Gershwin's – and Grofé's – take on the form transfers the jazz idiom into a work Liszt would have been proud to have written.

The Rhapsody opens with probably the most famous clarinet riff in music history.

It is answered by the horns with the principal counter-theme.

Nearly three quarters of the way through the piece, the tempo slows and the Rhapsody's next "big theme" is introduced.



Leroy Anderson
1908-1975

Leroy Anderson
Piano Concerto in C Major

Everyone knows that Mozart and many other composers were geniuses; all one needs to do is cast a superficial glance at their musical output. But musical genius can manifest itself in more subtle and often surprising ways. Take the case of Leroy Anderson.

Composer, conductor pianist and arranger Anderson was born to Swedish immigrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and graduated from Harvard in 1930 with an MA. He remained as choirmaster and organist at the University until 1935, working towards a PhD in German and Scandinavian languages, while at the same time serving, until 1939, as arranger for the Boston Pops. With the outbreak of the war, his linguistic skills (he was fluent in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, Italian and Portuguese) were snapped up by military intelligence and he was stationed in Iceland as translator and interpreter. There he wrote an Icelandic grammar for the U.S. Army. After the war he settled in Woodbury, Connecticut, as a freelance composer and conductor, still maintaining a close relationship with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. In the 1960s he did extensive traveling and guest conducting around the world.

In 1958 Anderson wrote the score for the musical Goldilocks. But he is best remembered for a string of delightful miniatures with descriptive and whimsical titles such as Blue Tango, Fiddle Faddle, Sleighride, The Typewriter, The Syncopated Clock (which became the theme song for “The Late Show” on WCBS) and many others. Some of them, like The Typewriter, are musical pictures of bygone technologies.

The Piano Concerto, Anderson’s most ambitious concert work, was composed in 1953. After the premiere in Chicago with the Grant Park Symphony and a subsequent performance in Cleveland, The composer withdrew the work and did not include it in the official list of his compositions. After Anderson’s death, his family released the score, which was reintroduced in 1989 in Toronto.

Although Anderson attempted to write a serious composition, the “pops” style pervades the Concerto. The first movement is composed in proper sonata allegro form, and the romantic mood of the opening measures owe much to Rachmaninov’s piano concertos,

The movement, however, continues in a more playful vein.

The second theme could have come from any romantic film score of the period; just imagine it slowed down and scored for the Hollywood Bowl string section.

You can’t miss the development although it introduces a new jaunty theme, a practice common with Mozart; it begins with the crashing chords of the opening.

And lest Anderson not fulfill his classical roll, he even inserts a little fugue – although admittedly a jazzy one – on the new theme.

A piano solo continues without interruption into the second movement.

The movie idiom continues into the nostalgic second movement, which also conforms to the standard classical structure for slow movements, a slight variation on the ternary song form (ABA).

A faster section recalls Anderson’s short works.

The last movement is a circus parade, reminiscent of Charles Ives’s interpolation of American folk tunes, but without the overlay of crashing dissonances of Ives’s competing bands playing at the same time. A little rhythmic figure pervades the entire movement, first introduced as a fanfare for piano and snare drum

Then comes a pentatonic tune recalling vaudeville minstrel shows,

a trumpet theme

and a little more movie music.

Before the sudden appearance of the cadenza, Anderson swings back to the opening “Rachmaninov chords”, to sew up the entire piece.