20 Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists

Abstract

Abstract On February 12, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin (1898-1937), premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Soon a group of other composers joined him in a brief but intense movement to produce “highbrow jazz”, including John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, and William Grant Still. The first three made their careers in concert music, and the last straddled both popular music and concert music. At the same time, parallel forays were being made by European modernists seeking a means of mediating between the rarefied aesthetic terrain of high modernism and the more accessible plains of jazz. Gershwin may have taken his biggest artistic leap of the mid-1920s with another work, the Concerto in F, which represented a more ambitious attempt to bridge independent musical categories. One of the trendsetters in the crossover movement was the jazz-band conductor Paul Whiteman (1890-1967).