Dr. Eva Jessye had a special relationship to the University of Michigan and to the city of Ann Arbor. Join blog team member Sophia Janevic as she spends a day in Jessye’s archive, currently housed at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, and speculates on what its materials can tell us about Dr. Jessye’s vibrant life. This is the final installment of a 3-part series on Dr. Eva Jessye. In part 1, we explored Jessye’s early life and her achievements as a choral director and composer, while part 2 chronicled Jessye’s work as the longtime choral director of The […]

Dr. Eva Jessye’s work in the premiere production and subsequent revivals of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess helped launch her choir to worldwide fame, and contributed to Jessye’s enduring legacy as “The Grande Dame of Black Music.” This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Dr. Eva Jessye. In part 1, we explored Jessye’s early life and her achievements as a choral director and composer. Our next and final installment will discuss Jessye’s career in academia and the Eva Jessye Collection here at the University of Michigan. “I saw this notice in the Film Daily looking for a black […]

Composer, singer, and actress Dr. Eva Jessye was the first Black woman to earn international distinction as the director of a professional choral group, the Eva Jessye Choir. Inspired by her heritage, Jessye also arranged and composed spirituals and worked to increase appreciation for them. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on Dr. Eva Jessye in which we explore the life and legacy of the “Grande Dame of Black Music.” Part 2 will chronicle Jessye’s work as the longtime choral director of The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, while Part 3 will discuss Jessye’s career in academia and the […]

In June, we announced some “rhythm changes” here at the Gershwin Initiative/American Music Institute — namely an enlargement of our educational mission to amplify and celebrate BIPOC creators and performers in the field of American music, and to confront issues of appropriation, advocacy, and representation in the works of George and Ira Gershwin. Toward this expanded mission, recent blog posts by our undergraduate researchers have highlighted Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings of the Gershwin Songbook; profiled composer Undine Smith Moore; and critically considered Gershwin’s Blue Monday (1922), an operatic blackface sketch for a musical revue often cited as a prototype for The […]

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 second in a three-part series devoted to Blue Monday—chronicles various efforts to revive and record the piece since its brief stint on Broadway, and examines the ways these productions dealt with the racially and culturally offensive aspects of the show. Content Warning: This post contains a quotation of an offensive racial slur. George Gershwin composed his one-act “jazz-opera” Blue Monday for the George White Scandals of 1922, but it was […]

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 […]

“Black music is a house of many mansions. Blacks have many musics and some of them relate in an extremely universal way to the human condition,” said Undine Smith Moore, who believed strongly in the power of Black music to reveal the innermost parts of the human heart, mind, body, and soul. This post is a celebration of her life as a Black woman in America, a legacy of bravery and persistence that lives on through her music. Known to many as the “Dean of Black Women Composers,” Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989) forged a remarkable career in composition and music […]

The University of Maryland’s National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) is back at it again with the release of a new album of American music featuring our critical edition of George’s Gershwin’s Concerto in F, performed by renowned pianist and Gershwin interpreter Kevin Cole! The album also includes performances of Joan Tower’s Sequoia, John Harbison’s Remembering Gatsby, and Walter Piston’s Symphony No. 5 under the direction of conductor David Alan Miller. Cole and Miller’s masterful performance of Gershwin’s concerto, edited by Tim Freeze, has already gotten national praise; check out Howard Reich’s review of the album for the Chicago Tribune, in […]

Ira Gershwin once declared, “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them.” Indeed, the Gershwins owe much of their enduring success to vocalist Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996), whose clear tone, seemingly effortless improvisational skills, and tremendous popularity earned her the nickname “The First Lady of Jazz.” Fitzgerald’s accessible yet powerful interpretations of the Gershwins’ music helped repopularize it over twenty years after George’s death, further cementing their compositions in the Great American Songbook. Launched to fame by her 1938 recording “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” Fitzgerald recorded over 200 albums during a robust, nearly 60 year-long career. […]