Did you know that switching from a minor scale melody to one in a major scale makes the listener feel happy? I recently learned about this musical trick—Jacob Gershowitz (aka George Gershwin) did it in his song “Swanee”– when I attended a packed lecture given by the LA-based composer Carlos Rafael Rivera at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music. The talk was about one of my favorite composers, Gershwin, more specifically about his composition “Rhapsody in Blue”. Was it me who kicked over my diet coke during the lecture?

The Conservatory itself is a mini-art museum, its halls and classrooms filled with first-rate modern painters. Most of the greats are there, Rauschenberg, Dine, and many others of the same ilk; oh, I almost forgot the most important artist: a Wudl hangs right across from the conservatory office, oh my.

As Rivera continued his fascinating lecture, I became more aware of what I already knew, that a composer of music is essentially the same animal as a composer of art. Sure, musicians compose atoms to hit your ears and artists compose atoms to strike your eyes, but after that, the difference disappears.

The more Rivera explained what Gershwin did in composing his Rhapsody, the more I appreciated this kinship. Both artist and composer struggle with consonance, balance, dominance, contrast, diversity, directional movement, continuity, rhythm, pattern, transition, counter-change, and other such compositional elements.

But not surprisingly, the most common characteristic of both artist and musical composer is the debt to those who came before and informed their works: For Gershwin they included Chopin and Debussy, gospel and blues, jazz, more specifically Harlem jazz. It was ragtime rhythms, and the stuff of tin-pan-alley; it was Vaudeville, and even the influence of then new technologies like the phonograph and piano roll. All influenced his compositions.

There’s the “plugger” playing that Gershwin learned on his first job as a song plugger to sell sheet music. In those days, people bought sheet music big time, so the plugger player always demonstrated the song by playing flamboyantly. And Gershwin did just that in parts of his Rhapsody.

There’s the “novelty piano” playing, a successor to ragtime and popular in the 1920’s, used by pianists trying to sell piano rolls. It was a weird sort of Victorian-era flourish married to sounds of the art-deco era, made big then by Zez Confrex’s novelty piano solos called, what else, “Dizzy Fingers”; I love it, Dizzy Zez!

There’s also what was known as “Harlem Stride Piano” playing, a jazz piano style where the player bounces his left hand back and forth on the keys while the right hand plays melody. Gershwin puts that into Rhapsody as well.

Other sections of Rhapsody are meant to showoff the composer’s virtuosity: rapidly played, difficult notes to execute meant to impress listeners with one’s skill. Haven’t we all stuck something into a painting just to show others that we are able to render something realistically if we wanted to?

There’s also the “comic piano,” taken from vaudeville. We’re all familiar with this type of piano from Chico Marx and Jimmy Durante. It’s in Rhapsody.

In fact, there are at least five major themes in Rhapsody, all owing their birth in Gershwin’s mind from different artists and different times.  Composing is all about the incorporation of multiple influences into one’s personal creative mix, perhaps a little Cy Twomly mixed with Braque and a twist of Goya (sounds like a dreadful combination, I should try it).

I had a little chat with Rivera after the lecture. I wanted to experience a composer who, although speaking a different language than I do when composing, faced the same creative struggles: Call me crazy, but I felt a sort of brotherhood with him, a man who would probably make a clarinet out of a paintbrush while I make a paintbrush out of a clarinet.