In Search of the Lost Generation (I)
There are uncanny similarities between the lives of George Gershwin and F. Scott Fitzgerald that have always fascinated me. When Gershwin died in 1937, his obituary in the New York Times described him as a Fitzgerald of music. Both artists’ careers took off at a young age, establishing themselves as icons of the Jazz Age, though both careers ended on a somewhat sour note in Hollywood. Most importantly, they were each adamant about creating art that portrayed the American people of their beloved Jazz Age, and in doing so, found a way for the beautiful dreamers and flappers of an ephemeral time to live on forever.
For my doctoral dissertation, I did a comparative analysis between George Gershwin’s Concerto in F and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both written in 1925, they are artistic monuments of American culture, remembered and admired for Fitzgerald’s stunning and brutally honest portrayal of the psychology behind the American dream and Gershwin’s creation of a different world of rhythm and harmony that echoes the American spirit. Through artistic imagination, compositional technique, and craftsmanship, Fitzgerald and Gershwin, who both insisted on creating art that the common American people could relate to, illuminated the spirit and emotions of their times.
One aspect of both works that I focused on in my analysis was the utilization of time as an expressive vehicle. The Gershwin concerto was written in “multiply-directed linear time.” This is a concept borrowed from music theorist Jonathon Kramer, who postulated many different kinds of musical times: linear time, non-linear time, multiply-directed linear time, vertical time, mobile time…While linear time can be boiled down to what we know as a piece that goes some variation of I-V-I, a piece written in multiply-directed linear time is one that also contains linear processes, but those processes are often interrupted and completed later. Like a piece in linear form, it is teleological, or goal-oriented, in some sense, but a piece in multiply-directed linear form also gives off the impression of being a series of discontinuities which segment and reorder linear time.
The Great Gatsby is actually a wonderful example of multiply-directed linear time, even though it is not a musical work. While the structure is functional, the true chronology of events is revealed through flashbacks which interrupt the present action of the summer of 1922. Therefore, the responsibility falls upon the reader to sort through the flashbacks in order to reconstruct the actual chronology that the events unfold in. The plot of Fitzgerald’s novel works both “backwards and forwards” over Gatsby’s past and present until “the complete portrait finally emerges at the end of the book.”[1] Fitzgerald’s way of interspersing events from Gatsby’s past life throughout the plot can seem bizarre at times: Gatsby’s childhood is not covered until the very last chapter, events in Gatsby’s life when he was seventeen years old are covered in Chapter six, and the love affair between Gatsby and Daisy, which is the singular most significant event leading up to the present action of the novel, is covered in chapters four, six, and eight, but sporadically, and from different points of view. The summer of 1922, which is to be the last season of Gatsby’s life, serves as a “string onto which these varicolored beads of the past have been haphazardly strung.”[2]
In order to make better sense of the chronology and form of The Great Gatsby, James Miller constructed the plot of the novel into a simple diagram. In his diagram, “X” stands for the chronological account of events which happened in the summer of 1922, while “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” and “E” represent the events of Gatsby’s past, such as his boyhood, his courtship with Daisy, and his mysterious business endeavors with Wolfsheim. Throughout the chapters, the chronology of The Great Gatsby can therefore be charted: X, X, X, XCX, XBXCX, X, XCXDX, XEXAX.[3] Just as Kramer describes in his definition of multiply-directed linear time, there is indeed some sort of linear process in The Great Gatsby: A, B, C, D, and E. It just happens to be scrambled into C, B, D, E, A, and it’s the reader’s job to unscramble this linear process upon finishing the novel.
How does multiply-directed linear time apply to the Gershwin concerto? Below is a link to my favorite recording of the Gershwin Concerto by pianist Jon Nakamatsu. Listen to the opening orchestral tutti, and notice how it seems to resemble the scattered dialogue of a group of people, individuals speaking and interrupting each other spontaneously in their excitement. While the motifs in this orchestral opening seem randomly placed and fragmented, they will eventually each return throughout the rest of the concerto at various times in even more developed form. Like Fitzgerald, Gershwin’s concerto is composed of fragments. Gershwin arranged and rearranged them throughout, giving the impression that the form of the concerto is working both forwards and backwards, only allowing a complete portrait to emerge at the very end. More musical analysis to come in my next post!