Rhapsody in Blue Trivia
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49 free Rhapsody in Blue trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Rhapsody in Blue trivia quiz covers the 1924 piece that made George Gershwin a serious composer and gave the Jazz Age its theme tune. The easy questions cover the composer, the bandleader who commissioned it, the instrument that opens it, the airline that has used it since 1987 and the Disney film that animated it. From there the quiz moves through the frantic story of how it was written: the newspaper article that announced it before Gershwin had agreed, the train to Boston, the five-week deadline, the brother who found the title in a Whistler exhibition and the arranger who scored it in about ten days. The hard end covers the premiere and the afterlife: the broken ventilation at Aeolian Hall, the improvised piano solo the orchestra waited on for a nod, the critics who called it formless, the million-selling Victor recording, Arthur Fiedler's first unabridged version, Oscar Levant, Michael Tilson Thomas and the 1925 piano roll, the 84 pianists at the 1984 Olympics, Deodato's disco single and the day it entered the public domain. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Rhapsody in Blue and George Gershwin before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classical music, jazz and 1920s quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Baz Luhrmann film reveals its hero to a burst of Rhapsody in Blue and fireworks?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby: the 2013 film plays it as Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby first turns and smiles, though the story is set in 1922, two years before the piece existed.
Q 02Rhapsody in Blue premiered during which American era?
Prohibition
Prohibition: the sale of alcohol had been banned for four years when the piece premiered in 1924, at a concert staged to show that jazz belonged in the concert hall.
Q 03A few weeks after its premiere, Rhapsody in Blue moved up to which larger New York hall?
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall: the first concert drew so much attention that Whiteman repeated it in March and then took it there on April 21, 1924, with the composer again at the piano.
Q 04Which instrument plays the famous opening glissando of Rhapsody in Blue?
Clarinet
Clarinet: Gershwin wrote only a trill and a plain 17-note scale, but in rehearsal Whiteman's player smeared the run into a wail as a joke, and Gershwin asked him to keep it in.
Q 05Which dancer starred with his sister in the Gershwin brothers' Broadway hit of 1924, the year of Rhapsody in Blue?
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire recalled Gershwin, then a teenage song plugger, saying how great it would be to write a show that Fred could be in; in 1924 he and his sister Adele were its stars.
Q 06At which New York venue was Rhapsody in Blue premiered?
Aeolian Hall
Aeolian Hall: the 42nd Street concert room belonged to a piano maker, and its ventilation failed that afternoon, leaving a restless, sweating audience well before the new piece began.
Q 07What was the title of the concert at which Rhapsody in Blue was first performed?
An Experiment in Modern Music
An Experiment in Modern Music: Whiteman's manager called it 'purely educational', a lecture-concert meant to show how far popular music had come from the 'discordant' early days of jazz.
Q 08The newspaper item that announced Gershwin's 'jazz concerto' in 1924 also promised a 'syncopated tone poem' from which songwriter?
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin wrote no tone poem and nothing new at all, so the band played three of his existing songs; Gershwin found his own piece announced when the item was read out to him in a billiard hall.
Q 09Roughly how long before the premiere did Gershwin start writing Rhapsody in Blue?
About five weeks
About five weeks: his two-piano manuscript is dated January 7, 1924, and he was so rushed that he left gaps in the piano part to improvise on the day.
Q 10Gershwin said the plan for Rhapsody in Blue came to him on a train to which city?
Boston
Boston: he said the train's 'steely rhythms' and 'rattle-ty bang' let him suddenly hear, and even see on paper, the whole piece from beginning to end.
Q 11What working title did Gershwin give Rhapsody in Blue while composing it?
American Rhapsody
American Rhapsody: he said he heard the piece as 'a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America', and it was his brother Ira who proposed swapping the country for a colour.
Q 12Ira Gershwin suggested the title Rhapsody in Blue after seeing an exhibition of paintings by which artist?
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler named paintings like pieces of music with colours attached, such as Nocturne in Black and Gold and Arrangement in Grey and Black, the portrait better known as Whistler's Mother.
Q 13Ferde Grofé, who orchestrated Rhapsody in Blue, later wrote which suite for Whiteman's band?
Q 21Which pianist, a close friend of Gershwin, recorded Rhapsody in Blue with Eugene Ormandy in 1945?
Oscar Levant
Oscar Levant tried to copy his late friend's own way of playing the piece, and that same year he appeared as himself in the Hollywood film of the composer's life.
