Klarinet Archive - Posting 001008.txt from 1997/03

From: "David C. Blumberg" <reedman@-----.COM>
Subj: Re: Still more on Gershwin and glissando
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 17:57:44 -0500

It wasn't Benny Goodman's good luck charm either. Eddie Daniels told of a
story that Benny was playing the Rhapsody on an internationally broadcast
(radio) that was hyped up into being quite an event. Well, in the
broadcast, he squaked big time in the opening gliss - It became known as
"the squeak heard round the world". The next day one of his band members
wrote on one of his scores "the squeak heard round the world" as the title
of the chart, and Goodman threw it to the floor- and never played it again.

At 10:42 PM 3/30/97 -0600, Gary Young wrote:
>I think the list is down, but I've become obsessed with this issue so that
>won't stop me.
>
>I found the source of my belief that the clarinetist at the premiere of
>Rhapsody in Blue turned the opening run into a glissando/portamento. It's
>Pamela Weston's chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet, at page
>102:
>
>"One of the earliest works to combine jazz with the classical idiom was
>Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924). The opening glissando -- not in
>Gershwin's original score but interpolated as a joke by Paul Whiteman's
>clarinettist Ross Gorman -- made the composer famous overnight. The
>glissando is not every classical player's cup of tea, and indeed proved
>fatal to Baltimore's principal clarinet, Georges Grisez (1884-1946), who
>died on stage after performing it."
>
>Well, this account is inconsistent with Deena Rosenberg's, from Ira
>Gershwin, which has Gershwin intending (but not notating?) the gliss, a la
>klezmer. Pamela Weston does not indicate her source for this story, and I
>don't have her other books to check for sources given there. She seems
>right that the gliss is not in Gershwin's original piano score (is it in
>scores today?). It is unclear who the clarinetist was (Weston and
>Rosenberg say Ross Gorman, Gunther Schuller says Chester Hazlett). Does
>anyone have any idea what really happened -- and reliable sources to back
>it up? And what's the source of the story of poor George Grisez?
>
>I look forward to responses from those similarly obsessed.
>
>Gary
>
>
David C. Blumberg
Principal Clarinet Riverside Symphonia
reedman@-----.com