1 - Introduction: the one and only

Summary

I don't think this music could be devalued. It has such character of its own, I don't think anything could kill it.

Leopold Godowsky III, son of Frances Gershwin Godowsky.

In 1987, United Airlines agreed to pay an annual fee of $ 300,000 for the rights to use Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in its advertisements, the first time the work was ever licensed for such a purpose. According to The Washington Post: “One of the first commercials using the rhapsody features its familiar, romantic, dah-dah-dahhhh-dah theme over shots of business persons bustling around offices and airports.” Six months afterwards, the Rhapsody, already one of the most frequently performed concert works of the twentieth century, was played - behind the husky voice of Gene Hackman - in United commercials throughout the 1988 Summer Olympics. It muffled the engine noise on United flights preparing for takeoff and upon landing, and floated through the busy passenger tunnel connecting United's two concourses at O'Hare Airport in Chicago - America's busiest. Apparently United chose the Rhapsody more for its cultural resonances than for its actual notes. Pursuant to the licensing agreement, the airline used the tunes of Rhapsody in Blue reordered and reorchestrated for its own purposes. The Washington Post observed that “had the family refused permission, the advertiser could have commissioned an original composition made to sound so much like the Rhapsody that many people would have thought that's what they were hearing.”