Play It Again, George

George Gershwin was at the keyboard one more time last week, banging out richly embellished versions of his pop tunes Swanee and Kickin' the Clouds Away. Though Gershwin has been dead for more than a half-century, his distinctive performing style has been preserved on nearly 120 player-piano rolls that he cut between 1916 and 1926. These virtuoso piano solos were never transcribed into sheet music, however. Since the demise of the player piano, the fragile paper rolls that hold the solos have been deteriorating on private collectors' shelves, unheard by generations of Gershwin scholars and fans.

Until now. Thanks to advances in technology, Gershwin's piano rolls have been rescued from oblivion. Under the supervision of Gershwin scholar Artis Wodehouse, an optical scanner was used to convert the holes that activate the keys into computer files that can be understood by today's music synthesizers. Last week's performance on ABC's Good Morning America was played by a Yamaha Disklavier, a $20,000 grand piano that comes with a computer disk drive. A book of piano scores, transcribed by computer, is scheduled to be released later this year.

Gershwin is not the only performer whose works could be computerized. Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Debussy also recorded piano rolls. But it was such keyboard acrobats as Gershwin and Zez Confrey, playing in the florid "novelty" style developed to boost player-piano sales, who were the stars of their day. Says Wodehouse: "This will open up an era of music that has been largely forgotten."