As the world becomes more globalized and generic, it's easy to lose our sense of individuality. Understanding where we come from, and celebrating the diversity of the world around us, gives us a sense of continuity, history and belonging.

Exploring the idea of "shared musical roots" is what inspired me in putting together the 2009-2010 season of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concerts.

Listening to any kind of music — not just classical — can connect us to the past, and tell us something about the present. Exposure to a wider range of musical and cultural influences can make us that much better at identifying why, when listening to symphonic music, we immediately recognize a melody or a rhythm as sounding, say, Hungarian, or French or American.

Consider Tchaikovsky. His sound was shaped by his personal experience with Russian and Ukrainian folk music. Bela Bartok's musical language is largely colored by the peasant dances and songs he heard while traveling through the fields and villages of Hungary and Romania. Even Gustav Mahler wove the sounds of Austria — from waltzes to klezmer tunes — into his enormous symphonies.

As a conductor, daydreaming about the very personal musical experiences composers have gives me insight when I begin the process of interpreting their music.

Gershwin On The Fast Track

I'm especially intrigued by George Gershwin. Just how does a first-generation child of Russian Jewish immigrants end up creating some of the most sublime, quintessentially American music?

Gershwin was the epitome of fast-tracking. He started late at the piano, at age 12. Yet at 15, he began working as a "song plugger" at a sheet music store in Tin Pan Alley — where he'd sit in the front window and play popular tunes to prompt people to buy the music. But Gershwin couldn't resist embellishing, and he was soon fired for changing the melodies into his own creations.

By the time he was 20, George had teamed up with his brother Ira, who loved words. Together they invented a new language that would define a unique direction for American musical theater. Up until the Gershwins, America imported musical theater. Now we had the start of our own tradition.

But George Gershwin's influence didn't stop there. When he was in his early 20s, he wrote a 20-minute-long mini-opera called Blue Monday for a vaudeville revue show. You can hear the enormous potential in this little piece, and 11 years later it led to Gershwin's creation of America's first true opera, Porgy and Bess — which premiered 75 years ago this season, in 1935.

Luck also plays an important role in history, and as luck would have it, the band leader for that early vaudeville show was Paul Whiteman, the modestly self-dubbed "King of Jazz." Gershwin was enlisted to write a piece for a major New York concert Whiteman was organizing in 1924. Gershwin's contribution to the event became his signature composition, Rhapsody in Blue — the ultimate American mix of classical music and jazz.

Gershwin's Rhapsody holds a special place for me: It was the first piece I ever conducted in a formal concert, when the conductor didn't show up and my friends insisted (without much resistance from me) that I step in! It has been a labor of love to support Gershwin's music ever since.

Related Links

• Baltimore Symphony Site
• Alsop's Site

Nearly a decade ago, a noble experiment was broadcast on public radio. From the Top was launched as a showcase for pre-college classical musicians.

Today, the program is heard by about 700,000 weekly listeners on NPR stations, and this year's tour will reach more than 20,000 live fans. The show's host is the amiable pianist Christopher O'Riley, known for playing Bach and Rachmaninoff, as well as his adventurous transcriptions of songs by the British rock band Radiohead.

The success of From the Top, O'Riley says, is due solely to the young musicians who appear on the show.

"They become the best emissaries I can imagine for classical music," O'Riley says. "They are not yet doing it for a living, so they can just go with their heart. It's not a pragmatic decision; it's really doing what comes most passionately and easily with them."

Some of that passion includes skateboarding — as when O'Riley allowed a young guitarist to take a spin on the stage of Davies Hall in San Francisco during a show.

10th Anniversary Alums: William Harvey

For the 10th anniversary of From the Top, the show has invited back some alums from the early days.

Violinist William Harvey appeared on From the Top's pilot program ten years ago. He was a teenager then, taking his first plane flight and subway ride to get to the show.

Since then, Harvey has graduated from the Juilliard School with a master's degree in violin. He also served as the concertmaster of Spokane Symphony and he started a non-profit organization called Cultures in Harmony, which promotes cultural understanding through music.

