Tone Poem Tuesday

Born this date, 125 years ago today: the great George Gershwin.

I was actually going to post this piece last week before I suddenly head an “Oh!” moment, one of those cliche moments when the sitcom person slaps their own forehead as they remember the obvious: Why post about Gershwin today, when his birthday is coming up?

So, here we are.

Gershwin was, of course, probably the first truly great American composer, because he was likely the first to really start to branch beyond the European influences and incorporate truly American forms and American sounds into his music, by bringing jazz and the melodic approach of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters into classical, or “serious”, music. He only got so far in this work–a brain tumor killed him when he was just 38 and starting to really plumb the depths of his compositional powers–and as he was still growing and attaining new heights of achievement at the time of his untimely death, Gershwin’s life stands as more of a tragic truncation of a great talent than does, say, that of Mozart.

Gershwin wrote for movies–he contributed all the songs and score to Shall We Dance, the seventh of the ten feature films Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together–and for the stage, often partnered with his lyricist brother Ira. But he also wrote for the concert hall, starting with today’s work and progressing through works that were more and more structurally interesting in a compositional sense, and he seems to have been heading for the opera stage at the time of his death. Who knows what he would have done had Porgy and Bess been a beginning instead of an ending…but Gershwin’s work still stands as a monument to one of America’s greatest musical talents from a time when America was starting to burst with musical talent.

Leonard Bernstein was an astute critic and champion of Gershwin’s work; even as he made some of the finest recordings of Gershwin ever, he was still realistic about the limitations of Gershwin’s early work, which ultimately turned out to be his only work. He wrote about this in an essay that is collected in his brilliant book The Joy of Music, which I excerpt below. Bernstein’s essay is in the form of a dialog between himself and a “Professional Manager”, whom Bernstein describes as “the fellow who makes sure that the music his firm produces actually gets played.” The main thrust of the essay is about simplicity in songwriting; to P.M. Bernstein gives the main question, aimed at Bernstein himself: “Your new Broadway show is a big hit, but none of the songs are hits. What’s that about?” (I’m paraphrasing, obviously) From this rises a discussion, shaped by Bernstein’s knowledge of American music and classical music, that eventually arrives on the doorsteps of George Gershwin. Bernstein notes that Gershwin was a songwriter who shifted toward serious music, while Bernstein was a serious composer (“I wrote a symphony before I ever tried writing a song”) heading in the other direction.

And finally we arrive at this passage, which has shaped not just how I think about Gershwin but also how I think about approaching any work of art, even works we know have issues in the execution.

P.M.
(A star in his eye) If you had met him [Bernstein has just indicated that Gershwin died when Bernstein was a child in Boston] you would have known that George was every inch a serious composer. Why, look at the Rhapsody in Blue, the American in–

L.B.
Now, P.M., you know as well as I do that the Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It’s a string of separate paragraphs stuck together–with a thin paste of flour and water. Composing is a very different thing than writing tunes, after all. I find that the themes, or tunes, or whatever you want to call them, in the Rhapsody are terrific–inspired, God-given. At least four of them, which is a lot for a twelve-minute piece. They are perfectly harmonized, ideally proportioned, songful, clear, rich, moving. The rhythms are always right. The “quality” is always there, just as it is in his best show tunes. But you can’t just put four tunes together, God-given though they may be, and call them a composition. Composition means a putting together, yes, but a putting together of elements so that they add up to an organic whole. Compono, componere–

P.M.
Spare us the Latin. You can’t mean that the Rhapsody in Blue is not an organic work! Why, in its every bar it breathes the same thing, throughout all its variety and all its change of mood and tempo. It breathes America–the people, the urban society that George knew deeply, the pace, the nostalgia, the nervousness, the majesty, the–

L.B.
–the Chaikovsky [sic] sequences, the Debussy meanderings, the Lisztian piano-fireworks. It’s as American as you please while the themes are going on, but the minute a little thing called development is called for, America goes out the window and Chaikovsky and his friends march in the door. And the trouble is that a composition lives in its development.

P.M.
I think I need more coffee. Waiter!

