Aeolian Hall, Former concert venue and office building in Midtown Manhattan, United States.
Aeolian Hall is a building from 1912 on West 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, built with a limestone facade and neoclassical decorative details. The structure originally contained a concert hall seating around 1,100 people, housed within the floors of the 18-story tower.
The building was erected in 1912 as the headquarters of the Aeolian Company, one of the largest piano and instrument manufacturers in the country at the time. The concert hall closed in 1927, after which the building was converted for other uses over the following decades.
The hall is remembered above all for a 1924 concert organized by Paul Whiteman titled "An Experiment in Modern Music," which brought jazz-influenced sounds into a formal concert setting. The audience that night included composers, critics, and performers who shaped American music in the years that followed.
The building sits close to Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan and is easy to reach by subway from most parts of the city. It now operates as an educational institution and is not open to the public, so the visit is limited to viewing the exterior from the street.
George Gershwin premiered Rhapsody in Blue here on February 12, 1924, but the piece was written in just a few weeks after Gershwin learned about the concert from a newspaper announcement. He performed as the piano soloist that night while Ferde Grofe had arranged the orchestral parts.
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