Clarinets aren’t featured much in contemporary music unless one counts their use in high school and college band performances during football halftimes. True, a clarinet can be heard in “American Pie,” “Beat It,” “Blowin’ in the Wind," “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and even “Born To Be Wild,” but generally, the instrument doesn’t lend itself to typical rock songs though clarinets have long been a part of jazz and classical music. With regard to the former the clarinetists Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Pete Fountain among many others performed during the thirties, forties, and fifties, many of them associated more with the sounds of Bourbon Street than with those of Motown. Classical compositions like Von Weber’s Caprice Moderne features the ebony woodwind, and pieces by Copland, Brahms, Debussy, and Finzi make it a centerpiece. But no use of a clarinet in music is as unique as that which audiences hear at the beginning of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The work opens with a clarinet running up two and a half octaves to a glissando, that rather famous slide of sound. I’ve read that it wasn’t Gershwin, but rather the clarinetist Ross Gorman who converted the composer’s original trill into the glissando that has since been the trademark sound of the concerto.
The clarinet then gives way to the piano though it does resurface not too long after the glissando. But that beginning, that memorable beginning captures the attention of the audience and sets up the nature of the music that follows. That Gershwin called the work “Rhapsody in Blue” supposedly stems from his attempt to combine American culture’s many features in what he called “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” *
The word rhapsody derives from the Greek words for “a verse work, a recitation of an epic poem, and a canto” and from the cognate word for the “reciter of epic poems.” Think of Homer. Even more ancient is the word’s relationship to “the person that stitches a poem together.” Again, think Homer. The Illiad and the Odyssey are works that have many tales within them. A rhapsodos put the individual verse tales together. Gershwin attempted to do the same, not in verse, but rather with American lifestyle as portrayed in music. And he begins the work with that glissando, a perfect way to “stitch” something together. No abrupt stops.
Not to interrupt your train of thought, but I thought it might be a good point here to mention versions of the work that you can hear and watch on YouTube. There’s the scene from the movie, of course, available on YouTube from the Warner Archive Collection. The sound is black-and-white 1940s movie-ish, so…not very good, but the glissando is worth hearing. ** Another performance of the work on YouTube features the pianist Khatia Buniatishvili. The sound on this one is superb, the orchestration is equally great, and the second trill by the clarinetist reveals what I might call a great example of “stitching,” as the clarinet gives way to a muted trumpet (at 1:23-1:26).
Sure, I know you’re wondering why I’ve chosen to focus on Rhapsody’s glissando. Two reasons, one having to do with culture and the other with you--and me and everyone else. Have you noticed how culture changes in two ways? There’s the slide, a gradual morphing from one form to the next, hardly noticeable during the change, and there’s the punctuated change. The latter might best be exemplified by the Great Depression and the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, two world wars had their abrupt and rather instantaneous effect, but even those protracted conflicts led to a cultural glissando.
The second reason for my focus is more personal for all of us. Our own lives are often gliding changes, a slide from one state to another, like going from rather unaware toddler to child, to teen, to young adult, to mature adult, interrupted, as you know, by some staccato of events, moments of change that might be captured in the statements “And then I realized…” or “And then I came to the realization that….”
It might serve each of us to examine our own personality glissandos, but the analysis is difficult because the changes we made were as smooth as the beginning of Gershwin’s Rhapsody. We were “someone” who became “someone else” or “more of the someone we once were,” and we can’t pinpoint the measure, to use the musical term, when the change occurred. Possibly, we can only point to a time, a duration, when we “were changing.”
If you do choose to listen to the version that features Buniatishvili, note what happens at 15:45 in the piece. There’s one of those abrupt changes that I see as an analog to cultural events like the Great Depression and “I came to the realization that….”
You are, as I understand human life, a rhapsodist, stitching together a story that only you can tell. It is episodic at times, and some of the episodes seem to stack one on another without much transition, but generally, you stitch your life in a series of glissandos. At times the work you compose appears to come from different instruments, as in that change from clarinet to muted trumpet at 1:23 in the Khatia Buniatishvili version with the Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Leonard Slatkin.
I won’t refrain from a refrain here. You can enhance your self-knowledge by looking over the entire composition of your life to see those glissandos you lived through without noticing them at the time. It’s those glissandos that make the abrupt changes noticeable.
