Rhapsody In Blue

Rhapsody In Blue Captured America's True Nature - Read Below


Shouldn’t some rock and roll song, a power ballad maybe, or a good dance tune, be the music that pulls your mind back to your young life on a college campus.

A piece of classical music shouldn’t do it for you, should it?

This evening, I happen on the Grammys just as they’re about to start a performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

I’m sure I heard this piece years before college, but it was in college where it came to life. Point Loma Nazarene College was a religious school, and we were required to attend thrice-weekly chapels.

At the 1984 Olympics, the opening ceremonies included some 50 (or more, I don’t remember) piano players playing Rhapsody in Blue. One of the players was a fellow PLNC student, Victor Labenske.

At chapel, after that performance, Victor and a music professor, reprised that performance. Two pianos, no orchestra, playing what seemed to be the must stunningly beautiful and brilliant piece of music I had ever heard.

Over the years, my appreciation for the piece has only grown. Gershwin perfectly captured post-industrial, modern America. No piece of music, with the possible exception of Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, so eloquently speaks for the United States, than Blue.

The song, with its blues-tinged jazz (the very definition of American music), captures all of the emerging moral ambiguity of the era, along with the hustle and and hurry of a modern American big city, from the trains and scurrying pedestrians to the factories that still defined the economy.

The music both soars and weeps, celebrates and reflects.

Blue clearly comes with a point of view, which is that of work-a-day American who both chases the dream and longs for a gentle touch. There is an ambition in the song that speaks both for America as it was and for the man watching the modern world pass as he tries to live out his own sometimes frustrated dreams.

If there is a companion poem for Blue, then it is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

If you want to understand America in the early 20th Century, listen to Gershwin and read Eliot. Then you will know something about the transition from the Romantic notions of the pre-Great War era to a disillusioned but still vibrant America that would grow into an economic dynamo like no nation before it.

And I conclude my post with one more note about Labenske: Nearly a decade later, many years since I had last spoken with Victor, I found he had become a professor at PLNC. My wife and I decided to get married on the PLNC campus in a little chapel called Goodwin (it has since been torn down). I ask Victor to play Blue while guests filed into the Chapel, and then Victor played the rest of the music for our ceremony. I’ve never known a better piano player and to this day, I still think it’s cool that we had such a great musician provide the music for our wedding.

News From: http://hbo3.com/2008/music/rhaposdy-in-blue-captured-americas-true-nature/