For anyone interested in music, the place to be on February 12, 1924, was Aeolian Hall, a prominent concert venue of the era near Times Square in Manhattan. A crowd braved the snow that afternoon and vied for tickets to attend a concert billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music.”
The celebrity big band leader Paul Whiteman, who organized the event, made it his mission to bring wider recognition to jazz. He wanted to prove that the jazz idiom was as valid as what the European classical tradition had produced and could inspire works rivaling those in the symphonic repertoire. “I sincerely believe in jazz,” Whiteman later declared. “I think it expresses the spirit of America.”
The overflow audience in the 1,100-seat concert hall included Igor Stravinsky, John Philip Sousa, stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Jascha Heifetz among its musical luminaries. Interest in the new pieces began to fizzle as the afternoon wore on—until a new “jazz concerto,” introduced as the second-to-last work on the program, stirred the audience into a reaction of frenzied enthusiasm.
Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony salute this defining moment in the history of American music as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue this season. The impact of this ever-fresh, exuberantly inventive music continues to reverberate comparably, in some ways, to the shock waves set off a little over a decade earlier by Stravinsky’s music for the ballet The Rite of Spring (featured next week on the first program in the new season’s classical series).
This involves much more than a backward glance at glories past. Instead of merely performing Rhapsody in Blue as many of us have heard it countless times, we hear the world premiere of a newly commissioned transcription of this icon by one of Nashville’s own musical legends, Béla Fleck. The Nashville Symphony can be proud of its ongoing relationships with living composers such as Fleck, whose banjo concerto The Impostor, also on our program, originated as a commission from the orchestra. And it carries forward the kind of innovation that Gershwin pioneered in Rhapsody in Blue by tearing down the walls between genres.
The Nashville Symphony’s relationship with its audience, with the city, with the past—as well as with the present and the future—is “a work-in-progress,” as Maestro Guerrero puts it: “We have to look at not only where we have been in the past, but at how we can continue improving for the future. Every season should be a continuation of the previous one, always trying to reflect the realities of Nashville—because our city is changing, and our programming needs to reflect that as well. We want to reach out to as many different voices as possible.”
Among the lineup of composers Paul Whiteman originally commissioned to write pieces for that landmark concert in 1924, not a single Black artist was included—for “an experiment in modern music” built on the foundation of jazz. We are only beginning to fathom the damage caused by this erasure of essential American voices. So it is especially fitting that this program begins with music by one of our most eminent living composers.
“We [Black composers] were left out of the American school of composition … in the 1920s … or the 1940s of Copland,” Adolphus Hailstork once remarked. “Now it’s time to make our own impact and to add to the American repertoire, and that should include us.” Now in his ninth decade, Hailstork is still a powerful creative force—recent seasons have seen the premieres of several major works, including his requiem in memory of George Floyd, A Knee on the Neck.
Hailstork’s best-known orchestral piece is the concert overture An American Port of Call, premiered by the Virginia Symphony Orchestra in 1985. He was inspired to depict Norfolk’s lively port scene in An American Port of Call—a powerful image for the confluence of diverse cultures and identities that is the definition of America. Vibrant orchestration and sonic contrasts characterize Hailstork’s vision of “the strident (and occasionally tender and even mysterious) energy of a busy American port city.” His enthralling orchestral landscape blends an open hearted, optimistic depiction of modern life with touches of poetic reminiscence.
Béla Fleck enjoys a longstanding relationship with the Nashville Symphony. For the opening of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in 2006, he was commissioned to join with bassist Edgar Meyer and tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain to write The Melody of Rhythm, a triple concerto. Its success encouraged Fleck to undertake a concerto entirely for his own instrument, which he proceeded to compose over a six-month period in 2010-11.
Dedicated to Earl Scruggs—another banjo legend and formative influence on Fleck—The Impostor was his first large-scale composition for classical forces, stretching the banjo to new expressive dimensions. The multiple-GRAMMY® Award-winning Fleck fuses influences from Chick Corea and Charlie Parker along with voices from the classical tradition (J.S. Bach and Beethoven in particular), blending these with the banjo idiom he learned from such figures as Scruggs. Fleck’s fascination with the African origins of the banjo is another layer of his approach here.
Fleck wrote The Impostor for his vintage 1937 mahogany Gibson Mastertone banjo, which he discovered at Gruhn Guitars—a prized possession Fleck calls the “holy grail” of banjos (much as a violinist treasures an instrument made in the workshops of Cremona). With no familiar models for a full scale banjo concerto, Fleck took up the challenge by evoking “different sounds from my banjo than I was used to doing.”
