A RECITAL AND
AN EXPERIMENT (1923–24)
ON JANUARY 30, 1924, READERS of the Boston Transcript were treated to an astute, open-minded commentary from reviewer Henry Taylor Parker on an unusual concert given the preceding evening in Jordan Hall: a song recital by mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier, assisted by two accompanists, Frederick Persson and George Gershwin—the latter in his second appearance ever on a concert stage. Gauthier’s recital repeated a program she had presented the previous November 1, in New York’s Aeolian Hall; instead of Persson, Max Jaffe had assisted then, but Gershwin played at both.1
From the start, Gauthier’s goal was to make a statement by complementing standard recital fare with something new and different, and she had enlisted music critic Carl Van Vechten to help her plan the program. When he suggested she sing a selection of American songs, “her face betrayed her lack of interest,” but when he specified “jazz,” “her expression brightened.” Gauthier settled on a program she called a “Concert of Ancient and Modern Vocal Music,” which included six groups of songs: “ancient,” including Byrd, Purcell, and Bellini; and “modern,” including Hungarian, German, American, Austrian, British, and French. The American portion consisted of music from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. Convinced that a significant moment was at hand, H. T. Parker attended both the New York and the Boston performances.
The American songs were a big success. In Boston as well as New York, Parker reported, the audiences “smiled and stirred and clapped to every one of her seven ‘jazz-songs;’ would not be stilled until it was obvious that she knew no more.” There was a clear connection between jazz music and the world in which present-day Americans live, he noted, and serious concerts ought not “to draw the shades and lock the doors upon a present that happens to intrude from the sidewalk.” Simply being serious does not make a human activity meaningful. “ ‘Jazz-songs’ are no more ‘debasing’ in the ‘serious’ concert-hall than they are when they tootle across the summer air from your neighbor’s gramophones; while in the recital-room a Gauthier sings them far better.”2 Parker’s view was that if the music was good enough, recitalists should sing it and their audiences would embrace it.
Not only was George Gershwin’s role as pianist essential to Gauthier’s performance, but he had helped her choose the American songs: Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Kern’s “Siren Song,” Walter Donaldson’s “Carolina in the Morning,” and three of his own numbers, “Innocent Ingenue Baby,” “Swanee,” and “Stairway to Paradise.” (The pair also prepared a fourth Gershwin song, “Do It Again,” as an encore. These seven songs were the extent of Gauthier’s popular repertoire, as the audience realized when she repeated her encore number.) And as Parker noted, Gershwin “diversified [the piano parts] with cross-rhythms; wove them into a pliant and outspringing counterpoint; set in pauses and accents; sustained cadences; gave character to the measures wherein the singer’s voice was still. As musician, not as song-smith, he played.”
Deems Taylor, a prominent composer, and music critic for the New York World, wrote that when Gauthier made an offstage exit after the first song groups, she reappeared “followed by a tall, black-haired young man who . . . bore under his arm a small bundle of sheet music with lurid red and black and yellow covers.” What happened next startled everyone:
Eva Gauthier sang “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” . . . She just sang it, as seriously and skillfully as she had sung Bartók’s “Harom oeszi Koenuycaepp,” while young Mr. Gershwin began to do mysterious and fascinating rhythmic and contrapuntal stunts with the accompaniment. And when she had finished she faced a new audience. . . . Here was music they didn’t have to think about or intellectualise over, or take solemnly. They didn’t have to do anything about it, in fact, except listen to it—which was easy—and enjoy it—which was unavoidable.3
Then Taylor summed up his own feelings about the American songs performed in Aeolian Hall on that Thursday evening:
I hear a good deal of jazz, and of course oceans of “good” music, but I had never before heard a concert singer take jazz in her stride, as it were, placing it beside other contemporary music without comment or apology. And I must say, that jazz group touched something that the other music didn’t. It had nothing to do with art, perhaps; it was a more purely human reaction, a thrill of sudden recognition of something native, something of which I was a part. . . . Bartók’s Hungarian folk song was “a song of the people” . . . but so is “Ingenue Baby.”
