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George Gershwin’s work has remained popular, but it is also controversial: for some it introduced jazz into the concert hall, while others consider it to be a white musician’s crass and racist appropriation
At the turn of 1924, all of musical New York was agog at the prospect of an “Experiment in Modern Music”. The venue was the exceedingly plush Aeolian Hall, and the famous Paul Whiteman Band was performing. It wasn’t quite the first experiment in combining jazz and classical music – Whiteman had recently caused a stir by mingling songs from modernist composers such as Schoenberg, Milhaud and Bartok with jazz songs by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Gershwin.