Lullaby

Long before Rhapsody in Blue made him a household name, a young George Gershwin was still learning his craft. In 1919, barely twenty years old and already working as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, he took lessons in harmony, theory, and orchestration with the Hungarian-born teacher Edward Kilenyi. Lullaby grew out of those studies, written for string quartet as an exercise in shaping long, singing melodic lines and complementary harmonic textures.