George Gershwin
When, on 24 October, APO Principal Clarinettist Gordon Richards rips into the opening notes of Rhapsody in Blue, no one will doubt for a second that George Gershwin was a genius composer.
What’s harder to answer is whether what he composed was classical or jazz. Rhapsody is shot through with blue notes and other jazz inflections, and yet it’s a piano concerto.
Ultimately, the question is moot: Gershwin was a composer of music, and drew his influences from the European tradition as well as the popular tunes he inhaled every time he strolled the streets of his hometown, New York.
Besides, in Gershwin’s music the classical/jazz distinction often lies in the interpretation. Take ‘Summertime’, from Porgy and Bess, as an example. When the soprano Cynthia Haymon sings it, in a famous recording with Simon Rattle and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, it’s classical. When Billie Holiday’s singing with Count Basie, it’s jazz. It’s a tribute to Gershwin’s ability that ‘Summertime’ sounds completely natural in either setting.
Kurt Weill
The European Twist
It’s a similar case for Kurt Weill, whose left-wing critique of capitalist decadence Die Dreigroschenoper found a home on Broadway as The Threepenny Opera, and is mostly famous these days for Bobby Darin’s cheery ditty ‘Mack the Knife’, which began life as a menacing song about a murderer.
Jazz was all the rage in 1920s Weimar Germany, when Weill wrote Die Dreigroschenoper. It was even more popular in France, where a number of African American musicians found an escape from the racism they faced in their segregated homeland. Francis Poulenc claimed not to like jazz, but his ballet Les Biches does a good job of hiding his distaste. The syncopations of the work’s ‘Rondeau’ and ‘Rag-Mazurka’ in particular show a clear debt to jazz. At a time when Paris was awash with the style, how could it be otherwise?
Francis Poulenc
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), despite eventually living in both Paris and New York, was Russian, and came to jazz from the perspective of an outsider. Even so, as the most rhythmically adept composer of his age, Stravinsky was perhaps inevitably attracted to the dancing pulses he heard coming from America. His most famous work in this vein was the Ebony Concerto, described by its composer as “a jazz concerto with a blues slow movement,” and written for the bandleader and clarinettist Woody Herman. By 1945, when he produced the concerto, Stravinsky had moved to America, but he had been writing jazz-influenced works since the late 1910s. The Soldier’s Tale (completed in 1918 – and to be performed by the APO in 2014) contains a ‘Ragtime’ dance and the same year saw a full work, also called Rag-Time, for 11 instruments.
Treemonisha
Giving Back
The influence didn’t go one way. The king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, wrote a ballet and two operas. The second of them, Treemonisha, has been performed with the soprano Kathleen Battle in the title role and recorded by that most establishment of classical music labels, Deutsche Grammophon.
Miles Davis
By the mid-1940s, Duke Ellington and his musical foil Billy Strayhorn were composing large-scale suites for jazz orchestra, including the ‘jazz symphony’ Black, Brown and Beige (1943).
A touch later, Miles Davis embarked on a series of collaborations with arranger Gil Evans. Among them was the album Sketches of Spain, which contains arrangements of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and ‘Will o’ the Wisp’, which classical fans will know as ‘Cancion del fuego fatuo’, from Manuel de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo. Miles and Evans also got together to produce a partly improvised, partly orchestrated jazz version of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Which is more or less where we came in…
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Music of its time 