This concert is called Classics à Go-Go because it presents certain works as not only representative of the marriage of jazz and classical music into a kind of urbanist style, but also works which have become fixed in the consciousness of popular culture. Popular Culture- the phrase is a kind of misnomer. I define it as those products of arts, commerce and leisure, whether it may be concrete, like an image or symbol, such as the peace sign, or intangible, such as a song or an expression, such as “cool,” that become part of the lexicon of everyday language and communication between various cultures. That sounds like an impressive status for Popular Culture, but in truth, most people express disdain when it comes to Popular Culture, because, like most things in mass psychology, when it becomes popular, even the word “cool” is no longer cool. Popularity usually breeds mediocrity or contempt or the lowest common denominator, and perhaps it explains , rather stereotypically, why some things become popular and others dont.
Therein lies the enimga in the phrase: Popular Culture. Everyone wants to be an individual in this mass, and we all hold on to our own symbols of individuality and uniqueness to set us apart from everyone else, to take us out of the popular culture mainstream. There is nothing worse than to know you are just like everyone else. To make it even more confusing, there is perhaps nothing more horrible than to be isolated and never a part of the popular culture. Who wants to be an intellectual elitist or a social pariah? So that is what makes it difficult. Composers may be famous for a work they think rather simple, and ignored for what the composer thinks is the real masterpiece. These works, like many others, find enough popularity that it eventually “crosses over,”gaining more public acceptance even at its own expense. As this is a classical music concert, what does this discussion have to do with our program? Just as we have done in previous concerts, OrchestraX takes our final exploration into the synthesis of jazz and classical music to determine just what makes classical music popular and exposed beyond the concert stage itself.
The answer is actually very simple. The composers in America during the 20th Century had to take that mass melting pot of the American city and somehow find a unique and individual voice to make their music relevant. In so doing, they defined American Music for the concert stage, they straddled the lines between high brow and low brow art and they made listeners of music aware of the extramusical aspects of composition and performance that lead it to attain some sort of Popular Culture status.
Leonard Bernstein was perhaps the greatest example of this crossover. He was not only the most successful Broadway composer of his time, but also the most important conductor of serious music in his time. Despite his lifetime struggle to be known equally for his serious works as his popular ones, his compositions for the concert stage are now regarded as staples of the repertoire and among the best works of the 20th Century. I remember asking him when I had the chance to study with him during the premiere of his last opera, A Quiet Place, while in Houston, whether I should pursue “popular music” or “classical music.” His answer set me straight: “Music is music, man.” And so, we can rightfully call Prelude, Fugues and Riffs simply music, but what it does, and what Bernstein did so well in West Side Story and On the Town, is it combines concert music and jazz, in this case the Baroque form of Prelude and Fugue being complimented by a series of riffs ( a riff is the same as a motif- a short, repeated melodic figure).
Just as it is in West Side Story, Bernstein takes the panorama of the American city, in his case, programmatically portraying the early beatniks and swingers of the streets of New York in the 50’s. By taking two idioms, one based on structured theory, the other based on improvisation, and two forms of social expression, one being serious music normally reserved for the rich, with the music popularized by the everyman of 1950’s New York, Bernstein managed to make his music at once both popular and serious. It was his original voice, but it was material that was decidely familiar to audiences. Even more so, his rhythmically driving music challenged the audience to not only sit and listen. In doing this, Bernstein contributed to changing the nature of what one calls classical music.
But he was not the first, of course. One early precedent in popularizing Classical Music is found in the social satire of Kurt Weill. In the 1920s, during the artistically rich period of the Weimar Republic in Berlin, Bertolt Brecht completed sketches of his German adaptation of the 1728 English satire, The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay. Brecht approached the composer Kurt Weill to supply music to his play having collaborated the previous year on Mahagonny. The work was finished in July 1928 and put into rehearsal on August 1st. An air of disaster hung over The Three-Penny Opera during its rehearsals. But after it opened it was an immediate success.. The show was performed more than 4,000 times in over 100 German theaters within a year of its premiere. Within five years, it had been performed in over 10,000 performances through Europe. It was made into movies in both German and French, and translated into eighteen languages.
In Mark Blitzstein’s 1954 adaptation for Broadway, it ran for six years and 2,500 performances, becoming at that time the longest-running musical in American theatrical history. Mack the Knife is now so much a part of Popular Culture that very often audiences who are familiar with the song have no idea of its origins.
Like the original Beggar’s Opera, The Three-Penny Opera mocks the conventions of bourgeois society in the story and those of bourgeois art in the form and the music. The work drew from Weill a precedent-setting score that mixed concert and popular genres from the beer taverns and dance halls in a way that influenced many later theater composers, including Bernstein and Sondheim. Perhaps even more than Gershwin, and like Bernstein, Weill had made classical music part of popular culture by portraying popular culture, specifically the seedier and therefore more colorful side of it in his concert work.
