ABSTRACT
Unlike the unconvincing actor portrayals of instrumentalists explored in the previous chapter, a scene in the George Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue (Irving Rapper, 1945) provides us with an intentionally bad performance, one where the performer#x2019;s errors are supposed to be detected by the audience. Based on a real-life concert in which Gershwin, while playing his Concerto in F with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, blacked out and reported an olfactory hallucination, the scene shows the composer-pianist stumbling over notes in an anticipation of the loss of motor control that accompanied the latter stages of his illness. 1 Concern is expressed by the observing Oscar Levant, prompting (or confirming) the watching screen audience#x2019;s recognition of performance breakdown. In contrast with the scenes explored in Chapter 2, however, there is no incongruity between the responses of internal and external audiences: we all may express concern for Gershwin#x2019;s performance. Significantly, though, both types of performance failure—actors portraying musicians unconvincingly or actual staged performance breakdown—share something in common. Though one is unintentional as far as the filmmakers are concerned, they both focus our attention on the mechanics and the physi-cality of instrumental performance. As such, this Gershwin scene might play a small but significant part in a musicological discourse about the essence of musical experience, which was reignited in 2004 in a somewhat provocative article by the musicologist Carolyn Abbate.
