that Edgar Stillman Kelley should write variations on the theme of O, You Beautiful Doll! or that Arthur Farwell should compose a symphony utilizing The Gaby Glide for the first subject of the allegro and Everybody's Doing It for the second, with the adagio based on Pretty Baby in a minor key. It is not my intention to encourage some one to write a tone-poem called New York, in which all these songs and ten or fifteen more should be thematically bundled together and finally wrapped in the profundities of a fugue. But if a composer, bearing the spirit and rhythm
Congo, Humoresque on Negro Minstrel Tunes, Negro Rhapsody, and Comedy Overture on Negro Themes. For such of this music as I have heard I can confess to no warm regard. John Powell's Rhapsodie Nègre for piano and orchestra and John Alden Carpenter's Krazy Kat jazz pantomime are better, but since hearing George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, performed by the composer for the first time at Paul Whiteman's concert of American music at Æolian Hall on February 12, 1924, I am convinced that the best serious music along these lines will be written by the jazz composers themselves. Gershwin is a composer of popular hits, but unlike the greater number of his confrères, he is also an expert musician. The Rhapsody in Blue, constructed on the formula of a Liszt piano concerto, is not novel in form, but it is entirely novel in content. Gershwin has built up the entire composition, even to the adagio and the cadenzas, on jazz themes, treated symphonically, with working-out sections, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the sonata form. The themes are both highly original and highly typical. At least two of them are as good as any that Richard Strauss ever thought of. The orchestration (indicated by the composer but carried out by Ferdie Grofé) utilizes all the novel and
