HUM 223: Porgy & Bess

Today we'll supplement the discussion of American songs and theater music in our textbook by looking at the work of George Gershwin, who with his brother Ira wrote songs for Tin Pan Alley (as the commercial songwriting district in New York City was called), the Broadway stage and classical music venues.

(But first a tangent. Once I had the opportunity to see a concert at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, famous for its performances of Russian composers like Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, and what did they play? A Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin!)

We'll go first to the official George and Ira Gershwin website. Enter the site, click through to the page with links to selected (rotating) clips of favorite songs displayed in the middle. In the menu at top, click on "History" to read about the Gershwin brothers, their musicials and their art. They were Jewish, of a Russian-American family, but when George wrote an opera about blacks in Charleston, S.C., he visited there to make sure he got the details right. The result was Porgy and Bess, and we'll see portions of it in class today.

On the Gershwin brothers website, click on "Anthology," "Selected Shows" and "Porgy and Bess." Read both screens. We'll watch portions of the Trevor Nunn production. Porgy and Bess is discussed in our textbook (pp. 218-20 in the 3rd edition). Originally written as a four-hour-long "folk opera," it has been cut down and adapted as a musical by Trevor Nunn. His production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess was previewed in The New York Times, and its promotional website has sound clips of some of its most famous songs, including one that's discussed in our textbook, "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'." Listen for the "blue" notes -- they'll sound slightly flat to you -- in all the songs. They're distinctively part of African American music, and Gershwin has them nailed!

We'll also watch a segment of the full opera version of Porgy and Bess directed by Nunn and conducted by Sir Simon Rattle of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1986. It showcases both Gershwin's operatic style and its rootedness in vernacular African American music, especially a song "Oh Doctor Jesus" that echoes black gospel singing traditions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you listen to the audio and watch the video clips (or as you write your midterm next week). In what ways does the singing sound like "Sheep Don't You Know the Road" and the singing of African American congregations we heard earlier this semester? In what ways is it different? How does Porgy and Bess compare to the artistic treatment of African American themes in the 19th-century minstrel shows and the spirituals arranged by classically oriented musicians like the Fisk Jubilee Singers?