First Gershwin Lecture
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Office Hours: Tuesday,
10:30-12, 452 |
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Upcoming events in the School of the Arts: |
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Challenge 5. Due 5 AM,
Wednesday, February 27. Identify a song that has a clear political message.
Type out or cut and paste the lyrics and send them to me with the title of
the song. That's the basic challenge. If you want to go farther, and if you
have the song as an mp3 file, tell me how I can get a copy (either you could
lend me a zip drive or burn it on a CD-Rom or email it). Or if the music is
downloadable somewhere on the web, send me the url. If the lyrics are
difficult to understand (or in a language other than English), please write
them out or provide a translation. IMPORTANT: If you send me a Word file,
do not send a .docx file. You have a more recent version of Word than I do,
and I won't be able to open it. Save your file in a .doc format. |
Want to know about Gershwin or
So why does a historian want to study on Porgy and
Bess?
Because the song-writing team of George and Ira
Gershwin has never been beat, I love songs like "They Can't Take that Away From Me"
Because I am a hopeless romantic
Because I love Porgy and Bess. Because tears
come to my eyes when I hear the duet in Act II, Scene 1 ("Bess, you is my
woman now...") or the end of Act III ("Oh lawd, I'm on my
way..."). It is music that moves me very deeply
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Summertime variations on YouTube
Because I am a historian and I was really interested
in juxtapositions:
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- Ira
Gershwin attends
- Shostakovich
attends production of Porgy and Bess in
- Compares Gershwin to Modest Mussorsgsky
(1839-1881) and Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
- The American composer who interests him most
- Porgy
and Bess appears in the same year as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the
Will, 2 years before the Degenerate Art exhibition
- In
the 1920s, a very wealth young George Gershwin collects art--Picasso and
many others--that the Nazis will prevent Germans from seeing in the 1930s
- Gershwin
is friends with Kurt Weill, Brecht's collaborator on The Three Penny
Opera, and meets him in
- Hitler
would definitely have hated an opera written by a Jew, performed by
African Americans, and featuring a disabled person
- And
I am interested in what I can learn from comparisons:
- Democratic
systems of governance vs. authoritarian regimes
- Systems
in which markets provide one measure of the success of cultural
productions vs. state control of the arts
- Different
conceptions of race (Nazi Germany vs. US in the 1930s)
- Gershwin
as a maker who doesn't see himself as a doer? With no revolutionary
context, no revolutionary art?
And because Gershwin's Porgy and Bess once
again raises some familiar central questions:
- Who
gets to make what sort of art?
- Who
judges what's good and bad?
But... I am not a
What it means to "work" on a topic when you
teach at a research university
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I've gotten merit badges for: Studies of why peasants hated the Studies of how West Germans reformed Nazi policies
about the status of women and the family in the 1950s Studies of how West Germans were able for so long to
deny their responsibility for the Holocaust And questions I'm now asking that define my
"research agenda": Why did it take West Germans so long to reform laws
introduced by the Nazis that dramatically intensified the criminal
prosecution of homosexual men? When Stanley Kramer's move, Judgment at Nuremberg
had its world premier in Why did a famous Nazi film director, Veit Harlan (he
made the euthanasia movie to which I referred) make a movie about
homosexuality in 1957 in As a research scholar, I also to go conferences and
meetings of scholarly professional associations, and I go to other
universities where I give seminars to students and faculty on my research. And if you want the whole story, go to my History Department
homepage |
- Your
high school AP World or European history teacher was responsible for
everything from the cooling of the earth's crust to the day before
yesterday
- University
research scholars "work" on a much narrower spectrum.
- Our
job is to make new knowledge that in turn becomes part of textbooks and
history books written for a non-specialist, general public (like most of
you!).
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Reconstructing my path (I didn't put the research
guide together just for you):
- Grove
Music Online (articles and checking for bibliography)
- Britannica
On-line
- MELVYL
(this gets me the entire UC system, not just UCI, Inter-Library Loan works
like a charm, and don't forget subject-heading searches,go to
details/locations and scroll down)
- JSTOR
(remember to check to look for articles only, play around with search
terms, doesn't capture the last five years)
- Historical
Abstracts (because I'm a historian)
- Project
Muse
- MLA
International Bibliography (because lit scholars and scholars who do
cultural studies may write on this)
- Two options: Compile bibliographies or go
directly to on-line sources available in our library and print out
immediately
- And for articles in .pdf format, remember to
save in case I lose the print-out (happens to me a lot, I am clean, but
not neat)
- WorldCat:
One step further and by now I was so into it, I wanted to know about
archival sources
- eMusic:
The music matters; how much of it can I find easily?
