Composer & Jazz Trumpeter Markus Rutz
Re-imagining a Rhapsody
THE ROSE commissioned Markus Rutz to create new arrangements of RHAPSODY believing the ability to freely reimagine a great artist like Gershwin’s work spurs a vast amount of creativity, from the serious to the whimsical and allows his legacy to endure. Now in the public domain, Gershwin’s career-making composition of RHAPSODY IN BLUE is freely available to the next Gershwin, even if he or she is a rap artist, a poet … or a jazz trumpeter from Chicago.
Original Sheet Music Cover | Harmon Music
Rhapsody in Blue
RHAPSODY IN BLUE was first performed in New York in a 1924 concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” It has since been used in a range of applications such as Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics opening ceremony and even United Airlines pre-flight safety videos and ads. The rhapsody is regarded as one of Gershwin's most recognizable creations and as a key composition which defined the historical period known as the Jazz Age. THE NATION has described Gershwin's piece as inaugurating a new era in America's musical history. The editors of the Cambridge Music Handbooks have posited that "the Rhapsody in Blue (1924) established Gershwin's reputation as a serious composer and has since become one of the most popular of all American concert works." The AMERICAN HERITAGE magazine notes that the famous opening clarinet glissando has become as instantly recognizable to concert audiences as Beethoven’s Fifth.
Publicity Photo of George Gershwin (detail)
George Gershwin
George Gershwin - born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer, pianist and painter whose compositions spanned both popular and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions RHAPSODY IN BLUE (1924) and AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1928), the songs SWANEE (1919) and FASCINATING RHYTHM (1924), the jazz standard I GOT RHYTHM (1930), and the opera PORGY AND BESS (1935), which gave birth to the hit SUMMERTIME. Initially a commercial failure, PORGY AND BESS has come to be considered one of the most important American operas of the twentieth century and an American cultural classic. When Gershwin moved to Hollywood, he composed numerous film scores. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards and part of the great American Songbook. He died in 1937 of a malignant brain tumor.