Quote of the day:

I will unite with anyone to do good, but with no one to do harm.
—Frederick Douglass

In some ways it feels like I’ve always known George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but as best as I can recall, I first heard it when I got the Leonard Bernstein recording with the New York Philharmonic which was recorded in 1959. I probably got that record a year or so later, so I may have been eleven when I first heard it, but those tunes are so burned into my consciousness that I no longer can remember my first exposure to them.

Bernstein was a big champion of Gershwin’s music, but in his book The Joy of Music he reprinted an article where he had this to say about the Rhapsody:

I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Chaikovsky, if you want to know what I really feel. I rank [Gershwin] right up there with Schubert and the great ones. But if you want to speak of a composer, that’s another matter. Your Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections, and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another, and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone; it can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact all these things are being done to it every day. It’s still the Rhapsody in Blue.

The latest episode of The Bowery Boys podcast is devoted to how Gershwin went about composing a “jazz” concerto for piano and orchestra in six weeks back in 1924. It’s a great episode and it had me in tears before it was over.

Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”: A Jazz-Age Drama