Six months after returning from my last trip to southern Africa, an invitation from Brooklyn College to lead a seminar on the music of George Gershwin shifted my attention back to the musical life of the United States.

As far back as 1945 my first professor of musicology, Steve Tuttle – gentle, Harvard-educated, passionately devoted to the great master-pieces of the classical repertory and with no apparent interest in popular music – had confessed to me that the music of Gershwin troubled him. Inclined by his education and musical tastes to dismiss it out of hand, he somehow kept coming back to it, attracted and repelled at the same time. I'd had somewhat of the same problem. Though I was fond of many of the songs and had found Porgy and Bess to be an outstanding piece of musical theater, Gershwin's orchestral compositions had always struck me as being unsatisfactory compromises between irreconcilable musical styles, or genres, or concepts.

This article, growing out of my first lecture for the seminar, sets out to identify and analyze the several strands of modernist thought that had shaped attitudes, mine included, towards Gershwin and his music. Though I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that Gershwin was a proto-postmodernist, some of the conceptual confusion surrounding him was clearly a reaction to his attempts to free music from the rigidity of modernist form and function.