George Gershwin versus Leonard Bernstein

documentary

“The American Way” (Made in America)

‘A look at two innovators in American music:

George Gershwin & Leonard Bernstein’

Hosted and conducted by Simon Rattle

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

“The Music of the 20th Century: Leaving Home”

Arthaus Musik/www.arthaus-musik.com

In case link breaks, some kludgy recordings 152007 :

Documentary starts with George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" playing in the background:

Simon Rattle: It's tempting but cliched to look at American classical music as just one rugged individualist after another.  In truth, it's essentially a dialogue between cultures thrown together very fast.  If European classical music is a slow marinated casserole, then American music is a fast brilliant stir fry.

Duke Ellington - It Don't Mean a Thing 

(If It Ain't Got That Swing) (1943)

Rattle:  Now most of the arts at the end of the nineteenth century had been transplanted from Europe.  It's probably fair to say that in no area in the elite arts that America was so deficient as in classical music.  But it had, however, already produced an enormously successful and vital popular culture and this is mostly traceable back to black music and to the minstrel shows.  In the beginning of the 20th Century this started to emerge first as ragtime and then as blues and jazz.  And in the 10s and the 20s, it conquered Europe and presented a new face to the world.

Bessie Smith - St.Louis Blues (1929)

Rattle: You have to look at how much cross fertilization there was in all of this music.

George Gershwin, far left

Rattle: And someone like Gershwin, a great genius coming from another culture, was able to take all these musics and synthesize them together.  If you look at the very beginning of "Rhapsody in Blue", for instance, what one can hear in this rising scale is something really stolen from Bessie Smith's trademarked wails.  But after it, what you hear is pure Jewish cantor music.  It's only in America that two such disparate elements can combine together so fast [I'm not certain if that's true] and can create something which is so recognizably not only American, but New York.  [the documentary then cuts to an old skyline of NYC before jihadis destroyed the WTC]

GEORGE GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue 1924

Terrorist convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is suing the U.S. over religious rights in prison pic.twitter.com/mfeGrjNhOV

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) August 29, 2018

Rattle: This music smells as much of New York as a Strauss waltz will smell of Vienna.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN

West Side Story: Symphonic Dances 1960s

Rattle: Gustav Mahler said that the symphony should contain the entire world and Leonard Bernstein, an extraordinary musical polymath, wonderfully eclectic composer, did the same for the musical.

[citing Walter Kerr of the "Herald Tribune" theater review]: The radioactive fallout from "West Side Story" must still be descending on Broadway this morning. The most savage, restless, electrifying dance patterns we've been exposed to in a dozen seasons.

from Spartanburg Philharmonic. “2010-2011 SPO Season Program.” Issuu, 7 June 2017, issuu.com/spomusic/docs/2010-2011_spo_season-program.


Rattle: "West Side Story," which is "Romeo and Juliet" transported to New York of the 1950s, has ll types of American popular music in its veins, as well as the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner thrown in, almost  cannibalized.  Bernstein aimed to create a whole new art form that somehow matched the vibrancy of American life.

Leonard Bernstein

Rattle: He succeeds brilliantly.  Like all truly great art, it reflects its time but in the same instance, it totally transcends it.