George Gershwin has long been a challenging figure to categorize and evaluate within mainstream music historiography. Few have gone as far as the Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, who, after attending a performance of Rhapsody in Blue, deemed him “half human and half animal.” But music historians and chroniclers have reacted variably to the composer’s rather anomalous achievement and place in the history of Western music.

To explore and gauge such differing perspectives on Gershwin, in particular his more serious compositions, I have examined his coverage – or lack thereof – among a fairly broad range of mainly American texts on Western and in particular American and twentieth-century concert music.

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the 1880s, foretold a time when ‘psychology shall be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist’. As always with this ‘dancing’ philosopher, the statement invites different interpretations. It seems to say that psychology is the end point of knowledge, yet it gives no hint as to what this psychology is.

George Gershwin encountered Hollywood in the early years of the talkies, as sound technology advanced quickly, public opinion about the role of music in film fluctuated rapidly, and studios experimented with how best to employ composers and songwriters. Entering the world of movie musicals by way of a successful Broadway career was in turns exciting and uncomfortable. Gershwin enjoyed living in Los Angeles but chafed against the reduced artistic control he was afforded. First visiting Los Angeles for fourteen weeks in 1930 to write the score for Fox’s Delicious (1931), and then returning in the last year of his life to compose RKO’s Shall We Dance (1937) and Damsel in Distress (1937), in addition to Samuel Goldwyn’s The Goldwyn Follies (1938), Gershwin’s interaction with Los Angeles and the people who lived and worked there brings into focus both the vitality of a city invigorated by a growing film industry and the tragedy of a promising life cut short.

There are many things to love about Gershwin’s 1935 opera, Porgy and Bess. Most of the tunes are already familiar through jazz standards (“Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “Bess, You is My Woman Now”), and Gershwin’s music has that perfect combination of an undulating Puccini-esque lyricism and catchy syncopations that capture the rhythms of the English language. Gershwin’s music achieves many things at once: it involves full-out operatic singing, yet still has moments that feel like a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Serena’s “My Man’s Gone Now” at the funeral of her husband in Act I showcases operatic virtuosity and brings on the chills of a new widow’s wail. The “Six Simultaneous Prayers” chorus during the Act II hurricane makes you feel like you have walked into a black church vigil. The creators’ insistence on a black cast makes going to Porgy and Bess a unique experience, and one especially exciting for black audiences, for nowhere else in the repertory do we have the chance to see so many black people on the opera stage – and in the audience.

George Gershwin was an avid traveler, and for most of his adult life he was on the move. There were work retreats in upstate New York, golf excursions and beach trips south (e.g. Florida, Cuba), premieres up and down the East Coast, a trip to Mexico, film projects in California and five trips to Europe. Gershwin’s relationships with his cousins, the poet and folklorist B. A. (Ben) Botkin and his older brother, the painter Henry (Harry) Botkin, deserve to be foregrounded in any discussion of Gershwin’s travels. Through his relationships with them, Gershwin acquired a deep interest in, and knowledge of, folklore and modernist art – topics that increasingly influenced his approach to composition during the last decade of his life, when he went from being a mere traveler to a cultural tourist.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact that no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it.

When George and Ira Gershwin returned to Hollywood in 1936, the town had changed. New songwriters, stars, and sound technologies had made the Hollywood musical a much more appealing medium for the Gershwins; their first effort, Delicious (1931), had fallen short of George’s hopes for the form. Among those in the vanguard of the film musical were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, both of whom had worked with the Gershwins on Broadway and now enjoyed star duo status at RKO. Gershwin’s reputation had changed too. His most ambitious composition, the “folk opera” Porgy and Bess, had opened in 1935. Some in Hollywood wondered whether the new opera composer would deign to write catchy tunes. “They are afraid you will only do highbrow songs,” explained a California-based associate. Gershwin’s wired response was unequivocal: “Rumors about highbrow music ridiculous. Stop. Am out to write hits.”

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.