Ravel grew up around factories. “In my childhood I had a great interest in mechanical things,” he wrote. His father was a civil engineer, and Ravel loved “going over factories and seeing vast machinery at work. It is awe-inspiring.” When approached to write a new ballet score, Ravel set a story of jealousy and retribution in the shadow of a factory. The scenario was eventually rejected, but Ravel’s machine-like music remains.

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Far more than a mere Jazz Age travelogue, Gershwin’s quintessentially American symphonic poem An American in Paris unfolds with radiant vitality and intoxicating energy. The work’s spry longevity (ninety years and counting) would have come as a surprise to those critics who dismissed Gershwin’s works as mere passing fancies. The New York Evening Post’s Oscar Thompson allowed that while An American in Paris might be all the rage circa 1928, “to conceive of a symphony audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter.”

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Rhapsody in Blue was George Gershwin's first extended work, written hastily for performance at a special evening of Big Band Jazz entitled An American Experiment in Modern Music by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in New York City's Aeolian Hall in February of 1924. The original scoring of the work for Whiteman's band, which included strings was done by Ferde Grofe and published in 1926, with an orchestral version that followed, though it was not published until 1942.

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Pavane pour une infante defunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess) was commissioned of the 24-year-old Ravel in 1899 as a somewhat whimsical salon piece for piano and premiered in 1902 by Ricardo Vines to much acclaim. The composer was a bit bewildered by the work’s popularity, but nonetheless orchestrated it in 1910 to even greater success.

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