- Always
play around with subject headings
- Use
subject headings in sources I find
- Send
myself results from library searches
- Be
patient and take the time to print-out articles that are available on line
or copy the .pdf file on my computer.
- Talk
to professors who know more a lot about twentieth century
- What
next?
- Huge
piles of print-outs, surrounded by books, keeping a path free from my desk
to the study door
- Not
forgetting to read from the bottom up: What function do footnotes serve?
- Trying
to work systematically but ending up with some articles 2 or 3 times
(there went the old growth forests)
- Read,
read, read some more
- Take
excerpts
- Print
out excerpts, use a high-lighter
- Listen
to Porgy and Bess constantly on my mp3 player on the elliptical
trainer at 5:15 AM
- Watching
the production video 1, 2, 3, who knows how many times
- And
yes, playing around with Google, finding Gershwin sites (now collected on
the Web Resource page), and ok, ok, looking at the
Wikipedia entry
- (And
yes, I am still getting in that bike ride to the Back Bay, I've progressed
to season three of "The Wire," I've tried a couple more recipes
in the North African cookbook, and I can't wait to see who makes it to the
runway in Bryant Park.)
- Along
the way, find cool stuff, like the fact that the Library of Congress has a
huge collection of Gershwin papers and the original manuscript of the play
on which the opera is based
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Questions that emerged from me:
- Is
Porgy and Bess an opera?
- Critics are divided, Gershwin calls it a
"folk opera"
- Do categories and genres create hierarchies? Is
a "folk opera" not as good as an opera? Is it trivial? Is it
more like a musical comedy?
- Does
Porgy and Bess offer a racist depiction of African Americans?
- Can artists who are not African American
represent the experience of African Americans?
- Who gets to make and do for whom?
But first, what about the bigger context? (Here, I
start with a basic survey textbook and the Brittanica, use the bibliographies they
offer me, ask colleagues for the best source on any given topics, and yes, do
some web surfing)
- International
Context
- US also enters World War I but only very late,
April 6, 1917 (2 days after Lenin returns to Petrograd from
- War doesn't have the same devastating effect as
it does in
- Domestic
Context:
- Red Scare associated with fears of eastern
European, particularly Jewish, immigrants
- Immigration curbs by 1924
The Jacob Lawrence, "During the World War
there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes." (from The
Migration Series, 1940-41)
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- Great
Migration begins in war, continues into 1920s
- Huge
increase in African American population in large urban centers in the
north
- "Red
Scare" and "Black Scare" immediately after war
- Comparative framework: The problem of race in
- Fight
for Rights for African Americans
- National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People founded in 1909
The NAACP sponsored
anti-lynching legislation right after World War I
- Marcus Garvey, Universal Negro Improvement
Association: "African was peopled with a race of cultured black men,
who were masters in art, science, and literature...
- W.E.B. Dubois
- The
Langston Hughes
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"I, too, sing I, too, sing America (Compare with Walt Whitman's "I Hear
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Novelist Zora Neale Hurston (another maker who would
be a really interesting subject for a research paper)
- The Jazz Age
Ethel Waters: Remember "Sweet Georgia Brown" from the lecture on Nazi Art?
Hitler may not have liked it, but Gershwin would have traveled to
- Economic prosperity of the 1920s and expansion of consumer culture
- The Great Depression, Stock Market Crash of 1929
- Unemployment at 25% by 1932
- Never below 17% in the 1930s
Margaret Bourke-White
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So what?
- The late 19th century immigration that brought eastern European
Jews--like Gershwin's parents--to the
- Porgy and Bess set at
turn of century (at the latest, right after World War I, the sources don't
agree)
- Audiences are living in a very different US
- From Broadway to
- The
- But in the poetry of Langston Hughes and the blues of Ethel Waters
we are witnessing the emergence of an African American urban culture
created by African Americans
- The Great Depression means that all Americans confront
unemployment and poverty that does not shimmer in the romantic glow of
"Catfish Row"
Where does Gershwin fit in?
Your job is to figure this out and tell us how what
you learn about Gershwin's life can help us to understand Porgy and Bess
- Where you trace musical influences in his life before 1935 in the
"folk opera" that premiers in that year?
- Don't forget to use Grove Music Online, the Britannica, and the 3
articles you'll be finding in the Library Discovery Task. And if you want
more on Gershwin, remember to start with the links I've put together.
My research leads me to the 2 questions I want to
raise with you:
- 1)
Has Gershwin written an opera?
- 2)
Is Porgy and Bess racist?
Today: Question 1. Rephrased: What difference do genre
labels and categories make?