But Weills contribution to the Popular Culture was largely limited. Despite the success of Three Penny Opera, and his other works and film scores, Kurt Weill is still considered too much of an academics darling for all his repertoire to be as much a part of the Popular Culture as Bernstein or Gershwin. Certainly, Leonard Bersntein’s maverick broadcast program, the Young Peoples Guide to Music, did more to make both Bernstein and his music popular. But Gershwin, without having to host his own television show, did even better. He got others to popularize it for him. How many times has Rhapsody in Blue been used for commercials or films? Can we not hear its famous melody without thinking of United Airlines? But it may be the modernized, orchestrated version that got us there. Had it been left in its original form, it might never have gone beyond the concert stage. What was its story and how did it find its place at the top of Popular Culture?
Paul Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert, performed on February 12, 1924 was the “Experiment in Modern Music” that launched George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The occasion also marked Gershwin’s first appearance as a concert pianist performing his own work. Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to contribute a “serious” piano composition for the recital. At this point in his life, Gershwin was highly successful. He lived a dual life in the world of classical music and in the realm of popular music. However, he wished to start a fresh approach to music that would portray the spirit of the American people. In an article by Jane Erb, Gershwin’s style was his assimilation of European, jazz and black styles of music into Gershwin’s unique style of tunes. Ira Gershwin, George’s brother and lyricist, bestowed the work with the more sophisticated title Rhapsody in Blue.
Believing the project to be a prank, Gershwin dismissed the idea until an announcement in the New York Tribune stated that “an American Rhapsody” written by Gershwin would be presented at the concert. Unbelievably, in a week’s time, Gershwin composed a piano version of Rhapsody in Blue.
Whiteman’s arranger, Ferde Grofe, developed the orchestration using markings from Gershwin’s original score. The clarinet opening notes, described as a “glissando” (a run up the scale), was compared to a high wire balancing act combined with the various sounds of a city. Again, like Weill and Bernstein, the city life was central both to the inspiration and the composition of the work. From the time of its premiere, Gershwin himself recorded it on piano roll and toured extensively, improvising the solo piano as he saw fit. It wasn’t until the Ferde Grofe full orchestra version that we know today did the Rhapsody settle into its present Popular form. But the original jazz band version from 1924 is that true expression of an American City in music. And it is this version, with Marcus Roberts’ original improvisations, done in the spirit of Gershwin himself, with the city lights of Houston surrounding us, that we perfom in these concerts in order to emphasize this urban sound on the concert stage. This is an idea we will return to.
“If you want to understand America and all its riddles,” writes composer Michael Daugherty, “sooner or later you will have to deal with (Dead) Elvis.” Certainly, no other character in American History defines Popular Culture as much as “the King.” Presley the rock idol of the 50’s to Presley the junkie, kitschy Vegas act before his death are so inextricably linked to American Popular Culture that is difficult to know what is fact and what is fiction. This hold that the Elvis mystique has on Popular Culture stems partly from his music, his voice, his good looks and his revolutionary hip swinging. But it was more than that. It was his death that ultimately got him on the permanent map of everlasting fame. Look at Dean, and Monroe and Jackie- O. Death, indeed, is a career move. The composer deals with him by having a bassoonist play variations on the plainchant Dies Irae, (itself a chamber study on his larger orchestral work of the same material, the Metropolis Symphony) with a little bit of “O Sole Mio” thrown in for fun. The orchestra makes dry comments in the idiom of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat (in fact it contains the same orchestration). One must ask, though: why a bassoon? Because no other insturment in the orchestra could wail, scream, cry and get out a low register ‘Thankyouverymuch” in musical form. Somehow, Daugherty went beyond the everyman of the urban environment or the underground so musically portrayed by Weill, Gershwin and Bernstein. Daugherty, a product of 50’s-60’s television, found his popular connections not in the un-named, but in those names recognizable to the everyman- those heroes of Popular Culture. In this way, Daugherty is unique, creating musical connections between our sociological aassociations with figures like Elvis, and musical connotations to reflect their greatness and tragedy. His music both celebrates their invincible celebrity and their human frailty.
And so here is the final connection between all the pieces. Jazz, from its early roots swing or post modern expression, is infused in each compositional conception from the outset. It is inspired by urban life and popular icons and images that define what is at the core of city living. City living is always on the go, and therefore, these classics, in their bawdy, jazzy elements and forward pulsation are indeed à Go-Go. From the great neon signs of Vegas and Broadway to the sin city of Berlin to the very Aemrican myth of rising from rags to riches, all of this is heard in the heart of this music. Without them, we might not have had just American classical music. We might never have had American popular music at all.
