February 12, 1924: "Rhapsody In Blue" Premieres

George (left) & Ira Gershwin

February 12, 1924: "An Experiment in Modern Music" is held at Aeolian Hall, at 29 West 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Midtown Manhattan. It was intended as an educational demonstration on how far American music had progressed since the Civil War, and on how the relatively new form of jazz could be performed in a concert hall.

The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, led by the man with perhaps the most unfortunate name in jazz (Whiteman was then the best-selling practitioner of an art form invented by black men) played each piece. They began with a suite by Victor Herbert, and closed with Pomp and Circumstance (a.k.a. "The Graduation Song") by Edward Elgar.

In between, they played Rhapsody In Blue, with the piano part played by its composer: George Gershwin, by this point the biggest name in Broadway musicals. Gershwin, known for light, airy tunes written with his brother Ira as lyricist, wanted to show he was a serious musical composer. Part of this was sitting for an interview with Isaac Goldberg, who had written a biography of the late 19th Century British composing team of William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and would publish the interview again as he wrote Gershwin's 1st authorized biography, in 1931:

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. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

The piece was a smashing success. To this day, its premiere is considered a defining event, not just of the "Roaring Twenties," also known as the "Jazz Age," but in the cultural history of New York City. In 2003, Orrin Howard, a Los Angeles-based music critic, wrote:

Beginning with that incomparable, flamboyant clarinet solo, Rhapsody is irresistible still, with its syncopated rhythmic vibrancy, its abandoned, impudent flair that tells more about the Roaring Twenties than could a thousand words, and its genuine melodic beauty colored a deep, jazzy blue by the flatted sevenths and thirds that had their origins in the African-American slave songs.

Lang Lang, the great Chinese concert pianist, has said, "When I hear Rhapsody in Blue, I see the Empire State Building somehow. I see the New York skyline in Midtown Manhattan, and I already see the coffee shops of Times Square." The fact that the Empire State Building wouldn't open until 7 years after the piece premiered does nothing to detract from Lang's perception.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has called Rhapsody In Blue one of his favorite pieces. In 1979, Woody Allen used the piece to open his film Manhattan. In the 1980s, it became the backing music for United Airlines' TV commercials. When Ken Burns made his Baseball miniseries in the early 1990s, he used it as the soundtrack for the story of the building of the original Yankee Stadium, although that had happened a year earlier, in 1923. Gershwin's piano playing seemed a perfect complement to old silent film of Babe Ruth trotting around the bases. In the 1920s, Gershwin was nearly as big a figure as Ruth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had praised the piece in 1925, the year he published The Great Gatsby, which is often considered the defining American novel of the decade. In 2013, the piece was used as a theme for a new film version of the novel.

There is a surviving recording with George himself tickling the ivories. It's not quite the same as having a recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducting his own orchestra, but unlike Mozart (who died of a fever in 1791, not quite age 36) and Gershwin (who died of a brain tumor in 1937, not quite 39), it does survive.

The Aeolian Building still stands, although it has been retrofitted, so that Aeolian Hall no longer exists.

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February 12, 1924 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball was not yet major league. And while the hockey season was underway, there were no games scheduled in either the National Hockey League or the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. So there were no scores on this historic day.