Harvey plans to move to Afghanistan in a few months to serve as a violin and viola teacher for the minister of education. His inspiration, he says, came from the tragedy of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. As soldiers and workers returned to the 69th Regiment Armory, after a long day of rescue and clean up at ground zero, Harvey soothed them, hours on end, with his violin.

"Seeing the impact that the music had on them, when it seemed like they needed it so much, I realized I would no longer be content to remain in the ivory tower of classical music," Harvey says. "I needed to go out and explore music's capacity to transform society."

10th Anniversary Alums: Maya Shankar

Another alum is violinist Maya Shankar. She was just 11 when she played on the pilot show, and returned at 13 to play the wickedly difficult "La Campanella" by Paganini. Although Shakar was sidelined with tendonitis for 7 years, she made a splash with her comeback, playing Bach with star violinist Joshua Bell in Cape Town, South Africa.

Now 23, Shankar is a Rhodes Scholar, working towards a Ph.D in experimental psychology at Oxford. She works in a multi-sensory perception lab.

"I look at how sensory signals from the visual system and the auditory system interact in the mind and communicate with each other," Shankar says. "I think music can be a very multi-sensory experience for both the player and the listener. And I definitely see some similarities between my field of research and what I've experienced as a musician."

Over the past decade From the Top has expanded, with road trips and a television show called From the Top at Carnegie Hall, now in its second season. But O'Riley says he's most happy about the fact that the show has become a known outlet for young people to express themselves through music.

"We have lots of kids who go on and pursue music, but we also have lots of kids for whom classical music is a part of their lives that they could not do without," O'Riley says.

"In both Maya and William's case we see that music is a very concentrated effort, passion and course in life, but the energy and the discipline that is inherent in music training allows them to pursue whatever else they would like to pursue."

On June 23rd, 1959, Leonard Bernstein and the Columbia Symphony took their places at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, N.Y. and made a landmark recording of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue.' To celebrate the event, Ted Libbey adds the album to our list of 50 essential classical recordings.

Rhapsody In Blue, the first "serious" composition by George Gershwin (1898-1937), is likely to remain his most popular work in any form, more for its prodigious melodic richness rather than for any deeper expressiveness or structural brilliance.

In the hands of another composer, Rhapsody In Blue could easily have turned into a disjointed exercise in symphonically dressed up jazz rhythms, melodic figures and quasi-improvisatory instrumental licks. Instead, Gershwin's uncanny sense of timing, and a gift for memorable melody unparalleled in the 20th century, turned the Rhapsody into an embodiment of the Jazz Age's upbeat lyricism and dance-driven vitality. The roaring Twenties had a soul, and this was it.

The piece was composed in considerable haste, for a concert on February 12th, 1924, organized by jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman. It took place at New York's Aeolian Hall, billed as an "Experiment In Modern Music." The piece was scored for jazz band by Whiteman's arranger, the multitalented Ferde Grofé, and Gershwin himself played the piano solo—- though at the time of the premiere he had not yet written it out. Grofé also scored the work's orchestral version.

Leonard Bernstein in 1960, one year after he made his classic recording of Rhapsody In Blue.

The Bernstein Swagger

Leonard Bernstein's recording is a disc for the ages. It's American music performed with mid-century flair, a moment never to be recaptured. Bernstein had the feel for Rhapsody In Blue, and he does full justice to the still racy and spontaneous score. His performance of the piano solo has a smoky, sultry jazziness to it, along with a brash exuberance; there is touching tenderness in the lullaby, riveting dynamism in the fast pages. The sound on this "Bernstein Century" CD is spectacular.

To hear last week's feature, click here.

For a full archive of NPR's Classical 50, click here.

Related Links

• The Official Website Of Leonard Bernstein
• The Officical Website Of George And Ira Gershwin
• Looking Beyond Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'
• 'Rhapsody in Blue'

As the new year opens — and a new president is about to be inaugurated — composer-commentator Rob Kapilow and Performance Today host Fred Child got to thinking about the importance of great beginnings in music. The opening moments of a symphony or sonata can speak volumes for what's to follow.

