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 upward scale, which then becomes a super-elegant and not at all raucous glissando. Having reached the topmost B-flat, the clarinet then saunters through a lightly syncopated melody, leaning heavily on the lowered seventh note of the scale. The tune dances down the same staircase that the opening scale shimmied up, ending on the F with which the piece began—a typical Gershwin symmetry.
A neat ambiguity becomes apparent: sometimes the lowered seventh is heard as a pitch-bending blue note, and sometimes it is interpreted as part of a straitlaced dominant-seventh chord, which has the effect of kicking the harmony into a neighboring key. The Rhapsody plays out as a dizzying sequence of modulations; the Rachmaninovian love theme at the center of the work ends up being in the key of E, a tritone away from the home B-flat. That theme, too, is strewn with extraneous blue notes, which give Rachmaninov a certain finger-snapping informality while propelling the harmony through a second string of modulations back to the point of departure.
When the last chord sounded, delirium ensued. In the audience at Aeolian Hall were such classical celebrities as Stokowski, Leopold Godowsky, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, and Rachmaninov himself, and they were practically unanimous in acclaiming Gershwin as the new white hope, so to speak, of American music. And when Gershwin went to Europe four years later, he met more high-level admirers: Stravinsky, Ravel, four of Les Six, Prokofiev, Weill, Schoenberg, and Berg. No American composer had ever gained such international notice.
Of the modern European masters, Berg fascinated Gershwin most. The legendary meeting between the two composers in Vienna—the one at which Berg said, “Mr. Gershwin, music is music”—perhaps gave Gershwin a glimpse of something new, of a deeper synthesis than what he had achieved to date. On the train from Vienna to Paris, he studied the score of the Lyric Suite, and at various parties held in his honor in Paris he had the Kolisch Quartet play the work several more times, no doubt to the puzzlement of the flapper crowds. Back in New York, Gershwin hung an autographed photo of Berg in a corner of his apartment, alongside a picture of the boxer Jack Dempsey and a punching bag.
European impressions bubbled up in the balletic tone poem An American in Paris, which Gershwin sketched during his 1928 tour and finished back home. If the Rhapsody had been predictable in form, alternating between plush tunes and busy transitional sections, An American in Paris showed a more confident use of a larger structure; the tunes undergo kaleidoscopic development and are stacked up in wickedly dissonant polytonal combinations. Yet the musical surface is kept shiningly clear, so that the listener can follow each jazz aria as it darts through the melee.
Gershwin had little left to learn, yet he still felt insecure about his education, and asked for advice and lessons from almost every accredited composer he met. Supposedly, he once approached Stravinsky, who asked after Gershwin’s salary—$100,000 to $200,000—and then said, “In that case, I should study with you.” (Alas, the story is probably legend: the same anecdote was told about Gershwin and Ravel.) As Howard Pollack shows in his authoritative biography, Gershwin kept trying to perfect his technique even after he had achieved fame. In 1932 he embarked on a new course of study with the émigré Russian composer-theorist Joseph Schillinger, who had created a system for symmetrically organiz ing rhythms, chords, and scales. Gershwin’s notebooks from his sessions with Schillinger show him writing in multiple modes and deriving richly dissonant chords from the harmonic series.
Since the time of “Swanee” and Blue Monday Blues, Gershwin had been navigating among diatonic, blues, klezmerish, whole-tone, and chromatic scales. Now he had a coherent method with which to work—a grid on which he could plot large-scale designs. In those same notebooks, Porgy and Bess began to take shape.
The idea of writing a full-scale opera had preoccupied Gershwin for years. The arts patron Otto Kahn—chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Opera, prime mover of Jazz Age culture, old friend of Richard Strauss’s—spurred him on, inviting him to write a “jazz grand opera” for the Met. Gershwin concluded, however, that the Met’s staff singers could never master the idiom; a true jazz opera could be sung only by a black cast.
DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject. After a long delay related to questions of rights, he set to work on the opera in early 1934. The story is of a crippled beggar with an indomitable urge to make his dreams come true. He falls in love with Bess, who returns his love but is prey to the affections and manipulations of other men. The story ends on a note of mingled hope and dread: Bess goes off to New York with the drug-dealing ne’er-do-well Sportin’ Life, and Porgy resolves to follow. Gershwin later said that he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing in the style of Wozzeck. Although his aim was to “appeal to the many rather than to the cultured few,” the work far exceeded the average Broadway revue in ambition. Gershwin spent eighteen months writing it, notating every note of the final orchestral score in his own hand, as he felt compelled to prove when journalists came calling.
Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern music. First comes a typical rhapsodic flourish, an upward scale followed by a trill. This gives way to a hard-driving two-chord ostinato, which sounds like a honky-tonk version of the quivering alternation of chords at the end of Wozzeck. The orchestra then drops out and the ostinato is carried on by an out-of-tune bar-room piano—a feat of crosscutting that imitates the tavern scene in Wozzeck. Next comes a great crescendo: the chorus launches into a neoprimitivist chant of “Da-doo-da” while the orchestra adds layer upon layer of dissonant harmony. The climax brings shrill harmonic complexes of seven or eight notes, split between a G dominant seventh in the bass
