14 February 2024. Gershwin | Self-care
100 years of Rhapsody in Blue // ‘Self love cannot flourish in isolation’. [#543]
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1: The Rhapsody in Blue problem
It is the 100th anniversary this week of the first performance of George Gershwin’s orchestral piece Rhapsody in Blue by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in New York. Gershwin had declined an invitation from Whiteman to write a ‘concerto-like piece’, because he didn’t have enough time to write it.
But Whiteman forced Gershwin’s hand by announcing the concert, and Gershwin’s piece, to the New York Tribune. The concert was subtitled ‘An Experiment in Modern Music’. Gershwin wrote the piece in a hurry, and it was orchestrated for the concert by the composer Ferde Grofé, who was Whiteman’s arranger, also in a hurry. (Grofé went on to write a further two arrangements over the next 20 years: there’s not a single canonical version.)
(The 1924 sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue. Via Wikipedia. Public domain)
The piece, with its soaring clarinet glissando at the start—an improvisation during rehearsals—and its syncopated rhythms, was an immediate success. The Paul Whiteman Orchestra played the piece 84 times in less than four years, and their recording sold a million copies.
These days, it is still one of the most programmed pieces by any American composer.
I was alerted to the centenary by the music writer Richard Williams, who has a short and rich piece about it on his Blue Moment blog. It is illustrated with a 78 rpm copy of the record that used to belong to his mother sitting beside a phonograph.
(78 rpm recording of Rhapsody in Blue. Photo Richard Williams, The Blue Moment)
Of course, you have to pause for a moment here. The Paul Whiteman Orchestra was aptly named. It was a white orchestra that had made a huge success of playing black music as part of a wider repertoire.1 And Gershwin was white as well, if from a first-generation Jewish-Russian family. Is Whiteman a populariser or an appropriater? Well, we know where the money ended up.
There’s a famous quote from Dizzy Gillespie when he was asked why they played bebop so fast, and he answered, ‘If the white man can’t play it, the white man can’t steal it.’ I’ve always wondered if his answer was a deliberate pun.
Williams’ post pointed me towards an article in the New York Times by the musican Ethan Iversen that addresses some of these issues. (I don’t normally reference the NYT here because it has an aggressive paywall, but this piece seems to be outside of that at the moment.)
Gershwin’s proposal was bold and obvious: Early forms of African American ragtime and blues had taken the nation by storm, and his job was to allude to those idioms in a virtuoso concerto. As a professional tunesmith and serious student of ragtime and early jazz piano, he was well suited for the task.
Iversen’s case is that the success of Rhapsody in Blue effectively killed off the idea that Gershwin was striving for, of a fusion between black American music and the music of the concert hall:
If the piece had been less successful, perhaps more could have been done to build on it. Instead, it has clogged the arteries of American music... The promise of a true fusion on the concert stage basically starts and ends with it. A hundred years later, most popular Black music is separate from the world of formal composition, while most American concert musicians can’t relate to a score with a folkloric attitude, let alone swing.
In turn, this has created what Iversen calls “the Gershwin problem”, for black musicians. The success of Gershwin’s concert pieces means that his reputation has eclipsed that of black musicians such as Duke Ellington:
Generally, histories of American music consider Gershwin more important than Ellington. Jazz musicians and connoisseurs would disagree; any mature Ellington LP beats out any recording of “Rhapsody in Blue.” There’s just no comparison in terms of depth of feeling, let alone swing. Ellington was usually debonair and reserved in public, but his stunning 1961 trio deconstruction of Gershwin’s “Summertime” documents a moment of losing his composure.
The pianist Herbie Hancock had similar misgivings when he embarked on his project Gershwin’s World in the 1990s. He discussed it in his memoir, Possibilities:
“Why should I make a record celebrating a great white American musician? Especially when that musician had gained fame by creating music in a style that was actually founded by Black musicians — who never got the credit, the fans or the money they so richly deserved. I knew I’d get flak from the Black community, and understandably so.”
Iversen is a bit forgiving about this. As he points out, the piece is written very early in the timeline of jazz music, and black musicians like Charley Christian took the piece back into the jazz repertoire. All the same, the jazz pianist Aaron Diehl says it acts as block to the music that Gershwin drew on for Rhapsody in Blue:
“The fundamental question is how to move beyond the nostalgia for this piece, and find viable musical solutions to a deeply rooted problem,” he said. “‘Rhapsody in Blue’ isn’t source material. James P. Johnson’s ‘ Carolina Shout ,’ Fats Waller’s ‘ Handful of Keys ’ and Jelly Roll Morton’s ‘ The Pearls ’ are source material.”