Q 22In 1976 Michael Tilson Thomas recorded Rhapsody in Blue with Gershwin, dead since 1937, as soloist, using what?
Piano roll
Piano roll: Gershwin had cut the roll in 1925, and a player piano reproduced his performance while the Columbia Jazz Band accompanied in the original band scoring.
Q 23Which airline made Rhapsody in Blue the theme music of its advertising and safety videos?
United Airlines
Grand Canyon Suite
Grand Canyon Suite: Whiteman's band premiered it in 1931, and its clip-clopping movement 'On the Trail' went on to sell Philip Morris cigarettes on American radio and TV for decades.
Q 14Which strummed dance-band instrument survives in the symphonic score of Rhapsody in Blue?
Banjo
Banjo: the 1942 score for full orchestra still carries its part, though a note in the score calls it almost optional, since the strings already cover the rhythm it used to strum.
Q 15At the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, how did the band know the improvised piano solo was ending?
Gershwin nodded
Gershwin nodded: the band's parts simply said to wait for his nod, because he improvised stretches of the solo and wrote the piano part down only after the concert.
Q 16Which operetta composer wrote a new suite for the concert that introduced Rhapsody in Blue?
Victor Herbert
Victor Herbert, far the better-known name in 1924, wrote his Suite of Serenades for the programme, yet the concert is remembered for the newcomer's piece that followed it.
Q 17Which magazine put Gershwin on its cover in July 1925, the year after Rhapsody in Blue?
Time
Time: the piece had turned a Broadway songwriter into a composer the whole country knew, and the record he made of it with Whiteman's band went on to sell a million copies.
Q 18Which 1928 Gershwin orchestral piece has parts for four taxi horns?
An American in Paris
An American in Paris: he toured the car-parts shops of the Avenue de la Grande Armée for taxi horns that honked the right notes, then carried them home for the New York premiere.
Q 19Why does Gershwin and Whiteman's 1924 recording of Rhapsody in Blue sound rushed?
To fit two sides of a disc
To fit two sides of a disc: a 12-inch record held about nine minutes in all, so a piece that ran some 17 minutes in the hall was cut down and played at a sprint.
Q 20Which orchestra recorded Rhapsody in Blue at nearly full length in 1935?
The Boston Pops
The Boston Pops, under Arthur Fiedler, set down nearly 14 minutes with pianist Jesús María Sanromá, swapping the jazz-band scoring of the premiere for a conventional symphony orchestra.
United Airlines licensed the tune from the Gershwin estate, calls it the airline's soundtrack, and has invited four musicians to remix it in the styles of their home cities.
Q 24Which Woody Allen film opens with a black-and-white montage set to Rhapsody in Blue?
Manhattan
Manhattan: as Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic play, Allen's narrator keeps scrapping and redrafting the first line of his book about a man who loves the city.
Q 25Eighty-four pianists played Rhapsody in Blue at the opening of the Olympics in which American city?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles: at the 1984 opening ceremony the 84 grand pianos came into view together through the arches of the Coliseum's peristyle, in a segment called Urban Rhapsody.
Q 26Which Disney film set Rhapsody in Blue to a New York segment drawn in Al Hirschfeld's style?
Fantasia 2000
Fantasia 2000: Eric Goldberg, the animator of Aladdin's Genie, got the caricaturist's blessing and drew four restless 1930s New Yorkers who help one another without ever realising it.
Q 27A 1998 law kept Rhapsody in Blue under copyright until 2020; it is named for which entertainer turned politician?
Sonny Bono
Sonny Bono: the act named for the late singer and congressman added 20 years to old copyrights after lobbying by Disney and the Gershwin family, so the 1924 piece went free in 2020, not 2000.
Q 28Which Brazilian musician followed his funk hit version of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme with a 1973 Rhapsody in Blue?
Eumir Deodato
Eumir Deodato trimmed the piece into a single over neo-samba rhythms, the follow-up to his remake of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which had reached No. 2 in America that spring.
Q 29Which two pianists performed Rhapsody in Blue together at the 50th Grammy Awards in 2008?
Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang
Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang, one jazz pianist and one classical, hit it off so well that the one-night duet grew into a two-piano world tour the following year.
Q 30Where did the first British performance of Rhapsody in Blue take place, in June 1925?
The Savoy Hotel
The Savoy Hotel: its house dance band, the Savoy Orpheans, played the piece with Gershwin himself at the piano while the BBC relayed the performance live to listeners at home.