"Particularly in the world we live in now," Kapilow says, "where there's such a premium on people's attention, and there's such a short attention span, there's a high premium on coming up with character-filled, energetic, attention-grabbing beginnings."

Kapilow says that when he's composing his own pieces, he consciously tries to grab the listener's attention.

"It's amazing how many different kinds of beginnings you can have," Kapilow says. "In a way, there are as many kinds of beginnings as there are ways of relating to people. Some pieces walk right in the door and announce completely who they are in one second. Think of that incredible beginning to Rhapsody in Blue, where the clarinet slides up its glissando to the first note. Within the first three seconds, you know there's Gershwin, there's America, there's jazz, there's concert music, and I own it all."

Kapilow adds that a good beginning doesn't have to be loud to grab listeners' attention.

"Think of the beautiful beginning to Copland's Appalachian Spring," he says. "Though it's quiet and restrained, that placid beginning — that slow-moving confidence, with chords unfolding at the slow pace — completely introduces you to the world of Appalachian Spring in its own quiet way."

To hear the previous feature, click here.

For a full archive of What Makes It Great, click here.

Related Links

• Kapilow's Site
• What Makes It Great: Full Archive

"Summertime" might be the opening word in George Gershwin's iconic song, but as Rob Kapilow points out to Performance Today host Fred Child, that's not where the music really starts. The eight instrumental measures that open the song, Kapilow says, set up an evocative transition into the languid world of Catfish Row.

A single note pushes us into Gershwin's South Carolina setting.

"Then the clarinet floats in from the heavens," Kapilow says, "bringing in the other two notes we need to establish: not just Catfish Row, but the character of Clara, rocking her baby, because 'Summertime' is actually a lullaby."

One of the keys to the song's greatness, Kapilow maintains, is its simplicity. From two gently swaying notes, Gershwin adds rich harmony.

"It's like black-and-white being filled into Technicolor, right as the voice comes in," Kapilow says. "An exquisite cross-fade: one note, a rocking theme, slow it down, and then harmony. That languid slowness of summer is also in the fantastic rhythm in the first word, 'summertime,' where the last syllable gets stretched on that beautiful high note. Somehow, we're in this incredibly languid world within two notes."

To hear the previous feature, click here.

For a full archive of What Makes It Great, click here.

Related Links

• The Sound Of Summertime In Six Notes
• The Great American Opera: 'Porgy and Bess'
• Patti Austin Spins New Stories from Old Classics
• George Gershwin Site

It's summer. And George Gershwin's song "Summertime," from Porgy and Bess, is in the air again.

The atmosphere of summertime is conjured up right away by its introduction. The funny thing is, though, that the atmosphere just keeps changing. It depends on if it's summertime in the 1930s off the Carolina coast, where Gershwin wrote the song, or summertime in Woodstock, N.Y., where Janis Joplin sang it in 1969.

Or anywhere else, it turns out, which is absolutely everywhere. The song says summer, and the magic of it is that it says so many different summers — the hot, urban summer or the lazy, rural summer — depending on who's doing it. And it says summer both with the lyrics, which are by DuBose Hayward, or without them.

At last count, there were more than 130 commercially recorded versions of "Summertime," from Jascha Heifetz to Miles Davis. And thanks to a few recent reissues, you can explore "Summertime" from every conceivable artist, era and genre.

"Summertime" consists of only six notes; that's part of its mystery. If you're playing it in the key of A minor, it uses just E, C, D, B, G and A. So it's an incredibly simple melody — but is there anything remotely like it?

Gershwin set out to do something with Porgy and Bess. He said he wanted to invent a new style of opera that would cross musical lines. Porgy and Bess, as an opera, received mixed reviews in the 1930s, ran for 124 performances — not even enough to make up its original investment — and has remained somewhat controversial, even through a film version and several revivals.

About "Summertime," however, there is no controversy. How many songs cross over so easily? How many six-note melodies have appealed so universally to musicians as a means of self-expression? With this one song, Gershwin did it: He put music above categories or artificial distinction of any kind.

It's a wild thing to have done with six notes.