Gauthier’s program implicitly questioned the divide separating classical and popular music. “If an occasional jazz number should creep timidly into our concert lives,” Taylor wondered, “who knows but that American audiences might learn to listen to music AS MUSIC, without bothering about its social position?” And once they have learned “to enjoy good music, even when it is light, they might learn to reject bad music, even when it is heavy.”
The concert was greeted as a landmark, especially by Taylor, whose Sunday column, appearing a few days after his review, was one of the first substantial writings to treat Gershwin as an artist. Never before had popular songs been included in a classical recital, nor sung by a singer who performed them as if they were art songs, even as her accompanist emphatically did not. The evening was a tug-of-war for anyone familiar with the world of classical music. On one side stood the recital format’s traditional atmosphere: the formality of the surroundings, the presumed dignity of the European repertoire, the singing in four different languages, and the conventions of cultivated vocal technique and text declamation. On the other stood popular songs, familiar enough in idiom, language, and in some cases musical detail to relax the listeners’ attitude, or to delight them in what they were hearing, or both. The presence of both forces, and the juxtapositions they introduced—art song and jazz song, singer and accompanist, one mood to another—made for an evening of emotional jolts. The popular–classical split itself became a catalyst for reflection—and, in Gershwin’s case, action.
As his first appearance on a concert stage, Eva Gauthier’s recital introduced Gershwin to a segment of the public that, even if they recognized his name as the composer of “Swanee,” knew nothing of his pianistic talent or physical presence. And the music critics in attendance supplied a fresh kind of feedback for a composer whose work had only been judged publicly, if at all, by drama critics. This jury critiqued what they heard according to standards set by the composers and performers, European and American, who had shaped the traditions of the concert hall. When Deems Taylor or Henry Taylor Parker judged a song, they weighed its merits in a context that included a historical past as well as present-day experience.4 But this performance, and its reception, proved it was possible for popular music to receive that level of judgment.
In retrospect, Gauthier’s recital also brought to mind the possibility that Gershwin the Broadway songwriter could produce a major instrumental composition.
THE UNDERTAKING of the Rhapsody in Blue proved so significant that many stories have since been told about its origins, and Eva Gauthier later claimed that her New York concert had been the new work’s flash point. Sitting in Aeolian Hall that November evening was Paul Whiteman, who “decided there and then that he too could give an Aeolian Hall concert.” Following the performance, Whiteman “came back stage to ask George to write him something for his orchestra, with a piano part which George might play.”5 That work, the Rhapsody in Blue, would be premiered in Aeolian Hall on Tuesday, February 12, 1924, just two weeks and a day after Gauthier’s recital in Boston.
According to Gauthier, when she, Gershwin, and Persson did some “re-rehearsing” for the Boston concert early in 1924, Gershwin played some of the themes he had developed for his new instrumental piece. Just before traveling from New York to Boston, she invited several musical friends, including Olin Downes, the new music critic of the New York Times, and English composer Arthur Bliss, whose music was represented on the program, to her last rehearsal. At the end of their session, she asked Gershwin to play his Rhapsody for this select audience to see what their reaction would be. The composer described it as “a new work for Paul Whiteman’s concert in a few days, if I can get it finished in time.” Gauthier concludes, “And that was really the first performance of the Rhapsody in Blue.”6
Perhaps Gauthier exaggerated her role in the Rhapsody’s genesis, but to view it through the prism of her recital brings certain connections to light. On November 1, Gershwin experienced firsthand the popular numbers’ transformative impact on Gauthier’s audience, which may have taught him something about classical concertgoers. For one thing, like the friends and guests he had entertained at parties, these listeners enjoyed his piano playing, and for another, they relished the American songs. That popular songs could earn attention and foster delight on musical grounds in a classical context was no small discovery. Indeed, the expressive linchpin of the Rhapsody lay in the variety of its musical materials: its rhythms, sonorities, and most of all melodies, both classical- and jazz-oriented.
