On February 12, 1924 at Aeolian Hall on 42nd Street, Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra presented An Experiment in Modern Music. Whiteman mounted the concert to demonstrate to the attendant New York musical establishment (which included the likes of John Phillip Sousa and Sergei Rachmaninoff) how "to make a lady out of jazz", as he put it at the time, by showing how the apparently horribly discordant new music (which he represented through the squawks, wild rhythms and general hokum of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's 1917 "Livery Stable Blues") contained important elements of what he termed "the true form of jazz" that, for all its flaws, could at the very least be "a stepping stone which will make it very simple for the masses to understand, and therefore, enjoy symphony and opera." The program opened with the ODJB abomination and concluded with Elgar's Pomp And Circumstance…with a progression of musical refinements, culminating with the ultimate stepping stone: a new piece by the young composer George Gershwin, the brilliant tone poem Rhapsody in Blue.