of 1893. A group of threateningly attired black singers perform a deepest-Africa number called “In Dahomey”—the very name of Will Marion Cook’s pioneering musical—and then reveal that they hail from Avenue A in New York. Frederick Douglass had complained that the organizers of the exposition imported African performers to “act the monkey”; Hammerstein’s libretto spells out clearly how black culture was being used to satisfy white audiences’ thirst for the exotic.
If these themes had been fleshed out more fully, Show Boat might have become a masterwork of social satire as well as a bewitching piece of theater. But, as the scholar Raymond Knapp points out, the creators could hardly address such an incendiary subject while they were keeping their black characters in subsidiary roles, on the margins of the drama. African-American suffering becomes a sort of background decor, an ambience of heartbreak.
What ever its failings as a study in race relations, Show Boat provided a grand aerial view of the American musical scene. The first thing you hear is a blaring, minatory minor chord out of Verdi or Puccini. That operatic gesture quickly fades away into a rapid montage of popular styles: Tin Pan Alley melody, mass-market blues, banjo strummings, Gilbert and Sullivan ditties, Sousa marches, vaudeville patter, and hoochie-coochie music. The one song from Show Boat that everyone knows is, of course, “Ol’ Man River,” and they know it because of the way Paul Robeson sang it. Show Boat was not only the first major American musical but the first musical in which black performers were given showstopping moments. Robeson became, in effect, the co-composer of the song, transforming a resigned, melancholy number into a vessel of spiritual might. In later years he changed the lyric “Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”
Humbly putting his music in the service of such august voices, Kern let white Americans know that there was more to black music than bouncing syncopation. Coursing under the zesty surface of Show Boat is the power of the blues.
Gershwin
“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” George Gershwin said, explaining the origins of Rhapsody in Blue. Epitomizing the Jazz Age in every pore of his suave being, Gershwin was the ultimate phenomenon in early-twentieth-century American music, the man in whom all the discordant tendencies of the era achieved sweet harmony.
Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that superheated melting pot where Russian, Eastern European, Yiddish, African-American, and mainstream American cultures intermingled. He experienced what he called his “flashing revelation” in the schoolyard of P.S. 25; in the middle of playing ball with other kids, he was stopped cold by the sound of a fellow student playing Dvořák’s Humoresque. There is a poignant historical symmetry here, because Dvořák had based his Humoresque on the American Plantation Dances of his young student Maurice Arnold, one of those would-be black composers who had dropped from sight.
Life on the Lower East Side could be tough for a middle-class kid who liked to play the piano. Gershwin’s early biographers, wanting to establish their subject’s all-American credentials, emphasized his boisterous, mildly delinquent escapades—roller-skating, skipping school, joining street brawls, dabbling in petty burglary. Gershwin stumbled into music by accident, it was said, and never had to work particularly hard. In fact, the boy spent endless hours practicing, and attended dozens of recitals at Cooper Union, Aeolian Hall, and the Wanamaker Auditorium (in the same department store where Strauss conducted his music in 1904). Gershwin’s childhood scrapbooks, which can be seen in the music collection at the Library of Congress, are stuffed with pictures of favorite pianists and composers, pasted up where other boys might have featured sports heroes or pinup girls.
Gershwin’s first significant teacher was Charles Hambitzer, who introduced him to the music of Debussy and Ravel and possibly to the early works of Schoenberg. Later came a thorough course of theory with the Hungarian émigré Edward Kilenyi, who told Gershwin that he had a better chance of winning an audience if he made his name in the popular arena rather than in the academic realm of composition. (Kilenyi, too, was familiar with Schoenberg, and apparently schooled Gershwin in the teachings of Harmonielehre.) While still a teenager, Gershwin began working as a pianist at Remick’s publishing company, and with the help of Will Vodery, Ziegfeld’s African-American arranger, he got some jobs on Broadway. His first songwriting success—what would remain his biggest hit, in terms of millions of copies sold—came in 1919, when the blackface singer Al Jolson took up the young composer’s rollicking pseudo-Southern number “Swanee.”
Early Gershwin classics like “The Man I Love,” “ ’S Wonderful,” and “Fascinating Rhythm” trumpet the new sophistication of American popular song. Often, a simple repeating figure plays out against a cooler, more complex harmonic background. In “ ’S Wonderful” the chorus melody consists simply of a falling third heard three times, followed by a falling fifth, spelling out a common chord. Nothing could be simpler—or, potentially, duller. It’s a mere signal, like a ditty that plays when subway doors are closing. The wonderfulness is in the harmonization: that inert third becomes the pivot for a graceful merry-go-round of major, minor, dominant-seventh, and diminished-seventh chords.
“Fascinating Rhythm” is a study in aural sleight of hand. Over a foursquare beat, the melody unfolds in three helter-skelter phrases, each made up of six eighth notes plus an eighth-note rest. The fact that each phrase falls one eighth note short of a complete bar means that the vocal keeps slipping ahead of the main beat; four extra pulses are needed to make up the difference. So a string of thirty-two pulses is divided into three sets of seven and one set of eleven.
Gershwin made his first serious foray into black music in 1922, with the vaudeville opera Blue Monday Blues. Set on 135th Street in Harlem, this brief one-acter tells of a woman who shoots the man who’s done her wrong, or so she thinks. The arias lack the verve of the best Gershwin tunes, awkwardly shuffling among the conventions of European operetta, Yiddish musical theater, and black musicals like Cook’s In Dahomey. The show had a whiff of minstrelsy about it: white singers performed in blackface, and Paul Whiteman’s smooth-timbred jazz orchestra provided something other than an authentic Harlem sound. But Gershwin was learning as he went along, experimenting simultaneously with opulent vocal lines in the operatic mode and with rhythmically pliable melodic lines that imitated stride piano and the blues.
Curious about what the European moderns and Manhattan ultra-moderns were up to, Gershwin regularly attended International Composers’ Guild concerts and other new-music events. In 1922 he heard the adventurous Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier sing Ravel and Stravinsky, and in February 1923 he showed up at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. That November, Gershwin made his official “highbrow” debut, accompanying Gauthier in contemporary songs by Kern, Berlin, and himself. He delighted the crowd—and showed off his classical knowledge—by inserting a phrase from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade into “Do It Again.”
Gershwin now received a commission to write an orchestral work for Whiteman, who was preparing a program titled “An Experiment in Modern Music” for Aeolian Hall. The bandleader, who had played viola in the Denver and San Francisco symphonies, made it his mission to give jazz a quasi-classical respectability. The stated aim of the “Experiment,” which took place at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, was to show “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant Jazz, which sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today.” The evening began with the raucous glissandos of “Livery Stable Blues,” and ended, oddly, with Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1. If, as Deems Taylor said in his review, the participants were engaged in the project of bringing jazz “out of the kitchen,” evidently jazz ended up on the veranda, drinking Madeira and smoking cigars.
Planted in the middle, with one foot in the kitchen and one foot in the salon, was Rhapsody in Blue. The score famously begins with a languid trill on the clarinet, which turns into an equally languid