L.B.
Me too. I didn’t mean to get started on all this, and I certainly don’t want to tread on your idol’s clay feet. He’s my idol too, remember. I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on the earth since Chaikovsky, if you want to know what I really feel. I rank him 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 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.

P.M.
But look here. That sounds to me like the biggest argument yet in its favor. If a piece is so sturdy that whatever you do to it has no effect on its intrinsic nature, then it must be pretty healthy. There must be something there that resists pressure, something real and alive, wouldn’t you say?

L.B. 
Of course there is: those tunes. Those beautiful tunes. But they still don’t add up to a piece.

P.M. 
Perhaps you’re right in a way about the Rhapsody. It was an early work, after all–his first attempt to write in an extended form. He was only twenty-six or so, don’t forget; he couldn’t even orchestrate the piece when he wrote it. But how about the later works? What about the American in Paris? Now that is surely a well-knit, organic–

L.B. 
True, what you say. Each work got better as he went on, because he was an intelligent man and a serious student, and he worked hard. But the American in Paris is again a study in tunes, all of them beautiful, and all of them separate. He had by that time discovered certain tricks of composition, ways of linking themes up, of combining and developing motives, of making an orchestral fabric. But even here they still remain tricks, mechanisms borrowed from Strauss and Ravel and who knows where else. And when you add it all up together it is still a weak work because none of those tricks is his own. They don’t arise from the nature of the material; they are borrowed and applied to the material. Or rather appliqued to it, like beads on a dress. When you hear the piece you rejoice in the first theme, then sit and wait through the “filler” until the next one comes along. In this way you sit out about two-thirds of the composition. The remaining third is marvelous because it consists of the themes themselves; but where’s the composition?

P.M. 
(A bit craftily) But you play it all the time, don’t you?

L.B. 
Yes.

P.M. 
And you’ve recorded it, haven’t you?

L.B. 
Yes.

P.M. 
Then you must like it a lot, mustn’t you?

L.B. 
I adore it. Ah, here’s the coffee.

P.M. 
(sighing) I don’t understand you. How can you adore something you riddle with holes? Can you adore a bad composition?

L.B. 
Each man kills the thing he loves. Yes, I guess you can love a bad composition. For non-compositional reasons. Sentiment. Association. Inner meaning. Spirit. But I think I like it most of all because it is so sincere. It is trying so hard to be good; it has only good intentions.

P.M. 
You mean you like it for its faults?

L.B. 
No, I don’t. But what’s good in it is so good that it’s irresistible. If you have to go along with some chaff in order to have the wheat, it’s worth it. And I love it because it shows, or begins to show, what Gershwin might have done if he had lived. Just look at the progress from the Rhapsody to the piano concerto, from the concerto to–

P.M. 
(glowing) Ah, the concerto is a masterpiece.

L.B. 
That’s your story. The concerto is the work of a young genius who is learning fast. But Porgy and Bess–there the real destiny of Gershwin begins to clear.

That’s where I’ll leave off…I probably should have trimmed that excerpt but I couldn’t decide where to do it, and Leonard Bernstein would almost certainly have been one of the great writers on music if he hadn’t been such a great writer and performer of music. But for me, the money quote is near the end there:

What’s good in it is so good that it’s irresistible.

I have invoked that phrase many, many times when discussing things I love that are still pretty flawed. It’s such an important concept that I think gets lost sometimes in today’s “All or nothing” environment: a flaw can, and probably should, be openly admitted and acknowledged, without discounting the strengths that exist in the work, any work, alongside those very flaws.

From all this it’s probably obvious what today’s tone poem is, so I’ll just get out of the way of the music now. Here’s Leonard Bernstein, playing the solo piano and conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, in George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

And what the heck, here’s An American in Paris, from the same recording (this time, the New York Philharmonic):

I won’t feature it here because this post is getting too long as it is, but I have a higher view of the Concerto in F than Bernstein does–I consider it the finest piano concerto written in the 20th century not by a person named “Rachmaninoff”–but if you want to give the Concerto a listen, track down the recording made by Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. That’s one of the great recordings of all time, in my opinion.

And if you read this far, you should know that I share a birthday with Mr. Gershwin. Happy birthday to me!