Following Heather L. Hodges’s fantastic guest post about the Gullah Geechee culture that the Gershwins and Heywards portray in Porgy and Bess, we turn to one of the opera’s most contended aspects: its treatment of the Gullah language. In this post, our managing editor, Andrew S. Kohler, explores how the work’s text came to be so far removed from Gullah, and how future performances may approach the inconsistent libretto so as to give Gullah culture and language the respect they are due. The language of Porgy and Bess is a far cry from that of the Gullah community of Charleston […]

On February 21 and 23, the Reno Philharmonic gave a test performance of our current drafts for Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris. The response from the orchestra and the audience was fantastic, the performance a success, and our editor-in-chief Mark Clague was able to explore his suspicions about the taxi horn pitches in An American in Paris (see the New York Times article). Here, conductor Laura Jackson provides her own response to the edited scores and considers how the newly reintroduced material fared in performance. Q: Now that the concert is over–and was a huge success–what material did you find you […]

Reno, NV—As editor-in-chief of the Gershwin Critical Edition, I’ve been in Reno this week with fellow editorial board member Ryan Bañagale (Colorado College), working with advisory board member Laura Jackson and her orchestra (the Reno Philharmonic) to test drive our new draft editions of An American in Paris (1928/29) and Rhapsody in Blue (1924, original Whiteman jazz arrangement). We’ve also joined forces with the Donald Sinta Quartet, who are featured as soloists in William Bolcom’s Concerto Grosso for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra, but who also join the Philharmonic to perform the additional saxophone parts required by the new Gershwin editions. […]

DuBose Heyward was at the forefront of Southern literature in the early twentieth century. His novel Porgy contributed to the growing conversation about African Americans in American literature and theater. George Gershwin had been actively seeking an opera libretto when Heyward’s Porgy caught his eye. Frances Sobolak is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan pursuing a Linguistics major and Music minor. She joined The Gershwin Initiative team in the fall of her sophomore year through the university’s undergraduate research opportunity program. In the early twentieth century, poets in Charleston, South Carolina, pioneered a literary renaissance where a group […]

The University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative bids farewell this month to Dean Christopher Kendall, who has completed his second and final 5-year  term at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Deans at the University of Michigan can serve for a maximum of 10 years. Dean Kendall leaves behind a legacy of transformation, crowned by the Brehm Pavilion addition to the School’s Earl V. Moore Building. Yet, those of us affiliated with the University’s George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition and the broader educational efforts of the Michigan Gershwin Initiative feel that these projects, which place some of the most […]

William Bolcom, Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Advisory Board Member, George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition “Finally there is a serious effort to put together a critical edition of George and Ira Gershwins’ work.  In the last few decades we’ve seen a growing number of worthwhile studies of American popular composers (see the recent Irving Berlin publications for example).  Others, like Jerome Kern and Alec Wilder, have written occasional chamber works alongside their song catalogues.  However George Gershwin, unlike his contemporaries in classic popular song, differs from the herd in that his non-Broadway work is major in substance, including one […]