Rhapsody in Blue vs. Pan's Preludes

Yes, I read Ethan Iverson's article. I think he's one of those anti-honky jazz musicians that is way too in love with the idea of jazz as a Black artform: I remember him taking a swipe at Bill Evans several years ago that was similarly provocative. I mean, yes, the 12-bar blues is African, but I think the militant side of this argument completely ignores that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were all excellent improvisers. - As for the differences: I was 27 (almost 28) when I wrote the first three movements of Pan's Preludes. Gershwin was 26 when he wrote the Rhapsody in Blue. By then, I'd already had separate training in jazz, film and concert music orchestration. In fact, I'd already orchestrated my first opera. I know what I want timbrally, and I'm simply not prepared to alter the orchestrations until I get a reading. That's why I've got them down as a scoring session rather than a concert premiere.

*** Next up, Pan's Preludes was a hit (so to speak) based on my MIDI parts, and that gives me a shitload of leverage to ensure that crisp, fresh sound is the one that people hear. I refuse to perform it. I think that I'd fail, and that's a bloody good reason to say no. Expedience isn't the name of the game here; successfully premiering a new guitar piece that doesn't suck is the important thing. To be bold, I'll open up the floor to David Russell or any of the truly world-class guitarists. Seriously, though, I pitched a vision of different movements by different players, and I fully expect people to take that seriously. Would you rather have one virtuosa that is so emotionally unstable and despised that she can't live any kind of real life, or would you rather have four or five guitarists nailing that piece and demonstrating different aspects of the sound that Jane brought back from her travels? **** I wasn't intentionally drawing upon source material, outside of Across The Ocean, which quotes both Gershwin and Sondheim, along with a Britten reference in the introduction. If people think a flute melody with repeated notes and a limited range 'sounds' Māori or that pentatonic scales 'sound' Chinese, then you're the ones hearing with an exoticist palette. I didn't use any microtonal effects: it's pure rhythm creating those correspondances. **** As for the orchestrations and their unusual sound: well, guitars aren't pianos or violins. It's very difficult to create a guitar sound that projects over a symphony orchestra, while this unusual chamber orchestra is something that I think a guitar could sound out over, even without amplification. If you're interested in where I got my ideas from, listen to Omnifenix by John Psathas, Heavy Traffic by Michael Norris, and Virgen De La Esperanza by Kenneth Young. **** This isn't an improvised piece, and nor was the Rhapsody in Blue. Pan was me deliberately thumbing my nose at all the bullshit that people said about me .. pretty tunes but no grunt, guitarists can't compose 'real music', I was just an improviser and not a 'real' composer. Despite having written Vanya's Lament and Portrait of a Knight, those stereotypes continued for many years; even after I wrote Pan, people were still saying that shit. So here we have something that sounds distinctly like me, written out note-for-note. That's why my cred has increased, and that was based on a MIDI. **** It's probably worth mentioning Jews weren't exactly beloved in the early 20th Century, and that most of the stride pianists of the day respected Gershwin. But yeah, my two cents is that while Jazz may have once been a largely black artform, those days are long gone and it's a bunch of primarily white conservatory students that are proselytising for the form. Much like there's been an explosion of Blackness and a multitude of various ethnic origins in traditionally 'white' forms such as musicals, opera and classical composition. This whole purity of jazz shit pisses me off, and that's why I'm more of an interested observer than a jazz musician. I see myself as a composer, whatever one takes that to mean. To me, the real dichotomy in the music schools is modal vs. non-modal music rather than tonal vs. WAM vs. jazz vs. ethnomusicology vs. Asian music vs. 'new music' This is why I prefer being on the outside looking in. I hate telling people that I find their well-intentioned (but irritating) arguments about my career decisions and my personal life to be shallow, reductive, and often based on half-truths that flatter their teller rather than flattering me. **** I left the conservatory for good reasons, and I have no desire to return. As I've said before, I challenge my peers to write a 32-bar AABA song that's fresh and interesting before bagging on my compositional abilities.

That's what's magical about the Rhapsody in Blue. He stacks all those clever tunes that are essentially song forms into an extended piece. That's the breakthrough, and it's one of the core things that Tin Pan Alley writers did in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. It's not really jazz, but name me one piece of third stream music that is a) authentically jazz, b) uses a conventional orchestra, and c) doesn't suck. Whether Pan is authentically Māori, I couldn't say, but it surprises me that my teachers thought that it was more authentic than them, despite not using authentic instruments or their authentic quarter-tone scale.