- Two
responses in the two reviews from your library discovery task:
- Brook
Atkinson, New York Times, October 11, 1935: "Whether or not
Mr. Gershwin's score measures up to its intentions as American folk opera
lies in Mr. Downes's bailiwick." (You can't understand this if you
don't know what bailiwick means.)
- So
Atkinson says: I'm not taking that one on. I have my discipline and
I know my limits; he hides behind his Ethos.
- "[H]e
has not completely formed his style as an opera composer.
- "The
style is at one moment of opera and another operetta or sheer Broadway
entertainment. It goes without saying that many of the songs in the score
of 'Porgy and Bess' will reap a quick popularity."
- "[T]here
are... too many songs and 'numbers' which hold back the dramatic
development and the treatment of passages of recitative is seldom
significant."
- This
isn't Pravda but does it sound like a good review to you? (And
ultimately, Gershwin will lose a lot of his own money on the show, and it
will not have that long a run. Gershwin will go to
- And
add to this one you haven't read:
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Virgil Thomson, famous American composer, writing in
1935, says Gershwin tries to write an opera but fails (Damning with faint praise) "I do not wish to
indicate that it is in any way reprehensible of him not to be a serious
composer. I only want to define something that we have all been wondering
about for some years. It was certain that he was a gifted composer, a
charming composer, an exciting and sympathetic composer. His gift and charm
are greater than the gifts of the charms of almost any of the other American
composers. And a great gift or great charm is an exciting thing. And a gifted
and charming composer who sets himself seriously to learn his business is a
sympathetic one. I think, however, it is clear by now that Gershwin hasn’t
learned his business. At least he hasn’t learned the business of being a
serious composer, which one has long gathered to be the business he wanted to
learn." (Can't handle basic elements of opera) "His
efforts at recitativo are as ineffective as anything." (Can the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants
not write opera? Who gets to be a maker and what do they get to make?)
"I don't like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet
harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefiltefish* orchestration." (Gershwin should know his place) "The numbers
which have rhymed or jingled lyrics are slick enough in the Gershwin Broadway
manner. But his prose declamation is full of exaggerated leaps and
unimportant accents. It is vocally uneasy and dramatically cumbersome... As
for the development, or musical build-up, there simply isn't any. When he
gets hold of a good number he plugs it in. The rest of the time he just makes
up what music he needs as he goes along." (In opera, the music should advance the narrative;
it doesn't) "There is little drama in the orchestra and little
expression in the melodies, prettily Negroid though they be..." *gefilte fish--literally stuffed fish--is a typical
eastern European Jewish dish made of deboned fish mixed together with meal.
The reference would have need no explanation for Thomson's readers. |
Argument and Counter-Argument
- Argument
of those who say it's not an opera:
- Gershwin writes tunes that are hummable show
tunes, not the stuff of opera Gershwin doesn't use the music to advance
the plot
- Gershwin relies too heavily on "six-part
choruses and gefiltefish orchestration."
- Gershwin has too many styles and you can't
classify him
- Counter-Argument
- Yes, Gershwin knows a good show tune when he
sees one:
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We fought in 1917 |
- But he also knows plenty about classical music
- His friends and associates include Darius
Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill (Brecht's collaborator
on Three Penny Opera and Gershwin's inspiration for Strike up
the Band), accompanies Maurice Ravel to
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Gershwin approaches
Stravinsky in Pairs in 1928 and asks if he can study composition with him.
Stravinsky asks him what he earns. Gershwin responses "a hundred
thousand dollars a year--maybe two hundred thousand." Stravinsky:
"Well, then, in that case perhaps it is I who out to study with
you." |
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- Gershwin studies composition until he leaves for
- Like Shostakovich, Gershwin knows that
"Opera is above all a vocal production... in opera music should play
the principal and deciding role..." (Shostakovich)
Hearing the Evidence
- Example
1: How Gershwin uses music to advance the plot
- "Catfish
Row" is a community on the brink of dissolution. At the turn-of-the-century--barely
a generation away from slavery--southern blacks were longed for a life
with worries, but many would soon be taking a boat--or more likely--a
train to
- So
how does the music convey this?
- Summertime
- Act
1, Scene 1, DVD Ch. 2, sung by Clara to her baby... right before the crap
game that will result in the death of Robbins, and Clara will be dead by
- Reprised
in Act II, Scene 4, sung by Clara to her baby during the storm , by the
end of this act, Clara will have vanished
- Reprised
in Act III, Scene 1, DVD Ch. 25, Bess sings it to Clara's baby, she longs
to be integrated into the community, but the scene will end in violence as
Porgy murders Crown
- Thesis:
Gershwin has effectively mastered a central element of opera by using a
repeated motif to develop a central plot element.
