8 - Invisibility: ideology and reception

Summary

In the history books

At the time of its premiere many listeners (though not all the music critics) saw Rhapsody in Blue as an embodiment of both jazz and musical modernism, a novel and titillating emblem of the Jazz Age. Modern music was a hot subject in Manhattan that winter. Besides Varèse's Octandre, which followed close on the première of his Hyperprism, the previous months had seen the New York premières of Schoenberg's Herzgewächse and Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps. It was natural for some critics to hear Gershwin's Rhapsody as an American retort. Henry Osgood, a Gershwin supporter, claimed that Stravinsky's Le sacre and Honegger's Pacific 231 “had nothing to say and said it cleverly, but Gershwin spoke with intelligence and conviction.” The conservative Daniel Gregory Mason, by contrast, dismissed Le sacre and the Rhapsody together as “tweedledum and tweedledee.” But as Carol Oja has documented, the modernist composers grouped around Aaron Copland (who had arrived back in New York from Paris six months after the première of the Rhapsody) soon drew the line between themselves and Gershwin. Paul Rosenfeld, the most progressive music critic on the scene, articulated their view in unflattering comparisons drawn between Copland and Gershwin. Rosenfeld brusquely dismissed Gershwin as a

gifted composer of the lower, unpretentious order; yet there is some question whether his vision permits him an association with the artists. He seems to have little feeling for reality. […]