That same fall of 1923, Gershwin and DeSylva were occupied with the score for a new Broadway show, to be called The Perfect Lady and later changed to Sweet Little Devil. Rehearsals started on November 15, scheduled around a move to Boston and Providence for more seasoning before the Broadway debut on January 28, 1924.7 In the meantime, Gershwin contributed songs to two other shows: Little Miss Bluebeard, adapted from a Hungarian original as a starring vehicle for Irene Bordoni and produced by Ray Goetz, and Nifties of 1923, a Charles Dillingham revue. “I Won’t Say I Will but I Won’t Say I Won’t,” a song written for Bordoni, sounds like a sequel to “Do It Again,” this time with “Arthur Francis” assisting DeSylva on the lyric.
Sweet Little Devil, Gershwin’s fifth musical comedy after La-La-Lucille!, A Dangerous Maid, Flying Island, and Our Nell, was conceived as a vehicle for stage and film star Constance Binney, with producer Laurence Schwab coauthoring the libretto along with playwright and librettist Frank Mandel. The production team included stage director Edgar MacGregor—producer of A Dangerous Maid (1921), the Gershwin brothers’ first attempt—and dance director Sammy Lee, a leader in his field through the rest of the 1920s. Even though Ira displaced DeSylva as Gershwin’s regular lyricist during 1924, Schwab, Mandel, DeSylva, MacGregor, and Lee were involved, in varied combinations, with fashioning some of the decade’s early signature musicals.8
In Schwab and Mandel’s story, Tom Nesbit, an American mining engineer working in Peru, reads a press agent’s article about New York chorus girl Joyce West, said to be as principled and down-to-earth as she is beautiful. Dazzled by the idea of this supposed paragon, he writes her an admiring letter, and receives a reply that seems to confirm every good thing the article said about her. Their correspondence continues, and before long Tom decides to travel to New York to sell a recent invention and meet Joyce in person. But two shocks greet his arrival, both the handiwork of Virginia Arminta Culpepper, Joyce’s younger cousin and roommate, and the show’s heroine—the “sweet little devil,” played by Binney.
It turns out that Joyce, interested only in a suitor’s financial prospects and therefore amused by the naïveté of Tom’s first letter, consigned it to her wastebasket, from which it was rescued by Virginia, who became Tom’s actual correspondent. Then, Tom is shocked anew to discover that a check for thousands of dollars that he expected to receive in New York has failed to appear. Unbeknownst to him, Virginia has intercepted it to keep Joyce from launching a charm offensive when she learns that Tom might get rich after all. Under Virginia’s coaching, Tom eventually recognizes Joyce for the gold-digger she is, and takes her to Peru to put her to work in the mines and teach her a lesson. Virginia follows, Joyce hooks up with another, well-heeled young man, and the “sweet little devil” finds enduring romance with her engineer Tom, in the wilds of South America.
Although Constance Binney was Sweet Little Devil’s featured star, the performers who actually stopped the show were Ruth Warren, as Joyce’s chum, and William Wayne, as a pal who arrives in New York with Tom. Warren and Wayne, appearing in what was apparently their first and last Broadway production, were a vaudeville song-and-dance team who brought a rough, ready, and athletic approach to dancing and comedy. In the Boston tryout run, one critic called their performance “one of the best burlesque dances of the vigorous type ever seen in this or any other local theatre.” For their Act I closer, DeSylva and Gershwin came up with a number called “The Jijibo,” named after a modern dance with the rare power to make dancers appear thin or fat, whichever they preferred. It’s another Gershwin song in a jazz vein: as the refrain runs through its short list of instructions on changing one’s body shape, the music manifests the verve and variety that bring dance-loving customers flocking to the dance floor.
