With reference to Gershwins Concerto in F, evaluate Gershwins

compositional approach to standard classical forms in relation to his

roots in popular music.
George Gershwin (1898-1937) began his musical career as a song plugger a jazz
composer for shows on Broadway, working on New York Citys Tin Pan Alley with
the rest of his showtune-writing contemporaries. At the age of 26, he wrote Rhapsody
in Blue, his first foray into writing classical music, although this still was infused with
elements of jazz. Prior to this, Gershwins works were comprised of songs
predominantly for Broadway and its singers. After the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue,
in which he performed the piano solo, Walter Damrosch, a conductor and the director
of the New York Symphony Orchestra, commissioned to write another classical
work this time a concerto. Gershwin was to write the piano concerto in a more
classical style and also to orchestrate it himself, as Rhapsody in Blue had been in fact
orchestrated by Ferde Grof, a professional arranger and orchestrator. At the time,
Gershwin was quoted to have said, [I bought] four or five books on musical structure
to find out what the concerto form really was. However, it is almost certain that he
would have known about the classically designed concerto structure of Haydn and
Mozart, if not have been familiar with it. This structure involved three movements:
the first in a sonata form, a slower second movement and a brisk, lively third.
Gershwin also knew that other well-known composers had taken this classical
structure, as well as the sonata form, and manipulated them according to their own
desires.
As for his compositional approach to standard classical forms, Gershwin spent much
time and effort studying traditional classical compositional techniques in preparation
for the orchestration of his piano concerto, as it was a task that he had never
encountered in such magnitude. All his songs and classical works, up until that point,
had been orchestrated by someone else. Although, as a teenager, he would have been
exposed to Romantic and Classical concertos at concerts, and was influenced by the
works of Edward MacDowell, a classical composer who also wrote songs and short
pieces for piano, Gershwin had not yet had any proper classical orchestration training.
He was influenced, classically speaking, by American composers such as MacDowell,
who themselves imitated the European Romantic greats as Schumann, Liszt, Wagner
and Grieg. He probably had little knowledge of the more experimental composers
such as Charles Ives and Charles Griffes due to their limited popularity. Gershwin
liked to view himself as a traditionalist in terms of classical composing, which
explains why he was determined to not only orchestrate his concerto on his own, but
also use proper traditional techniques to do with counterpoint, melody and harmony.
He says, to express the richness of [American] life fully, a composer must employ
melody, harmony and counterpoint as great composers of the past have employed
them. This clearly suggests that he respected and wanted to emulate the past greats
and therefore used classical compositional techniques, for example, shaping his piece
with reference to the traditional overall concerto and specific movement structure.
Gershwin also dismissed the notion perpetuated by critics that Concerto in F was a
jazz concerto, asserting that the jazz rhythms were only used in accordance with
more symphonic lines. This shows a direct rejection of his jazz history, and implies
that he wanted this work to only be analysed as a classical concert hall piece.

Therefore, it can be asserted that, while he was not avant-garde as a classical

composer at the time, Gershwin was being experimental in his own right, moving
directly away from his jazz-oriented comfort zone. Furthermore, because he had not
received any compositional training, and was essentially self-taught in the art of
classical orchestration, allowances must be made for perceived clumsiness and poor
structure. The orchestration itself received divided reviews from the musical
community: Stravinsky was said to have thought it was genius, whereas Prokofiev
thought it was rubbish. Steven E. Gilbert, in his book The Music of Gershwin, remarks
that Gershwin, in contrast to his previous Rhapsody in Blue where the melody lines
were singly developed in similar fashion to Broadway songs, had now demonstrated
examples of contrapuntal layering, where multiple melodies were developed at the
same time. Gilbert goes on to state that the connections between themes and the
tightly woven melodies in Concerto in F prove that Gershwin was a mature classical
composer. However, it is likely that these ideas stemmed from Gershwins
subconscious, rather than were strictly planned. Finally, Gershwin also utilised many
standard concerto tropes, such as a cadenza for the solo piano in the lyrical second
movement that resembles Cesar Francks Symphonic Variations for piano and
orchestra, and experimented with cyclic form where the themes in the first movement
are recalled in the second and third. Therefore, Gershwin has deliberately learnt and
used classical techniques in order to compose Concerto in F in a traditional manner.
Yet, like a seventh to the tonic, Gershwin still manages to be lured to his background
in popular music in Concerto in F, despite his traditionalist ideology. It is evident that
Gershwins comfort zone lay in the jazz and the blues in the songs that he had been
writing on Tin Pan Alley for he was hugely successful at what he did and many
signature jazz themes and rhythms infiltrated his concert hall works. Gershwin also
recognised the potential for a symbiotic relationship between jazz and classical music,
and while this was not the aim of his work on Concerto in F, it is evident in its
rhythm, tonality and, to some extent, structure. In the first movement, Gershwins
sketched outline indicates a priority being placed on rhythm and colour, and he uses
these elements to recall a popular jazz style. The rhythm of dance craze of the 1920s,
the Charleston, is used and repeated extensively in this movement as a motif. This is
evidence of how Gershwin was lead inevitably back to his popular roots whilst
writing Concerto in F. The first movement is written in a very free sonata structure,
but in lieu of development, Gershwin chooses to use a new theme from a plethora he
has at the ready. This is typical of a composer who has not yet had conventional
classical composition lessons, and is probably what he would have done if he was
writing a song for Broadway. Again, this is demonstrative of Gershwins firmly
established origins in popular music, as he repurposes techniques in popular music in
his classical works. Possibly the most indicative of Gershwins background popular
music is the tonality, including the blues themes that appear throughout Concerto in
F. Both the first and second movements have blues elements and the third movement
strays far from its home tonality of F major. The piano begins the concerto with an
upward glissando reminiscent of Rhapsody in Blue before introducing a lazy blues
theme. The second movement has hints of both blues and klezmer, a style of modal
music originating in Eastern Europe that is improvisatory in style and dance-like. As
notes cannot be slid on the piano, Gershwin chose to use many chromatic chords to
create the effect of notes that fall between the cracks, as blues musicians would
have done on other instruments. In this movement, the entire string section pizzicato 4
note chords to accompany the piano in order to emulate banjos, which were prominent

in the rhythmic section of jazz bands. The third movement deviates from the key of F
major significantly for most of the beginning, finally arriving after 111 bars. This
movement is wild and violently upbeat, and exemplifies Gershwins originality, as
nothing could have come out of a textbook. Gershwin has also written musical
gestures that seem to be lifted straight out of a Broadway musical. For example, close
to the beginning of the first movement, the orchestra plays a series of Broadwayesque flourishes complete with cymbals and rapid crescendos. Towards the end of the
third movement, Gershwin halts the concerto with a huge gong stroke, again a true
Broadway gesture, although Tchaikovsky used a similar technique at the end of his
Little Russian Symphony. Nevertheless, it is evident the gestures Gershwin used in
Concerto in F demonstrate a clear link between his classical work and his roots in
popular music.
In conclusion, Gershwins Concerto in F is the result of a popular music composer
attempting to write a work that was, although not completely foreign, distinctly out of
his comfort zone. Gershwins compositional approach was purely classical, as he
liked to viewed himself as a traditional composer, however, his path was unavoidably
skewed to include the elements of jazz and blues that he had so far built his career out
of.