By Kyle MacMillan
A superhero changed everything for composer Michael Daugherty.
In 1993, he completed a 41-minute work titled Metropolis Symphony, which was an ode to Superman and the comic books of the 1950s and ’60s that the Iowa native had avidly read as a child. At the time, audiences were often leery of new music, and that connection to pop culture provided a useful marketing lure and helped make them more willing to give it a try. And what they discovered was a compositional departure that was both fun and musically sophisticated.
Conductor David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra premiered this career milestone the following year, and it has been performed by more than 100 other orchestras since, including the Nashville Symphony Orchestra—the Tennessee ensemble’s 2011 recording on the Naxos label won three Grammy Awards, including Best Classical Contemporary Composition honors. Daugherty, who proclaims himself a “pop-culture guru,” has gone on to write works inspired by everything from Route 66 and spaghetti Westerns to Star Trek and Elvis Presley. And no matter how much he has been embraced by the mainstream classical world, including residencies with such organizations as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, he has always hewed to his own eclectic musical vision.
When famed conductor Mariss Jansons, then music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, wanted to honor his two resident conductors there, he asked Daugherty to write a work that they could lead together. While there are a few other pieces with similar structures, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–57) or John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 3, Circus Maximus (2005), which calls for a wind ensemble divided into three groups of players, Daugherty took a highly distinctive approach to this challenge. The result was Time Machine for three conductors and orchestra. “It was one of the hardest pieces I’ve had to write, without question,” he said.
Composer Michael Daugherty (photo: Yopie Prins)
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will showcase Time Machine July 29 at the Ravinia Festival as part of Breaking Barriers: Women on the Podium. The weekend mini-festival, which includes a symposium and other concerts and events, focuses on the decades-old imbalance between male and female conductors on orchestral podiums. It also marks the 20th anniversary of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, which provides coaching and other career support for emerging female conductors.
The event is the brainchild of Marin Alsop, who founded the Taki Fellowship and serves as Ravinia’s chief conductor. She will lead Time Machine alongside two Taki alumnae—Laura Jackson and Jeri Lynne Johnson. (The current Taki fellow, Anna Duczmal-Mróz will conduct the program’s opening work, Jessie Montgomery’s Source Code.) Alsop has been a longtime advocate for Daugherty, including serving as conductor for two albums of his music—Philadelphia Stories/UFO (2004) and Route 66 (2011). “She champions a lot of people, and she is a major force in contemporary music,” Daugherty said.
For much of the second half of the 20th century, serialism or atonality had a near-chokehold on the world of classical composition, especially in academic circles, and that was still the case when Daugherty, now 68, began his compositional studies at the University of North Texas and Manhattan School of Music in the 1970s. He even spent a year studying at IRCAM, a Parisian school for avant-garde and electro-musical composition, which at the time was overseen by Pierre Boulez, one of serialism’s staunchest defenders. While the budding composer gained valuable skills during these academic pursuits, he rejected the strictures of this prescribed style and took inspiration from György Ligeti, with whom he studied in Hamburg, Germany, in 1982–84. Daugherty described the celebrated Hungarian-Austrian composer as an “eclectic modernist,” who drew on a wide range of influences, including African music.
Daugherty, who joined the University of Michigan composition faculty in 1991, has gone his own way since, following his imagination, a word to which he returns often. The son of a dance-band drummer, the composer is an accomplished jazz pianist. He also played in rock bands for 20 years, toured one summer with country music singer Pee Wee King and even played organ for a circus. “I’ve done it all, man, I’ve done it all,” he said. He is also a big fan of movie scores from the 1940s and ‘50s, and, of course, he still draws on his classical training, which included a doctoral program at Yale University with such notable composers as Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands. “You put all that in a bottle and shake it up, and it shows how I think about music,” he said.
After completing his studies in 1986, he taught for four years at the well-respected Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, where, in those days before the internet and social media, he was largely cut off from the larger, coastally dominated compositional world. It was then that he began work on the Metropolis Symphony and Dead Elvis, a work for bassoon and chamber ensemble that carries a suggestion that the soloist dress up like its namesake. “Those pieces are pretty out there,” the composer said. “I was in an isolated area, and I came up with my own ideas. It would have been harder to do that if I lived in Los Angeles or New York.”
Daugherty is a prolific composer who has created works for a broad range of instrumental and vocal configurations, including concert bands, symphony orchestras, and chamber ensembles, and he has even written an opera, Jackie O (1997), which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera. “I like to compose and I’m always getting ideas,” he said. Two of his most recent works are Valley of the Moon, which was commissioned by the Santa Rosa (CA) Symphony and premiered in May, and Fifteen: Symphonic Fantasy on the Art of Andy Warhol, which had its first hearing in February. The latter, a musical tribute to the famed pop artist who was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony, his Time Machine collaborator, to mark the ensemble’s 125th anniversary. “That was a perfect fit for me,” Daugherty said.
Rather than “Symphony No. 3” or “String Quartet in E-flat major,” Daugherty’s works almost all have evocative titles. While his music is abstract, it’s always about something, like a facet of pop culture or historical figure. It’s important for the composer to have what he calls a “general imaginative construct” in mind as he is writing. “It’s sort of narrative, but it isn’t,” he said. Although he might outline his inspiration for each movement of a piece in accompanying notes, he rarely intends for his music to be overtly programmatic. “It’s not like I’m following a libretto or creating a film score,” he said.
Poster for the 1960 film based on H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine
This approach held true for Time Machine, which was inspired in part by the 1960 movie of the same name that Daugherty recalled seeing as a child. It sparked thoughts of time, time travel, and the science-fiction world of H.G. Wells. At the same time, he discussed “metric modulations” or tempo changes with Gustav Meier, author of the 2009 book The Score, the Orchestra, and the Conductor. (The internationally known conductor had moved to Ann Arbor in 1976 to teach at the University of Michigan and remained there until his death in 2016.) That conversation led to Daugherty’s idea of dividing the orchestra into three sections and having each perform tempos that were different yet related to each other. “That was an intellectual challenge for me,” he said, “to come up with the ways that the three conductors could often be in three different tempos but there would be a common denominator between them.”
To add yet another layer of complexity, he added quotations from 10 works that are among the most difficult to conduct, including one from Tchaikovsky’s fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet. “This is really a concerto for conductors,” Daugherty said. “That’s how I was thinking of it.” Because of the experimental nature of the work, Jansons led a workshop reading of the work about a year before its 2003 premiere so the composer could make any necessary revisions. “I had no idea if it was going to work,” he said.
Work it did, though Daugherty wondered if it would ever be performed again given the impracticality of three conductors. But according to the composer, Time Machine gets revived every three or four years, including a performance at the 2018 Baltic Symphony Festival by the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. And Ravinia’s July 29 performance will be the latest to keep it in the public eye. ●
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.