Related Links

• 'Porgy and Bess' as Gershwin Intended
• 'Porgy and Bess': Webcast on NPR.org
• 70 Years of Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess'

"Is it an opera, or a musical?" For some 50 years after its premiere, that's the question people asked about George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

It debuted on Broadway, right? So it must be a musical. On the other hand, the score surely wasn't like any musical anyone had heard before.

And the show had other problems. Its creators demanded that it be done with an all African American cast. Black performers weren't allowed at the Metropolitan Opera, so the opera had a private hearing in 1935 at Carnegie Hall. It ran four hours. After some cuts, it was previewed in Boston, and then had its Broadway premiere a few months later. It closed after only 124 performances — a bit of a flop by Broadway standards.

A touring company then took the show across the country, with protests for and against segregation following it along the way. The first integrated audience to see Porgy and Bess was at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. in 1936.

It took more than 50 years of bowdlerized versions, sometimes performed by an all-white cast, before the complete version was finally performed — that is, the operatic version.

And by now, the old question has been answered: Porgy and Bess is an opera. Many describe it as the "Great American Opera," and it's surely even more than that. By nearly any measure, the piece Gershwin called his greatest work is among the finest of all operas written in the 20th century.

Porgy and Bess is based on Dubose Heyward's novel about a crippled beggar from the slums of Charleston, S.C. The libretto was a collaboration between Ira Gershwin, Heyward and novelist's wife, Dorothy Heyward. George Gershwin worked on the opera in Charleston itself, and on James Island, where the music and traditions of the Gullah community gave him inspiration. Added to the score's unique musical palette are traditional black church music, chords from Gershwin's Jewish heritage and the quintessential swing of American jazz.

On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone presents the Great American Opera straight from the nation's capital, in a Washington National Opera production from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the banks of the Potomac in Washington, D.C.

See the previous edition of World of Opera or the full archive

Related Links

• 70 Years of Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess'
• Porgy and Bess

With songs in French, Spanish, English, and Hindi, the band Rupa and the April Fishes could have been formed in the food court of a suburban mall.

To the contrary, the band was founded in San Francisco by Rupa Marya, a doctor-by-day and singer-by-night born to Indian parents and raised in the U.S., India, and the South of France. Her debut album is called eXtraOrdinary rendition. She and the band join John Schaefer in the Soundcheck studios for an interview and live performance of tunes from the album.

She began with a song called "Une Americaine a Paris" — decidedly not a reference to George Gershwin's blithely upbeat An American in Paris, but rather an uncomfortable moment in a Parisian cafe that Marya had once experienced. A man had struck up a good conversation with her, but when the man, who was from Algeria, learned that Marya was American, the tone changed rapidly.

"This wall came down between us," she says. "And he said, 'Aren't you afraid to be an American in Paris with all these angry Arabs? If you were in my neighborhood...' and he just went [motions hand across throat]. ... That personal connection that we had just froze in that moment, and it was probably one of the most chilling experiences I've ever had face-to-face with a stranger."

Of course, Marya, the daughter of Indian parents, is no stranger to multiculturalism. She was born in the San Francisco Bay Area; her parents moved her back to India, then to France; and she settled again in California.

"I was raised a very confused child, and I feel like this music that I've been writing has been a way of trying to give voice to that experience, and come to understand it in a way," she says. "Because these identities — they all exist inside me."

The lion's share of songs on the album, however, is sung in French. Marya says she challenged herself after Sept. 11, 2001, to try something different.

"I was ... so horrified by the reaction of fear, of what was unfamiliar to people that I felt happening in our country," she says. "And I wanted to write songs about love — which I had never done before — and to write them in a language that people in my immediate surrounding didn't necessarily understand, but wouldn't be wholly alienating to them. And to see if people could understand the emotion and the truth that was being conveyed under the language I was speaking through the music. So it started as an exercise, an artistic exercise to use language as a musical tool, also, with rhythm and melody inherent in the words."

When she isn't on stage, Rupa Marya is a doctor of internal medicine on faculty at UCSF, and often draws ideas for songs from her patients' stories. She was able to take advantage of a flexible residency track designed for female doctors who may be expecting children, which allows her to spend six months working and the other half of the year touring.

