Jazz Enters the Concert Hall
New York, 1924: jazz rhythm takes a seat in the concert hall.
Related
Time and place
New York, 12 February 1924, at Aeolian Hall. Paul Whiteman's Experiment in Modern Music put Gershwin at the piano; he finished the piano part of Rhapsody in Blue in haste, partly on a train, and Ferde Grofé orchestrated it.
What happened
The concert hall had kept jazz outside, treating it as music for dance halls and saloons. Whiteman wanted jazz to acquire a symphonic status, placing a dance band, a piano soloist and classical structure on one programme. Rhapsody in Blue opens with a clarinet glissando, moves through piano flourishes, and lets the band spread out over jazz rhythm. At the same time Stravinsky wrote ragtime rhythm directly into Piano-Rag-Music, and Milhaud and Hindemith borrowed jazz vocabulary.
What changed
The border between popular and art music was breached: composers could openly use jazz harmony, rhythm and colour instead of hiding it as exotic colour. Concert programmes began to admit an American voice, Gershwin moved from song plugger to concert composer, and Copland, Bernstein and Duke Ellington followed. Jazz players also discovered that the concert hall could be their stage.
Listen to the turn
Gershwin's Three Preludes bring rag and blues vocabulary into a piano recital, short-phrased and syncopated yet shaped as concert pieces. Swanee, his 1919 popular song, was the kind of success that convinced Whiteman jazz could enter the hall. Stravinsky's Piano-Rag-Music turns ragtime into a modernist rhythm experiment through staccato and displaced accents.
Related
This turn belongs to Modern; see Syncopation and the Trumpet.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Schiff, Gershwin — Rhapsody in Blue（Cambridge, 1997），用于核对 1924 年埃奥利安音乐厅音乐会
- Grove Music Online 的 Gershwin 与 Jazz 条目，用于交叉核对爵士进入音乐厅的背景
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.