Only mildly implicit here is the suggestion that the shtetl and the ghetto, so to speak, would have to mix it up in this piece in order to capture this “modern” moment like lightning in a bottle. a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America,” a symphonic rendering of a “vast melting pot, our unduplicated national pep, or of blues, our metropolitan madness.” 2 It’s the rhythms of a locomotive, Gershwin would insist years later, that shook something loose in him while traveling from New York to Boston, sparking in him a vision of “a definite plot of the piece. Perhaps Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is closer to being “a sonic manifestation of the American Dream” 1 than the original performance was, but Gershwin famously participated in this kind of mythmaking from the start: that is, from 1924, when orchestra leader Paul Whiteman premiered the work at New York City’s Aeolian Hall.
So we begin in the register of both seduction and weariness, a clarinet glissando synonymous with the languor and steaminess of precoital mating calls, of postcoital exhaustion and other bedroom rituals moves swiftly out the window of cramped tenement housing into the bustling streets below where European immigrant hustle meets the grandeur of metropolitan possibility framed by “colorline” encounters, charged interracial socialites, and the dizzying opportunity to make art and commerce out of this noisy urban “experiment.” We are being teased, abruptly invited to linger for no more than a moment in the billowy flutter of a flirtatious trill.
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