Rhapsody in Blue

Rhapsody in Blue was first performed on 12 February 1924 at Aeolian Hall in New York, in a concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music. By the following morning, Jacob Gershowitz had become, in the public imagination, George Gershwin — and a celebrity. Among those present was Walter Damrosch, then conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra. The work’s extraordinary impact lay in the natural way it brought the inflections of blues and jazz into the concert hall, creating a musical language that felt both unmistakably American and immediately universal.