American Rhapsodies: Wellspring of The Fifth Stream
In reflecting on Rhapsody In Blue, Gershwin said, “I heard it as a sort of a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot.” Surprisingly, the most popular version of Rhapsody In Blue is the hasty original orchestration by classical composer Ferde Grofé from Gershwin’s still-wet manuscripts for two pianos; the composer never orchestrated his own masterpiece. Despite its initial mixed reception, primarily due to its creolized (European-African American) and hybridized (literate-vernacular) lineage, the enduring themes and rhythmic vitality of Rhapsody In Blue have come to represent the spirit and musical legacy of America in the twentieth century.
Composer and historian Gunther Schuller differentiated Gershwin’s 1920s “symphonic jazz” from a 1950s music called Third Stream on the basis that his music contained no improvisation. Schuller described the Third Stream as a synthesis of the essential characteristics and techniques of Western concert music (First Stream) with those of the African American vernacular traditions, primarily jazz and blues (Second Stream). With American Rhapsodies, Anthony Brown ushers in the era of the Fifth Stream, a new musical language blending instruments, conventions and sensibilities of world and popular music into the Third Stream. This intercultural recasting of Rhapsody In Blue more closely mirrors the contemporary demographic profile of the planet—one of every three people alive is an Asian Pacific Islander—and particularly its microcosmic reflection in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In April 2003, Anthony Brown received a Guggenheim Fellowship to recompose Gershwin’s original 1924 recorded version of Rhapsody In Blue. Smithsonian Institution curator Dr. John Hasse first described the process of reinterpretation, re-arrangement and reorchestration used by Brown as recomposition. Brown developed his conceptual approach while researching and working with manuscripts at the Duke Ellington archives during a Smithsonian doctoral fellowship in 1989, and continuing during his subsequent employment at the Smithsonian as a curator and founding director of the Jazz Oral History Program.
Brown’s American Rhapsodies is performed by a sixteen member international, intergender and intergenerational ensemble, and scored for jazz orchestra and traditional instruments from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Whereas Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue is essentially a piano showcase, American Rhapsodies democratizes the soloistic features by extrapolating improvisatory passages for various instruments from Gershwin’s score, and replaces original piano parts with two Chinese hammered dulcimers, electric guitar, and Trinidadian steel drums. Additional instruments include 2 trumpets, fluegelhorns; 2 trombones, tuba; 5 saxophones, flute, clarinet, bassoon; double bass; drumset; Western, Asian and Afro-Cuban percussion; Japanese mouth organ and flute; Chinese violin, flute, and mouth organ.
American Rhapsodies completes Brown's personal trilogy of homages to American composers, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Gershwin. His transformative work with Ellington-Strayhorn’s Far East Suite integrates Persian instruments into Ellington’s score, capturing sounds he heard on his State Department tour in the Middle East that originally inspired him to write his extended work. Brown’s treatment of Thelonious Monk’s music for the Orchestra’s critically acclaimed recording, Monk’s Moods, includes extending the works through recomposition, with new solo and_ collective improvisational features based primarily on extrapolated passages from Monk’s solo piano recordings.