Thirty Million Calls

On February 12, 1924, George Gershwin walked out to a Steinway at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan and played an opening that had never existed before — a single clarinet sliding seventeen steps upward in one long, audacious glissando, and then the rest of the orchestra arriving like a city coming to life. One hundred years and one month later, on any given workday in 2024, some portion of roughly thirty million annual callers were still trapped inside that melody — compressed, slightly distorted, looped every two minutes and forty-one seconds — waiting for United Airlines to answer the phone. 1

The association began in 1987, when United licensed Rhapsody in Blue from the Gershwin estate for $300,000 a year — the first commercial license ever granted for the composition. 2 Gene Hackman voiced the first ads. The choice was deliberate: Rhapsody was, as Colorado College musicologist Ryan Raul Bañagale has written, "a quintessential sound of America, especially New York in the 1920s" — optimistic, cosmopolitan, forward-moving. For an airline trying to sell business travel at 35,000 feet, it was perfect pitch. 3

In 2012 and 2013, Hollywood orchestrator Conrad Pope — whose credits include Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park — was brought in to re-imagine the piece entirely. 4 He recorded a seventeen-minute, fully orchestral version with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, stripping out the solo piano and folding it into the ensemble. That version became United's boarding music:

What arrived on the hold line was something else: a two-minute-forty-one-second loop, documented in this field recording:

Reddit users described it as sounding like it was "recorded off an old 8-track player, then compressed the hell out of it":

The gap between those two versions — the Abbey Road grandeur and the telephone-line fragment — is the subject of this piece. Thirty Million Calls opens with the composition Gershwin wrote and United commissioned: lush, sweeping, a piano melody carried by full strings and brass, the urban-romantic sensibility intact. Then, around the forty-five-second mark, the orchestra recedes. What's left is the hold experience — piano alone, slightly compressed, slightly hollow, the same phrase cycling with the patience of a system that has no idea how long you've been waiting. The music is still beautiful. It's also relentless.

The bittersweet re-entrance of strings at around the minute-forty-five mark is not a resolution. Concert pianist Emanuel Ax — a United frequent flyer who spoke to the Seattle Times in 2014 — put it precisely: "Even the Beethoven Fifth Symphony can be destroyed by Muzak treatment. Being repeated ad nauseam is probably not healthy for any music." Clinical psychologist Frederick Rotgers, who waited eight hours on hold during a January 2014 weather cancellation event, said he heard the melody in his sleep afterward. 5

There is a detail worth noting: Rhapsody in Blue entered the US public domain on January 1, 2020 — ninety-five years after its 1924 publication. United may still license the specific Pope/LSO recording, but the composition itself now belongs to everyone. 6 The piece you hear on this episode belongs to no one and to all of us: an orchestral tradition built on jazz, compressed to fit a telephone codec, and looped across thirty million moments of suspended time per year. 7

Before Gershwin, United used Brian Eno's Music for Airports. That lineage — Eno to Gershwin, ambient surrender to symphonic assertion — is worth sitting with. This channel began with the IRS flute-and-piano loop, moved through Comcast's synthesizer and Bank of America's Richard Clayderman-adjacent piano ballad, and arrives here at the most culturally loaded hold line in American aviation. Rhapsody in Blue was already about waiting — about the city in motion, about impatience and beauty existing in the same breath. United just made that literal.