Fifth Stream Music is the blending of Jazz, Classical, World and Popular music to create a new style inspired by the global community of the 21st century. In the 1950s, Classical composers and Jazz musicians collaborated and created Third Stream Music, a blend of Classical (First Stream) with Jazz (Second Stream). Anthony Brown’s reimagining of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue ushered in Fifth Stream Music with his Grammy-nominated Asian American Orchestra transforming Gershwin’s original sonic portrait of New York City into a contemporary portrait of the Pacific Rim as American Rhapsodies.
MISSION
Founded in 2005, Fifth Stream Music is a San Francisco-based nonprofit arts organization that represents the artistic and educational work of Anthony Brown, Ph.D. and the Asian American Orchestra, with the mission to advance the art form of jazz through innovative intercultural music and transformative educational experiences that reflect and promote an appreciation for, and understanding of American cultural diversity.
More specifically, Fifth Stream Music strives to:
Create and promote a new intercultural musical idiom that combines jazz traditions with the sensibilities and instruments of classical, world, and popular music.
Increase public understanding of jazz as an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process.
Provide transformative educational experiences for young people to express and value their individual voices by using the creative process of jazz to promote student self-expression, increased literacy, and appreciation of jazz, poetry and storytelling.
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.