A “Rhapsody in Blue” Remix Playlist

Over the last few months, I found myself unexpectedly steeped in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while working on “American Rhapsody,” a documentary about the work’s centennial for BBC Radio 3. Part of me said yes to the project because I thought that it would be a nice diversion from the dumpster fire of real life to spend some time absorbed in a fun piece of music that doesn’t simultaneously demand engagement with social, cultural, and political issues. 

To paraphrase another Gershwin tune, that ain’t necessarily so. 

“Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered at New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924, is a work entirely enmeshed in the anthropology of its time. To treat it as an absolute musical experience devoid of context is to shut out Gershwin’s own intents with the work: “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America,” he told journalist Isaac Goldberg, “of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”

The piece certainly became a musical shorthand for America—or, at least a particular version of America (see: United Airlines, the 1988 Summer Olympics, “Fantasia 2000”). Like a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen song, it’s adaptable to various circumstances, arrangements, and remixes. What follows is a collection of some of those reflections and refractions of the piece, as well as works that build on Gershwin’s theme of a portrait of where we are as a country, one hundred years later.