Gershwin and DeSylva wrote at least a dozen songs for Sweet Little Devil, and seven were published. Two of these were dropped before the show opened on Broadway: “Pepita,” set in Peru and included for local color, and “Mah-Jongg,” the last example of the “Chinese” style that Gershwin honed during his years as a composer of revue scores. Of the other published songs, “Under a One-Man Top,” written for Warren and Wayne, is a get-away-from-it-all duet for a couple preparing a honeymoon by car. “Hey! Hey! Let ’Er Go!,” a song for Wayne with the choristers, amounts to a pep talk: if something is bothering you, hide your melancholy with a show of high spirits. This one-step jumps with a recurrent blue seventh and enough syncopation to sound like a twentieth-century song, if a bit old-fashioned for the century’s third decade.
With two exceptions, the songs for Sweet Little Devil recall the fruit of Gershwin’s labors for The Rainbow and George White’s Scandals earlier in 1923: they are professionally competent and musically inventive enough, yet don’t seem to have made much of an impact. The exceptions are the two main numbers written for Binney: “Virginia,” which aims to catch the spirit of an irrepressible character and reveals some human complexity, and “Someone Believes in You,” a heartfelt duet with Tom. What separates these songs from the rest is how the words and music come together for convincing portrayals of human emotion; both songs seem to hold the potential for a life outside the theater.
The show did well enough, running in New York until May 3, 1924, and racking up 120 performances.9
BY THE TIME Sweet Little Devil was a thing of the past, the Rhapsody in Blue had won Gershwin more public acclaim than anything he had done before. Its February 12 premiere had been part of a concert that, like Eva Gauthier’s recital, was supposed to break new artistic ground. But while Gauthier had devoted only portions of her program to expanding the concept of American music, Paul Whiteman’s whole Lincoln’s Birthday concert aimed to be a lesson on that subject. It is hard to think of another American premiere that realized its artistic potential so fully and publicly.
Whiteman’s brand of disciplined jazz music was proving a product of dependable quality, and one that still managed to seem in tune with the ethos of an era known for its impetuous spirit. By 1923, his orchestra stood at the heart of a lucrative business enterprise, and Whiteman was always on the lookout for ways to expand his audience. As 1924 approached, he was determined to demonstrate that the kind of music he and his ensemble played was not just commercially appealing but artistically sound. He hoped to elevate jazz through high-quality performance and an impressively varied repertoire.
Touting his concert as a statement about America’s musical identity, Whiteman, or someone on his staff, came up with the title “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Regular morning rehearsals began in January, even as the orchestra maintained its daily schedule at the Palais Royal, plus onstage appearances in eight performances of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923 every week. The conductor did all he could to control the message he hoped the concert would send, and it was thanks to his promotional persistence—three public rehearsals were held during the runup to the concert, January 22 and 29 and February 5—that many music critics ended up reviewing a performance they might ordinarily have skipped. An elaborate brochure was prepared for audience members, describing the nature and purpose of the “Experiment” and providing program notes by Gilbert Seldes. In the performance hall on February 12, Whiteman’s personal manager presided over the occasion with spoken commentary.
And what was the man of the hour thinking as his handiwork took shape? When, in 1926, Whiteman looked back on that first Aeolian Hall concert, what loomed largest was the memory of his own anxieties. “Would we be the laughingstock of the town when we woke the ‘morning after’? Would the critics decide I was trying to be smart and succeeding in being only smart-alecky?” As curtain time drew closer, Whiteman’s most urgent wish was that he could cancel the performance:
Fifteen minutes before the concert was to begin, I yielded to a nervous longing to see for myself what was happening out front, and putting an overcoat over my concert clothes, I slipped around to the entrance of Aeolian Hall. There I gazed upon a picture that should have imparted new vigor to my wilting confidence. It was snowing, but men and women were fighting to get into the door, pulling and mauling each other as they do sometimes at a baseball game, or a prize fight, or in the subway. . . . I went backstage again, more scared than ever. Black fear simply possessed me. I paced the floor, gnawed my thumbs, and vowed I’d give five thousand dollars if we could stop right then and there. Now that the audience had come, perhaps I had really nothing to offer after all. I even made excuses to keep the curtain from rising on schedule. But finally there was no longer any way of postponing the evil moment. The curtain went up and before I could dash forth, as I was tempted to do, and announce that there wouldn’t be any concert, we were in the midst of it.10