February 2024 marks the 100th birthday of George Gershwin’s jazz piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue. To celebrate, the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative in partnership with Ann Arbor’s landmark Michigan Theater (606 East Liberty in Ann Arbor) will host a Gershwin Centennial Celebration Concert on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, but requires an electronic, general admission ticket (reserve here). Please note: The start time for this event has been moved up to 4:00 p.m. A special feature of the concert will be the appearance of George Gershwin’s personal piano, a […]

While it was never particularly successful, George Gershwin’s 1922 one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday played an important role in bridging the gap between his popular style and classical compositions. This post—the final installment of our three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—explores just what a “jazz-opera” might be and delves deeper into the cultural implications of these stylistic elements in Gershwin’s work. Content Warning: This post contains a quotation of an offensive racial slur. As discussed in the initial post of this series, George Gershwin’s Blue Monday was cut from the George White Scandals of 1922 after opening night. Still, this short […]

While it was never particularly successful, George Gershwin’s 1922 one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday played an important role in bridging the gap between his popular style and classical compositions. This post—the first of a three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—delves into the creation and short life of the work and explores its place in Gershwin’s compositional development. At the peak of his career, George Gershwin was a versatile and successful composer of movie scores, popular songs, musicals, and concert pieces. But the fifteen-year-old boy who dropped out of school to be a song-plugger didn’t become an opera composer overnight. While the […]