For Williams, Rhapsody in Blue was a ‘gateway drug’ that introduced him to syncopation and the flattened notes that are distinctive to the blues scale:
It didn’t take very long before I was following a path that led to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor... Pretty soon I’d worked out that an ounce of Ellington was worth a ton of Gershwin’s instrumental music, but I retain a respectful gratitude to “Rhapsody in Blue” and its role as a gateway, just as I do to The Glenn Miller Story and “Take Five”.
As for Williams in the 1950s, for me a decade or so later. My father had fairly conservative tastes in classical music when I was young, with a deep love of Mozart. But his record collection included a copy of Rhapsody in Blue. Of course it did. In an age when it was hard to find music, listening to it set me off on a journey of discovery.
2: ‘Self-love cannot flourish in isolation’
It is Valentine’s Day today, and perhaps opportunistically, the radical ecological magazine Resurgence has promoted an article about the idea of “self-love” as a radical act. It is by Raiyah Butt, a South Asian woman based in East London. The original article appeared in The Lipstick Politico.
Butt starts with a quote from the late American activist bell hooks:
“Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self love cannot flourish in isolation.”
The phrase “ourselves and others” is important here:
She views love as a radical praxis both to ourselves and to others, the “willingness to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth through acts of care, respect, knowing and assuming responsibility”.
(Amsterdam Art Market, by Jennifer Stottle Taylor. Source: Fine Art America).
Raiyah Butt suffers from depression and low self-esteem, as she explains in the article. As for many others, this was exacerbated by the pandemic. It’s hard to look back at the pandemic, and at the spiking increases in poor mental health that were reported recently, and not wonder if we’re watching a long aftershock. (Of course, mental health outcomes had been worsening for some years before that.)
But, in the age of advanced capitalism, our needs are packaged up as products and sold back to us through highly mediated marketing and advertising. And so it is with the idea of self-care:
Self-care has a very wide definition, and nowadays it can mean anything from reading a book to putting on a face mask to quitting your job. Its once meaningful lessons grounded in radical theory have snowballed into the Self Care Industrial Complex, championed by the carefully curated aesthetics of Instagram influencers and the beauty brand that wants you to buy the aforementioned face mask.
This is how this works at the granular level:
Recently I saw an advert on TV for a nutritional supplement company, with British singer Cheryl Cole as the poster girl for health, clear skin and a good life. “Self-care starts here!” she says. Cue a montage of her getting her hair blow-dried by three people, and sitting on top of a yoga ball in a meditation pose. “Namaste,” she says as she winks at the camera, and I’ve never cringed so hard.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the idea of self-care has been radically re-appropriated, and politicised, notably by black women activists:
In an article for Refinery29, Kathleen Newman-Bremang traces the roots of self-care back to radical Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde, who wrote about self-care in her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light. Lorde states: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
In that article, Newman-Bremang observes that that idea of “self-care”, as in taking care of yourself, is hard, even impossible, when your community is under attack. These attacks, in my interpretation of what’s being said here, tale the form of both fast and slow violence.
For her, self-care is tied to community care – to nurture your community politically, socially and within your relationships, because these will nurture you back when government institutions fail said communities.
This was, of course, amplified during the pandemic: “South Asians living in the UK were two to three times more likely to die from Covid-19 than members of other ethnic groups.”. Self-care, in short, doesn’t go far enough:
(Y)ou can’t slap a self-care sticker onto structural issues that have direct consequences for both our physical and our mental health. That’s why investing in your community is important, because that’s who is left when the government’s policies aren’t protecting you, you’re burnt out but you don’t have the means to take time off work, or you have a long-term mental health condition that needs help and support.
At one level, she suggests, this is about refusing the individualism that capitalism always encourages:
communities working together are harder to break down than individuals who are taught to just fend for themselves.
And this is a politics you can try in your own neighbourhood. For Raiyah Butt, it starts with making a connection with a local food vendor at a Pakistani food stall whose produce reminds her of her background and family. You can’t make the connection with youself without making a connection with others:
hooks starts the chapter on communal love with a quote from Parker Palmer: “Only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others.” I carry that with me on my journey of self-love and self-care. Making sure your life is sustainable is to make lifestyle choices that are as healthy and beneficial to you as you can, but to do that as well as nurturing the bonds with those around you, bettering each other’s conditions, helping each other grow and overcome the challenges we face.
j2t#543
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In fairness, Wikipedia notes: “He encouraged upcoming African American musical talents and planned to hire black musicians, but his management persuaded him that doing so would destroy his career due to racial tension and America's segregation of that time.”