The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  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 Dvoák’s Humoresque. There is a poignant historical symmetry here, because Dvoák 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 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 organizing 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 barroom 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-dooda” 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 and C-sharp-major arpeggios in the treble. Gershwin probably assembled this music from overtone rows, as he had done in his Schillinger notebooks.

  The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling Wozzeck again—Marie’s song of “Eia popeia” to her child. Gershwin even uses his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother’s soothing lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: “Summertime, and the living is easy…”

  The entire score is structured around such fusions of complexity and simplicity, although the simple always wins out in the end. In his notebooks Gershwin wrote down some rules that would never have sufficed for Berg: “Melodic. Nothing neutral. Utter simplicity. Directness.”

  What sets Porgy apart from every classical theater work of the time is that the score invites considerable freedom of interpretation. Once the chords of “Summertime” start rocking, they become a steady-state environment in which a gifted performer can move around at will. She can bend pitches, add ornaments, shift the line up and down. Billie Holiday and Sidney Bechet made “Summertime” their own; Miles Davis, on his Porgy and Bess album of 1958, actually discarded Gershwin’s chords and kept only the melody. The same freedom of expression is permitted in the opera’s other set pieces, such as “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “My Man’s Gone Now,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” When, at the premiere, John W. Bubbles sang the last-named number with devil-may-care pizzazz, he irritated the trained singers in the cast, but Gershwin defended him.

  Glowing with confidence, Gershwin offered Porgy to the public in the fall of 1935. To his surprise—he was accustomed to being loved—it met with critical opposition and commercial disappointment. Porgy ran on Broadway for 124 performances, a large number by operatic standards but not enough to recoup expenses. People had trouble deciding whether Gershwin had written an opera or a musical show: some theatergoers complained that the orchestral passages and turbulent recitatives got in the way of the hit numbers, while classical-music intellectuals found the showstoppers bewildering. There was fuss over how the work should be labeled—“opera,” “folk opera,” “musical,” or something else.

  Virgil Thomson, smarting over the disappearance of Four Saints, wrote a thoroughly incoherent review for Modern Music in which he proposed that Gershwin was “not a very serious composer” who had nonetheless produced an important work: “Gershwin does not even know what an opera is; and yet Porgy and Bess is an opera and it has power and vigor.” Thomson was, in fact, paying Gershwin a compliment—the highest that he could offer to a composer who lacked the correct credentials and could never be considered “one of us.”

  Gershwin’s racial ambiguities, his miscegenating mixture of Western European, African-American, and Russian-Jewish materials, also caused trouble. The black singers were generally overjoyed by what Gershwin had written for them; J. Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon Johnson’s brother, who sang the part of Lawyer Frazier in the premiere, went so far as to describe the composer as the “Abraham Lincoln of Negro music.” African-American critics were more cautious, though generally positive. A few commentators on the political left attacked what they perceived to be white exploitation of black material. Unexpectedly, Duke Ellington, who seldom had a bad word to say about anyone, led the critique. “Grand music and a swell play,” Ellington was quoted as saying, but “it does not use the Negro musical idiom. It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.” As it turned out, some of Ellington’s remarks had been fabricated by an overeager Marxist journalist, although in a subsequent clarification Ellington stated once more that Porgy was not a true Negro opera.


  Thomson picked up on this leftist critique of Porgy when he wrote, “Folk-lore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.” In the end, the racial debate around Porgy (was it a real Negro opera?) bled into the aesthetic debate (was it an opera at all?). Thomson concluded thus: “I don’t mind his being a light composer and I don’t mind his trying to be a serious one. But I do mind his falling between two stools.”

  Falling between two stools was, in fact, the essence of Gershwin’s genius. He led at all times a double life: as music-theater professional and concert composer, as highbrow artist and lowbrow entertainer, as all-American kid and immigrants’ son, as white man and “white Negro.” Porgy performed the monumental feat of reconciling the rigidity of Western notated music with the African-American principle of improvised variation. In the end, Gershwin reunited two sides of the composer’s job that should never have been separated to begin with, and he came as close as any composer of the day—his chief rival was Kurt Weill—to the alldevouring, high-low art of Mozart and Verdi.

  Tragically, Gershwin did not live to fulfill his entire vision. Not long before his sudden death in 1937, of a brain tumor, he told his sister: “I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface of what I want to do.”