In the nineteenth century Roman Catholic orthodoxy (right belief) was defined by Scripture (the Bible), Catholic tradition, and, since 1870, the magisterium of the papal office. Eastern Orthodox Christianity was also characterised by the authority of Scripture and tradition, but it was only gradually affected by the conflicts that are the subject matter of this chapter. In Protestantism, for which Scripture was the ultimate authority, orthodoxy was defined by early Christian creeds (shared with Catholic tradition) and by confessions of the Reformation period.

In 1888, women representing nine different countries convened in Washington, DC, for the first International Council of Women. Comparing the early women’s rights efforts at the Seneca Falls conference of 1848 to this International Council of Women, speaker Frederick Douglass remarked: ‘Then its friends were few – now its friends are many. Then it was wrapped in obscurity – now it is lifted in sight of the whole civilized world, and people of all lands and languages give it their hearty support.

In the West, the bloody and costly Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) were followed by economic depression, political reform, famine in Ireland, civil war and imperial assertion. But the immediate global political consequence was the creation of the ‘nation state’ at the Congress of Vienna (1815–16), where Europe was carved up into countries that mirrored the languages, religions and traditions of the people who would rule them. The newly created governments were eager to justify their legitimacy as nations by employing historians to celebrate their ‘imagined community’.

All of us experience moments that permanently change the course of our lives. Mine came when I met Ira Gershwin in 1977. I was twenty, and he was eighty. For years, I had been reading about and collecting everything I could get my hands on regarding the Gershwin brothers. When I finally met Ira, I was well prepared for the encounter.

For the next six years I became blissfully immersed in a long-vanished era, channeled through a survivor with whom I vicariously relived a time that looms large in cultural history. George had died forty years before, but he was still alive and well in Ira’s house. Surrounded by George’s everyday items – his pipe, tie clip, self-portraits, tune notebooks, grand piano, gold bracelet, photos, letters, and passport – I soaked up a sense not only of him, but also of his music and how it evolved and changed through the years. Countless stories were told by Ira and his friends.

Gershwin scholars and critics looking back on his career often focus on Gershwin’s modernity, his skillful use of jazz in his concert repertoire, and marvel at his ability to cross the divide between popular and classical music. Many people interpret Gershwin as essentially an art music composer who happened to work in musical theater. The over-representation in musicological scholarship that privileges Gershwin’s “classical” works such as Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, and Porgy and Bess compared to his songs and musicals demonstrates the bias of the field toward the long compositions that are routinely performed in concert music spaces and analytical approaches that are grounded within the classical repertory. But viewing Gershwin as primarily a theatrical composer provides a different vantage point on his career, and one, I argue, that is truer to the development of his compositional voice.

Gershwin scholars and critics looking back on his career often focus on Gershwin’s modernity, his skillful use of jazz in his concert repertoire, and marvel at his ability to cross the divide between popular and classical music. Many people interpret Gershwin as essentially an art music composer who happened to work in musical theater. The over-representation in musicological scholarship that privileges Gershwin’s “classical” works such as Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, and Porgy and Bess compared to his songs and musicals demonstrates the bias of the field toward the long compositions that are routinely performed in concert music spaces and analytical approaches that are grounded within the classical repertory. But viewing Gershwin as primarily a theatrical composer provides a different vantage point on his career, and one, I argue, that is truer to the development of his compositional voice.

Norman Granz, Fitzgerald’s producer and manager for what might be described as the glory years of her career, occasionally gets credit for inventing the idea of the songbook album. Granz was not a humble man, but even he would have hesitated to take a bow for this particular innovation. “Songbook” albums dedicated to the canon of a single composer, lyricist, or team, go back at least as far as 1939, when the jazz and torch singer Lee Wiley launched a series of songbook projects that ultimately extended to six different albums. The songbook’s growing popularity as a format appears to have gone hand-in-hand with the introduction of the long-playing record in 1948: Margaret Whiting did a Rodgers and Hart collection for Capitol Records in 1947 (released as a 10 inch LP in 1950), and even more notably, Fitzgerald herself recorded her first songbook, Ella Sings Gershwin, in 1950.

That premiere Fitzgerald songbook was produced by Milt Gabler, an under-appreciated figure in the arc of Ella’s career and in jazz in general. Yet Norman Granz deserves credit for something else, something closely related.

‘Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, there are – socially, morally and perhaps even physically considered – but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the civilized tribes’, announces Henry Mayhew (1812–87) at the very beginning of his widely influential London Labour and the London Poor.

If all philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Plato, Aristotle is the ultimate source of footnotes to rhetoric and poetics.

There has never been a more exciting time to be working on Shakespeare’s language. If you have an internet connection, fire it up.