Unlike a traditional string concerto—in which, say, the solo violin or cello has its doppelgängers in the ensemble—the banjo represents “a voice that is not present in the orchestra,” he points out. Fleck imagined the banjo as “the hero in this play,” a protagonist who “tries to avoid the truth of who he is, but in the end cannot avoid it”—hence “The Impostor.”
In the first movement, according to Fleck, “the banjo is at its most ‘classical,’ even though I wasn’t trying to emulate any particular composer.” The rest of the work develops to gradually reveal more and more of Fleck’s own voice: “As it continues, I become more comfortable with the idea that this can be whatever I want it to be and end by returning to my roots in bluegrass and Earl Scruggs.”
Brought to America by enslaved peoples forcibly taken from their homes in Africa, the banjo has especially close ties to Appalachia, where a variety of traditions developed and cross pollinated. Aaron Copland in fact did not have any specific notions of Appalachian country or culture in mind when he accepted the commission to compose a ballet score for Martha Graham, the trailblazing choreographer and dancer, in the middle of the Second World War.
The arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge asked him to write a ballet on American themes specifically for Graham. Copland initially called the work-in-progress “Ballet for Martha.” It was Graham who suggested the title Appalachian Spring—a phrase she had found in Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge. The score, which the Brooklyn-born Copland actually wrote while staying in Hollywood and Mexico, has come to represent the image of a vanished American idyll of unspoiled, pastoral nature and simple community values.
As straightforward as a folktale, Appalachian Spring tells the story of a young farmer husband and his bride-to-be embarking on life together on the frontier. The beloved score includes episodes of country dances as well as five variations on a Shaker melody published under the title “Simple Gifts” the only folk melody Copland uses in the entire piece. Framing the suite is serene music evoking “a suffused light,” as Copland described it, with the couple “left quiet and strong in their new house” in the closing image.
Rhapsody in Blue has entranced Béla Fleck since his childhood growing up. He recalls his Uncle Steve taking him to see the biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945) at the Thalia Theatre on the Upper West Side. (Fleck’s family lived only two blocks from Gershwin’s former residence in the neighborhood.) “The movie had an incredible impact on young me, and the piece in particular blew me away,” Fleck says. “Over the years, I’ve checked in with Rhapsody in Blue regularly and always found it had that same compelling effect.” He added it to his “bucket list” of pieces he wanted to explore on the banjo. The pandemic gave him time to focus on the project.
Gershwin’s original score for Rhapsody—written at breakneck speed in the weeks before the premiere—is for two pianos. The composer/arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated the music for Paul Whiteman’s jazz band, and it later became more widely known in a scoring for symphony orchestra he created in 1942. Fleck studied Gershwin’s piano score closely, “one measure at a time, just to see if it was even remotely possible on the banjo”, and concluded that “technically, it was possible—not easy, but some kind of possible.”
We hear the world premiere of Fleck’s banjo interpretation of the piano part, with the original orchestration by Grofé for the orchestra. “I’ve always noted that banjo is kind like a lap piano,” says Fleck. One challenge, though, is that he can strike only three notes at a time (versus at least ten at the keyboard, using both hands—not to mention the much larger range of the piano). He thus had to change the piano part “to accommodate the banjo’s range and limitations.” Fleck adds that he is not incorporating improvised passages: “My goal is to play the piece very directly. I haven’t always enjoyed the improv inclusive versions, although sometimes these are great. I just wanted to play the piece. It’s very challenging already!”
Gershwin was raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side as the son of Jewish-Russian immigrants—background he shared with Copland, just two years his junior. Growing up in this milieu sharpened his ear’s sensitivity to the polyglot musical textures around him; he would later weave these diverse musical styles into his music. Already in his teenage years Gershwin became firmly grounded in the “real” world of commercial entertainment: he launched his career by crafting popular songs (known as Tin Pan Alley songs in this era). In works like Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin used his gift for catchy, self contained melodies to retool the European model of the piano miniature.
The title Rhapsody in Blue is a play on the artist James Whistler’s color-themed names for his paintings. George’s brother Ira Gershwin came up with that idea, replacing the working title American Rhapsody. But the piece remains “a musical kaleidoscope of America,” as Gershwin would later describe it, “of our vast melting pot, of our incomparable national pep, our blues, our metropolitan madness.”
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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