Continued from De Organizer

the music in 1989 while he was head of the American Music Institute, but failed completely. Dapogny said, "I called people who knew the whole story and I heard the same message over and over. 'Forget about it. Everyone's looked for it. It's gone.'" The sense of loss was deepened by the quality of the sole surviving piece, "Hungry Blues," a distinctive and beautiful lament about the intersection of race and poverty.

But in 1997, Dapogny chanced on a partial score of the opera right on the U. Michigan campus, materials that even the James P. Johnson Foundation was unaware existed. The score, held by the University's African American Music Collections, was among papers given years before to the University's Black Student Association by Eva Jessye, a professional choral director who had prepared the chorus for the original performance of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess." As Dapogny examined the pages, he found notes indicating that Jessye, also the choral director for the single performance of "De Organizer," probably had used this very copy in her work. Supported by a grant from the Institute for the Humanities at the university, Dapogny spent the year 2000 creating a restoration that is engaging, authentic and faithful to Johnson's style.

"It has been my method and goal to be faithful to Johnson's work," Dapogny said. "Whenever there was an indication of what Johnson would have done, that is the approach that I used." The found materials contained only the sung notes and no accompaniment. But it provided the structure and sequence of the work, and it proved enough to win Dapogny access to papers of Johnson that were held by the James P. Johnson Foundation. Johnson's papers yielded sketches for about a quarter of the opera, additional material that enabled Dapogny to restore the piece, composing the missing instrumental music and providing the orchestration. He also unraveled a series of conflicting clues about the nature of the orchestra until discovering the answer in Johnson's own notes, which specify a 45-piece orchestra---essentially a jazz band within an orchestra.

"Part of this project has been detective work," Dapogny said, "finding out everything I have been able to about the composer's intentions, and part is the technical work of composing the missing music, carrying out those intentions." "The music ranges in style from a near-folk style to jazz," Dapogny said. "The chorus is the main character, with the principal solo roles being a Woman, the Organizer's Woman, an Old Woman, Brother Dosher, Brother Bates, the Organizer, and the Overseer."