"And so after my first year of internship, I went into my program director and said, 'Listen, I'll be a terrible doctor if I'm not an artist, and I'll be a terrible artist if I'm not a doctor," Marya says. "'And I need to find a way to do these things.'"

Related Links

• Rupa and the April Fishes MySpace page
• Rupa and the April Fishes Web site
• Beirut Mixes Exhaustion and Inspiration
• The Broken Romances of Pink Martini's 'Eugene'
• Pink Martini's Dark Take on a Doris Day Classic
• SXSW 2007: Beirut

Fresh off a Grammy nomination for her latest album (Avant Gershwin), vocalist Patti Austin performs "A Gershwin New Year's Eve," live from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

A professional singer since early childhood, Austin has straddled pop, R&B and jazz for decades, both as an in-demand session musician and as a prolific solo artist. Her latest release updates the catalog of the brothers Gershwin with challenging interpretations, and features the complex arrangements of the WDR Big Band.

"Sheathed in a snug gown, she looked glamorous and sounded even better, accompanied by a horn-powered octet and inspired by a series of fresh interpretations of Gershwin tunes arranged by Michael Abene [of the WDR Big Band]," wrote Mike Joyce in the Washington Post.

WBGO Newark and NPR present Patti Austin in concert, on Toast of the Nation.

Related Links

• Patti Austin, Singing Gershwin's Praises
• Patti Austin Spins New Stories from Old Classics
• Avant Gershwin Web site
• Patti Austin Web site

The story of Ruby Elzy is a powerful example of how talent can overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. One of four children, she was born, her biographer David Weaver tells us, in abject poverty in a small town in Mississippi. Her father abandoned the family when Ruby was 5.

But she could sing. A visiting professor, astounded by her voice, helped her get into college. Then she got a fellowship to Juilliard. In 1933, she appeared opposite Paul Robeson in the movie version of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

When George Gershwin heard her sing, he cast her in the major role of Serena in his new opera, Porgy and Bess. She made her Broadway debut in this role in 1935, at the age of 27, and sang the part more than 800 times, on Broadway and on tour. Her future success was all but guaranteed. She had an extraordinary soprano voice—both pure and searing. She was good looking and she could act. Serena is the woman whose husband is murdered by the villain Crown, and her rendition o" "My Man's Gone N"w" electrified the audience. She never made a commercial recording of it, but three of her performances have survived, two of them from radio broadcasts.

Before Porgy opened, Gershwin took five of the leading players into a recording studio to conduct parts of the opera with an orchestra. In a rehearsal recording made on August 19, 1935, Gershwin himself can be heard introducing and conducting Ruby Elzy in "My Man's Gone Now." All three of Elzy's surviving performances of "My Man's Gone Now" are now on a remarkable disc compiled by David Weaver that includes all 20 of her known recordings, the majority of which are spirituals.

In 1941, Ruby Elzy appeared in Birth of the Blues with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin. She had already made her recital debut at New York's Town Hall and been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to sing at the White House. Her repertoire also included art songs and arias, the most ambitious of which is probably "Elsa's Dream" from Wagner's opera Lohengrin.

In the 1930s and '40s, it would have been impossible for an African-American singer, however extraordinary, to sing Wagner's lily-white heroine in an opera production. But Elzy was preparing the role of Verdi's Ethiopian princess Aida, when in 1943, she had to have surgery. It was supposed to be a relatively minor procedure, but she died in a Detroit hospital at the age of 35. Since her death, she's been largely overlooked, except for Gershwin mavens. But thanks to her biographer-turned-record-producer David Weaver, no one who hears this recording could possibly forget her.

Songstress Patti Austin's newest CD, Avant-Gershwin, allows her to cover the classic and sometimes controversial music of legendary composer George Gershwin. Austin talks about her music with Tony Cox.

Almost every American singer who's serious about the legacy of American songs sooner or later has to confront the extraordinary body of work by George Gershwin.

From his time as a teenager, a steady flow of melodies and songs poured out of Gershwin, many of them taking shape while he was noodling at the piano. Gershwin's friend, the pianist Ocsar Levant, recalled that "any time he sat down [at the piano] just to amuse himself, something came of it."

