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In recent years George Gershwin scholarship has experienced a revival--something a man of the theater surely would have enjoyed. This resurgence is witnessed in special Gershwin sessions at annual meetings of the Society for American Music, prominent articles in JSAM and other scholarly journals, and a soon to be completed critical edition of Porgy and Bess by Wayne Shirley.1 Front and center in this assemblage of scholarship is Howard Pollack's substantial 900-page biography, George Gershwin: His Life and Work.
The sheer bounty of information in this book marks Pollack as one of a very small group of true Gershwin scholars. The first eleven chapters (some 215 pages) concern Gershwin's "life," and the remaining twenty-five chapters (nearly 500 pages) are given over to the composer's "work," the most comprehensive summation of Gershwin's oeuvre ever assembled. Pollack integrates a stunning array of sources--it is the rare paragraph without at least one footnoted reference. His research involved a thorough combing of primary documents housed in the Gershwin Collection at the Library of Congress and the archives of the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts, as well as all available secondary literature--scholarly, journalistic, and other. Pollack incorporates several of his own recently conducted interviews, ranging from Gershwin's onetime girlfriend Kitty Carlisle, to Ira Gershwin's nephew and estate trustee Michael Strunsky, to renowned Gershwin interpreter Michael Feinstein. Sixteen inserted plates enhance the text with almost fifty images, several published here for the first time. Back matter includes a hundred pages of endnotes, an extensive selected bibliography, and a meticulously compiled index, itself nearly sixty pages in length.
Although to scholars of American music it may now be well established that Gershwin owed his success not simply to inherent talent, but also to extensive training and considerable effort, the fact that Pollack returns to this point throughout the first portion of the book suggests that constructions of the composer as unlearned continue to abound. A primary objective for Pollack, then, is to challenge twentieth-century depictions of the composer as either a "childlike" (modest and naive) or "flawed" (ambitious and vain) genius (701). Such visions of Gershwin have largely obfuscated his position in the scholarly literature. To this end Pollack's separation of his book into...