Who composed Rhapsody in Blue?

George Gershwin, in 1924, and he wrote it because he read in a newspaper that he was writing it. A bandleader had announced a concert including a new jazz concerto by Gershwin without telling him; he saw the item, had about five weeks, and composed it largely on a train to Boston, saying he heard it in the rhythm of the wheels.

The opening clarinet glissando was a joke. Gershwin wrote a seventeen-note rising scale, and the band's clarinettist smeared it in rehearsal to tease him - Gershwin liked it and told him to keep it. That accidental wail is now one of the most recognisable openings in American music.

He also could not orchestrate it in time, so Ferde Grofe scored it for the band, and the familiar full orchestral version came later. Gershwin died at 38 of a brain tumour, having spent his last months being told his symptoms were psychosomatic. He had wanted to study with Ravel, who declined on the grounds that Gershwin was already a first-rate Gershwin and would only become a second-rate Ravel.