More than eight decades after his death, George Gershwin remains an outsize figure in the story of instrumental jazz. “I Got Rhythm” (1930), a popular hit from the musical Girl Crazy, provided an essential template over which swing musicians such as Lester Young etched free-wheeling improvisations during the 1930s. “I Got Rhythm” continued its prominence in the 1940s, when its melody and harmonies were reworked by the likes of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. Over time, musicians streamlined Gershwin’s original composition into a standard form known as “rhythm changes.” This thirty-two-bar, AABA chord progression became a template to rival the twelve-bar blues as a jam-session cornerstone. In the 1950s, Gershwin’s compositions spurred explorations of modal jazz, as on Miles Davis’s and Gil Evans’s album-length reinterpretation of the opera Porgy and Bess (1958).

Many of those who lived through the turbulent period sparked off by the revolution in Paris in 1789 such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) in England, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Germany and Madame de Staël (1766–1817) in France, concurred in their different ways that what was at work was the action of human reason, in a progressive direction – that had been subverted by reaction – and that the new century would renew the progress promised by the initial event.

Gershwin called himself “a man without traditions.” Although most early twentieth-century American composers eschewed tradition, ranging from Dane Rudhyar’s “spiritual dissonance” to Aaron Copland’s exploration of jazz rhythms, Gershwin’s approach was viewed cynically – his concert works labeled as tainted products of an uneducated outsider. Larry Starr crystallizes this disparity most succinctly: “There was simply no preexisting model for the kind of American composer that Gershwin became; he had to invent himself each step of the way, and it stands to reason that his remarkable success in doing so was met with skepticism and resentment by those personally invested in more traditional musical paths.”

Like his other concert music, Gershwin’s four works for piano and orchestra – Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925), Second Rhapsody (1932), and “I Got Rhythm” Variations (1934) – showcase a composer who roamed freely across traditional musical boundaries and pioneered stylistic hybrids of lasting enjoyment and value. Taken as a group, they also contribute unique perspectives on the multifaceted artistry of his concert works. Only the concerti were conceived as vehicles for Gershwin the pianist, resulting in extant recordings featuring the composer as a central musical protagonist. These recordings, unlike those of him performing popular song, convey a less familiar image of Gershwin as a score-oriented composer-pianist in the European tradition, at once revealing a pianist assiduously attuned to the notated part while also yielding insights into the composer not accessible through his scores alone. And although Gershwin often related his music generally to the spirit of the modern American metropolis, the concerti comprise his most vivid and varied portraits of New York City in particular.

George Gershwin has been both celebrated and reviled as a hybridizer of musics popular and classical. The tale that he was turned down as a pupil by Stravinsky is a case in point. In this frequently reprinted anecdote, the young American met Stravinsky (or Ravel in some tellings) and asked for lessons. The European master replied by asking Gershwin how much money he made and, after Gershwin named an astronomical sum, quipped: “Then I should take lessons from you!” Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant to the argument here. It is the persistence of the tale and its humor that highlight an ideological fault line between Old World and New, classical and popular, artistic accomplishment and economic success.

Between 1800 and 1900 the dominant literary mode of romanticism, with its various transformations, moved in the direction of modernism, accompanied and sometimes assailed along the way by different kinds of realism. More paradoxically, over the same period literature tended to become ever more international, indeed cosmopolitan, even as self-consciously national literatures developed and asserted themselves with growing confidence in Ireland and in the United States, in Russia and in Scandinavia.

In 1898 both George Gershwin and the modern city of New York were born. On January 1, Kings and Richmond counties, along with parts of Queens and Westchester counties, officially consolidated with the island of Manhattan to create the five boroughs of New York that we know today. George Gershwin (listed on his birth certificate as Jacob Gershwine) followed nine months later, entering the world at 242 Snedicker Avenue in Brooklyn on September 26. Gershwin grew to manhood in and with a burgeoning city full of noise, invention, and endless entertainments, whose disparate ethnic neighborhoods retained a character all their own even as they were being knit together in new ways.

Liberalism and democracy are wrongly seen as inseparable by many people today – despite the alarming evidence provided by some governments that are democratically elected yet behave in strikingly illiberal ways. But liberalism and democracy are neither necessarily interchangeable nor allied, either conceptually or historically. The playground on which the relationship was forged and first tested was nineteenth-century politics and thought in Europe and America. It was also in the nineteenth century that the diverse meanings of the two terms were debated and established.

Such hypotheticals betray a reality that affords a fascinating exploration of how Gershwin’s musical legacy – and particularly that of Rhapsody in Blue – has been shaped as a result of his early passing. Gershwin’s death on July 11, 1937 sent shock waves across the nation, and his memorialization through performances of the Rhapsody began almost immediately. Radio responded first, with tributes broadcast coast-to-coast. The evening after Gershwin’s death, David Broekman’s orchestra along with Bing Crosby and Victor Young appeared on the Mutual Broadcasting System, originating from Los Angeles. Simultaneously, the NBC Blue Network in New York City featured a concert by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra. The next day the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Richard Czerwonky, included Rhapsody in Blue in their CBS broadcast from Grant Park, reaching over one hundred stations.

It could be said that, during the nineteenth century, capitalism took over the world. Developments in trade, finance, manufacturing, farming, energy sources and population growth in Western Europe converged to create a new kind of economy whose rhythms were no longer primarily dictated by pestilence, the seasons, climatic cycles or wars of religion and of succession.

Viewed retrospectively, the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century were Karl Marx (1818–83) and Charles Darwin (1809–82). Two of their central concepts, class struggle and evolution, both focused on the idea of ‘struggle’, and clearly had some common origin, as Marx at least recognised. Together they provided a definitive leitmotif for fin de siècle Europe and America, whose inheritance was bequeathed to the twentieth century, at least to 1945 (for Social Darwinism), and to 1991 (for Marxism).

George Gershwin has long been a challenging figure to categorize and evaluate within mainstream music historiography. Few have gone as far as the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, who, after attending a performance of Rhapsody in Blue, deemed him “half human and half animal.” But music historians and chroniclers have reacted variably to the composer’s rather anomalous achievement and place in the history of Western music.

To explore and gauge such differing perspectives on Gershwin, in particular his more serious compositions, I have examined his coverage – or lack thereof – among a fairly broad range of mainly American texts on Western and in particular American and twentieth-century concert music.

George Gershwin composed for the Broadway stage for two decades. Two songs – single numbers in shows featuring several songwriters – bookend this area of Gershwin’s output: “Making of a Girl” in the Passing Show of 1916and “By Strauss” in the 1936 revue The Show Is On (both productions played the Winter Garden Theatre). In the intervening years, Gershwin was the sole credited composer on twenty-two musical shows, and songs by Gershwin were included in nineteen more productions. From 1924 to 1932, Gershwin was a dominant commercial and artistic force on the New York musical stage.

When Hegel died in late 1831, suddenly and unexpectedly, he still reigned, widely acclaimed, over philosophy – and not just in many German-speaking territories. The thought of people inspired by Hegel’s ideas continued to evolve for a long time, from Finland to Naples, from Russia and Poland to France and further afield. However, there was also some awareness that a peak had been attained and limits reached. ‘Our philosophical revolution has come to an end.