Source: Good News Network
95 years ago today, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a mix of classical music with modern effects written for piano and jazz band, premiered in New York City. Commissioned by conductor Paul Whiteman for a concert entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” the 26-year-old Gershwin composed the 9-minute piece on a train ride to Boston—and it became one of the most popular and well known of all American concert works.
LEARN More about the amazing moment, and hear the piece… (1924)“IT WAS on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer – I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. … And there I suddenly heard, and even saw on paper – the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”
Many important and influential musicians attended that day and witnessed Gershwin on piano, including Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Stokowski, and John Philip Sousa. The ventilation system in the concert hall was broken and—late into the concert—people in the audience were losing their patience, until the clarinet glissando that opened Rhapsody in Blue was heard.
The New York Times reported, “The audience was stirred and many a hardened concertgoer excited with the sensation of a new talent finding its voice. … There was tumultuous applause for Gershwin’s composition.
”In 1955, the great composer Leonard Bernstein wrote: “The themes are terrific, inspired, God-given. I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist…
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