Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: Is It on Your iPod?
Composed in 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is one of the spectacular highlights of American music. A rambling 16 minutes long, it’s a crazed mishmash of a jazz symphony, with the orchestra and piano trading propulsive, then gorgeous, themes. It’s the sound of a New York city street, a speeding freight train, a white ‘n’ Negro tribal call, and, at about the 10-minute point, a transcendent love song.
I agree with what Leonard Bernstein wrote about it in 1955:
“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together. The themes are terrific – inspired, God-given. I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. [But] Your Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable. You can cut parts of it without affecting the whole. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still foes on as bravely as before.”
It’s true that the piece seems to lose its way at times - after the open there’s a section that’s as much dream sequence as coherent piece – but I keep coming back to that incredible passage at 10 minutes in, the “love song” section. What a moment. Woody Allen famously used this section in conjunction with a night-time shot of the New York skyline, and the affect is straight romance.
Here’s a clip from that high-point:
Amazing thing about Rhapsody on iTunes: you can buy it for .99 cents, just like the No. 1 song from 1981, Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes,” which is now totally forgotten, or Usher’s 2004 mega-hit, “Yeah!,” which is fast on its way to being forgotten. Great art or ephemera – it’s all the same price on iTunes.