Academic

Wail.

The "famous opening clarinet glissando" of Rhapsody in Blue "has become as familiar as the start of Beethoven?s Fifth." Frederick D. Schwarz, Gershwin?s Rhapsody, 50:1 American Heritage (Feb./March 1999). I regard George Gershwin's 1924 breakthrough classic as the most distinctively American musical composition in our country's vast repertoire. In its vigor and its versatility, Rhapsody in Blue is also a fitting metaphor for legal education. Here at the University of Louisville, we conduct our Law School as a Rhapsody in Red and Black.

Musicians define a rhapsody as "a one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, color and tonality." The composition of Gerswhin's Rhapsody certainly captures this musical form's "air of spontaneous inspiration" and "sense of improvisation." Inspired by the "steely rhythms" and the "rattle-ty bang" of a railroad train, Gershwin imagined at once "the complete construction of the Rhapsody, from beginning to end," as "a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness." Ron Cowen, George Gershwin: He Got Rhythm, Wash. Post (Nov. 1998).

A more appropriate anthem for Kentucky's leading metropolitan research university could scarcely be imagined.