.
* Goldberg, Isaac. (1958) [1931]. George Gershwin: A Study in American Music. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k. As I mentioned above, the sound is not very good. I prefer the version by the Orchestre National de Lyon with Khatia Buniatisvili, but Gershwin himself might have signed off on the movie version had he lived beyond age 38.
0:54 / 17:46
Khatia Buniatishvili - Rhapsody in Blue
0:54 / 17:46
Khatia Buniatishvili - Rhapsody in Blue
The clarinet then gives way to the piano though it does resurface not too long after the glissando. But that beginning, that memorable beginning captures the attention of the audience and sets up the nature of the music that follows. That Gershwin called the work “Rhapsody in Blue” supposedly stems from his attempt to combine American culture’s many features in what he called “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” *
The word rhapsody derives from the Greek words for “a verse work, a recitation of an epic poem, and a canto” and from the cognate word for the “reciter of epic poems.” Think of Homer. Even more ancient is the word’s relationship to “the person that stitches a poem together.” Again, think Homer. The Illiad and the Odyssey are works that have many tales within them. A rhapsodos put the individual verse tales together. Gershwin attempted to do the same, not in verse, but rather with American lifestyle as portrayed in music. And he begins the work with that glissando, a perfect way to “stitch” something together. No abrupt stops.
Not to interrupt your train of thought, but I thought it might be a good point here to mention versions of the work that you can hear and watch on YouTube. There’s the scene from the movie, of course, available on YouTube from the Warner Archive Collection. The sound is black-and-white 1940s movie-ish, so…not very good, but the glissando is worth hearing. ** Another performance of the work on YouTube features the pianist Khatia Buniatishvili. The sound on this one is superb, the orchestration is equally great, and the second trill by the clarinetist reveals what I might call a great example of “stitching,” as the clarinet gives way to a muted trumpet (at 1:23-1:26).
Sure, I know you’re wondering why I’ve chosen to focus on Rhapsody’s glissando. Two reasons, one having to do with culture and the other with you--and me and everyone else. Have you noticed how culture changes in two ways? There’s the slide, a gradual morphing from one form to the next, hardly noticeable during the change, and there’s the punctuated change. The latter might best be exemplified by the Great Depression and the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, two world wars had their abrupt and rather instantaneous effect, but even those protracted conflicts led to a cultural glissando.
The second reason for my focus is more personal for all of us. Our own lives are often gliding changes, a slide from one state to another, like going from rather unaware toddler to child, to teen, to young adult, to mature adult, interrupted, as you know, by some staccato of events, moments of change that might be captured in the statements “And then I realized…” or “And then I came to the realization that….”
It might serve each of us to examine our own personality glissandos, but the analysis is difficult because the changes we made were as smooth as the beginning of Gershwin’s Rhapsody. We were “someone” who became “someone else” or “more of the someone we once were,” and we can’t pinpoint the measure, to use the musical term, when the change occurred. Possibly, we can only point to a time, a duration, when we “were changing.”
If you do choose to listen to the version that features Buniatishvili, note what happens at 15:45 in the piece. There’s one of those abrupt changes that I see as an analog to cultural events like the Great Depression and “I came to the realization that….”
You are, as I understand human life, a rhapsodist, stitching together a story that only you can tell. It is episodic at times, and some of the episodes seem to stack one on another without much transition, but generally, you stitch your life in a series of glissandos. At times the work you compose appears to come from different instruments, as in that change from clarinet to muted trumpet at 1:23 in the Khatia Buniatishvili version with the Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Leonard Slatkin.
I won’t refrain from a refrain here. You can enhance your self-knowledge by looking over the entire composition of your life to see those glissandos you lived through without noticing them at the time. It’s those glissandos that make the abrupt changes noticeable.
.
* Goldberg, Isaac. (1958) [1931]. George Gershwin: A Study in American Music. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k. As I mentioned above, the sound is not very good. I prefer the version by the Orchestre National de Lyon with Khatia Buniatisvili, but Gershwin himself might have signed off on the movie version had he lived beyond age 38.
0:54 / 17:46
Khatia Buniatishvili - Rhapsody in Blue
0:54 / 17:46
Khatia Buniatishvili - Rhapsody in Blue
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