- Example
2: What Bess sings
- Use
of music to develop character: Compare Bess with Katerina. Bess has lovely
lyrical music to sing, but it is never her music. She has no motif.
She must sing with the chorus ("Oh the train is at the station," Act I, Scene 2,
Ch. 10 of DVD) together with a man (e.g., "I wants to stay here", Act II, Scene 3, DVD Ch.
22), or she sings Clara's song ("Summertime," Act III, Scene 1, DVD, Ch. 25). This
musical choice reinforces the theme of Bess as a dependent woman
who is unable to shape her own identity.
- (Other comparisons with Katerina, the
female voice under a late appearance of Sonyetka. Bess is part of a
community of women--Clara, Serena, Maria. And their acceptance of Bess is
crucial to her integration into the community.)
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What's the problem? The choice not to let
some people sing is deliberate (more on this in the next lecture, but think
about who doesn't sing); elsewhere the use of recitative is no clumsier--and
often more elegant--than in other operas. |
- Example 4: Are hummable tunes a crime? Should Verdi, Bizet, and
Delibes also be on Broadway, not in opera houses?
- Counter Examples:
- Verdi's Rigoletto, La donna é mobile (Oh, woman is fickle) (Act III)
- Bizet, Carmen, La habanera (And if you like Carmen, it'd be a great
focus for a research paper)
- Leo Delibes, Lakme (story is set in colonial
- And too folky?
- Aaron Copland, "Billy the Kid" (1938)
- Example 5: How can six-part choruses, "prettily negroid
melodies," and "musical build up" tell a very compelling
story:
- Act II, Scene 4, Begins Chapter 24 of the DVD (Note: How did you
stage the end of Act II, Scene 2? Does Crown rape Bess? Does she willingly
go off with him into the woods?)
- Choral music: Call and response, the "shouting" that
Gershwin heard when he visited
- Goes into spiritual, "Oh, Doctor Jesus"
- Reprise of summertime
- Music of storm seques into into spiritual, "Oh, dere's somebody knockin' at de do'..."
- Crown enters, recitative
- Red-headed woman... and chorus is seduced into singing
it, back to Act I, Scene 1, and Jasbo Brown's.
- Crown's exits into storm, question of Porgy's
masculinity on the line
- The music conveys the story:
- Community in transition... from gospel to a red-headed woman and
Jasbo Brown's. The chorus is seduced by the music--as Bess will be seduced
by Sportin' Life.
- Elemental forces of nature that shape African American life
- Reprise of Summertime and longing for imagined community
- Effective use of recitative
- Reliance on choral works: This is an opera about a community. The
community appears as a character in song in ways that it cannot on the
page of Dubose Heyward's novel or in the stage version. Gershwin fully
exploits the genre--the genre of opera. (And compare the chorus in Porgy
and Bess and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.)
What difference do the categories make?
- If
it ain't an opera, it won't play in opera houses
- If
it doesn't play in opera houses, amazingly talented operatically trained African
American singers won't sing in those houses
- And
if it's written off as "low culture," more Broadway than the
Metropolitan Opera (probably the premier opera house in the
- We
don't need an American Pravda to tell us it isn't opera; we have
the New York Times and Virgil Thomson
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(The photograph of Gerswhin is by Carl van Vechten.
Van Vechten, white, was a promoter of some of the most important figures in
the Harlem Renaissance and introduced Gershwin into this cultural scene. His
photography of artists, musicians, and writers is famous. Another possible
subject for a research paper?) |
The pragmatic response:
- Gershwin writes (New York Times, October 20, 1935):
"The reason I did not submit this work to the usual sponsors of opera
in
- Gershwin gets that the genre labels conveys meaning; he wants to
avoid that meaning
Race in
Marian Anderson, a highly trained classical musician,
sings on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 because the Daughters of the
American Revolution won't allow her to sing in front of an integrated audience
in a huge concert hall they control in Washington, D.C. Anderson performed to a
crowd of 75,000.
- Getting the opera performed is more important than insisting that
it is an opera
The aesthetic (political?) response:
- Gershwin writes (in something you haven't read) in 1926 in
"Jazz Is the Voice of the American Soul": "I do not know
what the next decade will disclose in music. No composer knows. But to be
true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and
the time. My people are Americans. My time is today."
- The label Folk is another way of saying that it is uniquely
American.
- In German, Volk=people=nation. Gershwin has written an opera of
and for the people and the nation.
But... is it racist?
- Virgil Thomson also write: "Folklore subjects recounted by an
outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak
for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in
1935."
What do you think?
- Dodging the question by hiding behind disciplinary walls:
- Lawrence Starr, Professor of Music at
- Bob Moeller, Professor of History at the