Detroit Industry: New Orchestral Music by Michael Daugherty

By Jack Borrebach


If you’re just getting to know composer Michael Daugherty, a glance at the titles in his discography will give you a sense of his artistic agenda: "Dead Elvis," "Motown Metal," "I Loved Lucy," "UFO," and "Le Tombeau de Liberace" have a distinctive ring. Daugherty’s music bursts with jazzy syncopations, showy percussion, and kitsch, and the composer matches them with nervous energy and an acid edge. Melodic hooks are often sharpened into insistent motifs that aren't so much developed as obsessively worked over. Like the artificially colored pop material it's inspired by, Daugherty's music is inviting, even aggressively so, but something uncompromising coexists alongside the pop glitz. There's a complexity and depth beneath the whirling scraps of jingles and Latin jazz.

Two recent recordings issued on the industrious Naxos label (as ever, transcending its budget label category) show off a handful of Daugherty's orchestral works from the past decade. In these collections, earnest drama overlays frenetic edginess, and the combination leads to a startling emotional honesty. Daugherty's romanticism is cut with sardonic asides and stylistic free associations, but sentimentality takes hold here and there to disarming effect. The pictorial titles, though they can seem cheesy or quaint at first, allow a sparking interplay between earnestness and irony. Meanwhile, and most important, Daugherty is composing music with lucid thematic development, bold dramatic contours, and exciting orchestral effects.

The disc Fire and Blood features the violin concerto by that name (2003), which Ida Kavafian tears into alongside the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and their now-emeritus music director Neeme Järvi. The disc is rounded out by the orchestral works MotorCity Triptych (2000) and Raise the Roof (2003). Another concerto, Deus ex Machina (2007), appears on the disc Metropolis Symphony and spotlights pianist Terrence Wilson with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. The title work is Daugherty's ambitious Superman-inspired symphony (1988-93), his breakout orchestra piece. Both discs pull their material from live recordings, which lose a little exactness but make up for it in vicacity. Kavafian and Wilson both sound excellent, as do the orchestras.

Fire and Blood is exciting: it’s really one of the better violin concertos written recently, and is the work that Daugherty has most successfully drawn a tight dramatic thread through. The thematic cue here is Diego Rivera's series of Detroit Industry murals—a local homage for the orchestra and for Daugherty, who has taught nearby at the University of Michigan for close to thirty years. Daugherty pulls off enough pulsing, muscular machine-music to do justice to Rivera's images, while creating enough shadows and dissonance to accommodate whatever tensions you cares to read in. The solo violin is a tightly wound engine of wiry energy, charging through a richly colored and percussion-heavy orchestral field. Contrasting ruminations and plaintive harmonic tugs provide emotional counterpoint. The slow middle movement shifts in homage to Frida Kahlo, and even if Daugherty's soulful mariachi tune in her honor is a compositional non sequitur or a glib national gesture, it's dramatically effective. Later in the movement, Daugherty blends the theme into the broader orchestral texture to successful effect; the violin's scalding lyricism is truly Kahlo-worthy. The finale, all ferocious fiddling energy in skittish 7/8 time, winds up the piece while heightening its characteristic volatile combination of liveliness and anxiety.


The MotorCity Triptych offers more Detroit music, but its pleasures are uneven, primarily because its concluding image of Rosa Parks Boulevard fails to gather enough power. Orchestral expressionism isn't the best vehicle for calling to mind the civil rights movement, and Daugherty's three blues-summoning trombones mostly go to show how far the average concert hall is from Montgomery. In contrast, the opening Motown Mondays movement lands in a pleasingly unusual place for trying against similarly long odds to evoke Motown music. Near the start Daugherty pulls together a meandering oboe melody, percolating percussion, some asymmetrical pizzicato strings, and a muted-brass horn hook: for all its distance from the inspirational article, the moment carries itself in charm, modesty, and off-kilter lilt.


Raise the Roof, a festive overture that spotlights tympani, sends a Gregorian-style chant through technicolor variations, then barrels into a raucous dance-orchestra scene and a resounding sendoff.

On the Nashville disc, Deus ex Machina packs less punch as a concerto than Fire and Blood—there's less of a dramatic give-and-take between the piano and the orchestra at the center of the piece—but Daugherty’s color and personality are out in full force. He composes nominally about trains here, but passes over the mechanical energy of Fire and Blood for more freely associative snapshots. The first movement, an homage to the train paintings of the Italian Futurists, begins with the soloist playing on the strings inside the piano—an authentic early-20th-century experimental touch. In the middle movement Daugherty turns to a Lincoln portrait, an evocation of the slain president's funeral train. The scenario is a throwback to the earnest Americana of the 1940s or ‘50s, but it sets up a genuinely moving scene. A trumpet and an English horn, intoning taps in a gentle nocturnal canon, float over a velvety piano patter just quick enough to intimate an unsettled atmosphere.


In the final movement, Daugherty turns back to more recent popular nostalgia, transposing locomotive momentum into a boogie-woogie mode with piano that's all drive and splashy virtuosity. Here is a composer in his element, and it's great fun.

The Metropolis Symphony demonstrates how Daugherty has enriched his orchestral music in the past two decades: the instrumental colors are more garish, the textures more acerbic, the gestures sharper and more obsessive. At forty minutes long, the piece is a good deal to take in all at once, but it's a wild, unusual, and rewarding listen. I can't help but admire Daugherty's fearlessness in the concluding Red Cape Tango, which for much of its fourteen minutes sets the requiem-mass Dies Irae melody to a tango beat and sticks to the idea for longer than you'd think possible.

New orchestral music with this vibrancy and clarity is a rare commodity, and it's magnificent to be able to hear so much of Daugherty's recent work all at once. Both discs are also available for download and can be heard on Naxos' indispensable online listening library.

Audio clips courtesy Naxos Records, Inc. Full tracks available at http://www.classicsonline.com/catalogue/product.aspx?pid=827993 and http://www.classicsonline.com/catalogue/product.aspx?pid=852250.



Published October 2009