The appeal of Gershwin's songs is both long lasting and wide ranging. They are sung in both symphony halls and barrooms. Performers as diverse as Fred Astaire, Meat Loaf, Kate Bush and Aretha Franklin have sung Gershwin.

Now, Patti Austin, best known as a versatile R&B singer, has put her personal stamp on classics by Gershwin in her new CD, Avant Gershwin.

The challenge for Austin was to find a fresh approach to such well-known songs.

"I love the challenge of taking something that's perceived one way and creating a different perception for it," Austin says. "And if the material is really good, it can take all that bending and stretching and survive."

Austin even puts a new spin on Gershwin's "Swanee," a song that is practically taboo for African-Americans because of its language and its legacy. Al Jolson, singing in blackface, made the song a hit in 1919, crooning words that became fraught with racist connotations. Austin, by contrast, gives "Swanee" a groove, a walking bass line and a sultry vocal far removed from Jolson's vaudevillian wail.

Related Links

• Looking Beyond Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'
• 'Porgy and Bess' as Gershwin Intended
• 'Porgy and Bess'
• 70 Years of Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess'
• Patti Austin Web Site
• Gershwin Web Site

George Gershwin's "Second Rhapsody" isn't nearly as well known as "Rhapsody in Blue," or "An American in Paris." But music professor Howard Pollack thinks it's one of Gershwin's most complex, interesting works.

Pollack teaches at the University of Houston and is the author of a new book George Gershwin: His Life and Work. He speaks with Debbie Elliott.

More than 300 singers, drawn from 17 different choruses from Washington DC, New York, and Minnesota, come together under the artistic direction of Philip Brunelle to present a kaleidoscopic history of choral music in the USA:: from the colonial anthems of William Billings, to the African-American choral tradition personified by Harry Burleigh, to barbershop quartets, to the inspiring works of Leonard Bernstein.

The featured concert from the 2006 Chorus America conference, marking the 40th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts, was recorded in the great acoustics of The Music Center at Strathmore, the newest addition to the Capitol area's cultural life. Hosted by NPR's Lisa Simeone.

Music Performed in the Concert:

Young People's Chorus of New York City

Gershwin: "S'Wonderful"

Ellington/Strayhorn: "Take the A Train"

VocalEssence Ensemble Singers

William Billings: "An Anthem for Thanksgiving"

US Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps

Trad. "Yankee Doodle"

Heritage Signature Chorale

Harry T. Burleigh: "My Lord, What a Mornin'"

Conductor Philip Brunelle.

U.S. Army Chorus

Stephen C. Foster: "Camptown Races"

The Ringers

John Benson Brooks (arr. Razaf): "Rhythm Man"

Washington, D.C. Massed Choir and U.S. Army Orchestra

Aaron Copland: "Stomp Your Foot"

U.S. Army Chorus

Trad. (arr. Alice Parker): "What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor"

Heritage Signature Chorale

R. Nathaniel Dett: "Go Down, Moses"

VocalEssence Ensemble Singers

Aaron Jay Kernis: "I Cannot Dance, O Lord"

Washington, D.C. Massed Choir and U.S. Army Orchestra

Randall Thompson: "The God who gave us life"

Young People's Chorus of New York City

Dominick Argento: "Orpheus"

VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and Heritage Signature Chorale

Moses Hogan: "My Soul's Been Anchored"

Washington, D.C. Massed Choir

Stephen Paulus: "Pilgrims' Hymn"

Washington, D.C. Massed Choir and U.S. Army Orchestra

Leonard Bernstein: "Make Our Garden Grow"

Veteran guitarist Ralph Towner founded the influential group Oregon decades ago. His unique style of playing, and his compositions, are inspired by a wide array of influences, from Bach to Brazil and jazz. Towner joins host Fred Child in the Performance Today studio to play an original piece, "Anniversary Song," followed by his own arrangement of George Gershwin's "My Man's Gone Now," from Porgy and Bess.

Related Links

• Ralph Towner's Site