I was relieved when I realized that I needn’t fret about the implications of Michael Daugherty’s music. And I was most definitely fretting there for a while. My knickers were getting into knots. I had the willies and the heebie-jeebies. I was in a stew.
My dilemma stemmed from my hand-wringing dread that perhaps the entire noble adventure of American concert music is devolving into massively orchestrated, regurgitated pop-art that sounds like the musical equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer summer movie blockbuster. Please do not let this be happening. Please no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
Could the mishmosh of the Metropolis Symphony, with its sirens and spatial effects, its movement titles such as “Oh, Lois!” and “Red Cape Tango” really represent the leading edge of modern American music? The treacly John Williams-ish Steven Spielbergian smoosh of Letters from Lincoln? The rockabilly bang-fest that concludes the piano-and-orchestra Deus ex Machina?
At the same time, I was having a weirdly good time listening to those pieces, together with Fire and Blood for violin and orchestra, the Motor City Triptych, Philadelphia Stories, and the two percussion spectaculars UFO and Raise the Roof. Without a shadow of a doubt, if you have the sound system to do them justice—and I do—Michael Daugherty’s Imax-enhanced orchestral spectaculars are a ton o’ fun. He really knows how to pump it out in spades. Nor are the pieces particularly difficult to grok; in fact, they make a lot of sense on a single hearing. Part of that has to do with Daugherty’s grab-bag collage technique; you need no musically discerning ear to pick out the strains of “Dixie” running gently through the “Gettysburg Address” finale of Letters from Lincoln, after all. Themes are clearly stated and they are developed simply but effectively. And if you don’t like something you’re hearing, just wait a bit, because something else will come along.
There isn’t a piece in the bunch that doesn’t make an obvious bid for audience cheers; Daugherty goes in big time for socko endings. Nor are you ever apt to be puzzled by the harmonic language—what ‘modernism’ that might creep in is safely familiar by now via many decades of Hollywood movie scores. There’s a bit of Indiana Jones here, some Star Wars there, perhaps a soupçon of High Noon over there. You’d never mistake it for Max Steiner, to be sure. But you’d never mistake it for Magnus Lindberg, either.
So while I have appreciated the workout that Daugherty’s Cinerama-fied orchestrations give to Fasolt & Fafner, my living room B&W 803D speakers, until just today I’ve been fretting, as I said. If I am obliged to consider this much-awarded and frequently-commissioned composer as representing the latest wave in American concert music, then I’m in trouble. That might sound hypocritical of me, given my occasional jabs at the deadening, sterile pomposity of a lot of modern art music. At least Daugherty’s pieces are meant to be approachable, entertaining even. This is a composer who clearly wants his audiences to like his work, and they do. So I should be happy. But there I sat fuming and futzing.
But I calmed down the minute I realized that Michael Daugherty’s musical ancestry is other than I had been thinking. I had allowed the externals—commissions from major orchestras, a professorship at Michigan, doctorate in composition—to influence me, but I wasn’t looking at him right. His creative grandfathers aren’t Roger Sessions or Milton Babbitt or Elliot Carter or even Aaron Copland for that matter.
Michael Daugherty is our modern-day Ferde Grofé. And I do not mean that as an insult, not one iota. I’ll bet that ol’ Ferde is enjoying a happy eternity of last laughs. All those acidulous bastards who dismissed him as a populist schlockmeister while praising arid serialists to the skies instead—well, just look how well their cocksure prognostications actually played out. When the sour turgidities of Milton Babbitt are but a distant memory, folks are still going to be digging the Grand Canyon Suite or the Mississippi Suite or the Death Valley Suite or the Niagara Falls Suite. Grofé wasn’t a cerebral academic composer who was made the subject of cerebral academic monographs or who was taught in cerebral academic seminars. He just got performed and recorded all over the place, that’s all. Everybody and their dog knew his stuff, that’s all. Hell, I grew up listening to the Grand Canyon Suite almost daily; I played my old Hollywood Bowl record of that puppy down to bare vinyl.
While Grofé specialized in scenery, Daugherty’s bailiwick is cities. Philadelphia, Detroit, and Superman’s fictional Metropolis have been his stomping grounds so far. Grofé had an uncanny ability to translate the idioms of the jazz age and the Great Depression into symphonic terms; Daugherty ditto with movie scores, jazz, and the multifarious threads of American pop music. Both Grofé and Daugherty are masters of the orchestral spectacular, neither hesitating for a split second to add non-standard instruments to the band if it serves their needs. Grofé cashed in on movie fandom with Six Pictures of Hollywood; Daugherty has kept his finger on the tabloid popular pulse with pieces such as UFO, his opera Jackie O, and the Superman-inspired Metropolis Symphony. Both are immaculate craftsmen whose highly polished, technically impeccable scores work like well-oiled machines.
Daugherty, like Grofé, has suffered his share of venomous put-downs. Change a few words or names here and there, and both composers could be the subject of the same reviews despite a separation of three some-odd generations.
Maybe Ferde Grofé’s splashy travelogue suites aren’t as popular as they once were, not even that pop-classic doyenne the Grand Canyon Suite with its sunrise and braying donkeys and thunderstorm and slam-bang-super-duper-ultra-splashola finale. But Grofé remains vastly more familiar than his oh-so-hoity-toity American contemporaries, the guys who lived on grants and college salaries, the ones who founded Composer Alliances and Contemporary Music Festivals and Meet the Composer series. How many people, do you suppose, could actually recognize anything by Edgard Varèse or Henry Cowell? But how about “On the Trail” from the Grand Canyon Suite? You know, the one with the donkeys.
Now I’m not saying that just because one piece is more familiar than another, it’s ipso facto better. But Grofé’s stubborn refusal to fade away as a period relic tells me that there is always room for music that skirts the edge of “classical” but doesn’t quite enter into a purely “pop” idiom, either. Like movie soundtracks—some of which have proven to be perennial best-selling albums down the years—certain kinds of music resist easy pigeonholing.
So I’ve come to a personal détente about Michael Daugherty’s stuff: it’s not everyday fare by any means, but like Grofé’s Mississippi Suite with its Ol’ Massa on the Plantation drawly charm, it has its place in the scheme of things and can be enjoyed without a lingering aura of guilt or queasy premonitions that it’s all going to hell in a handbasket. Ergo, I can quit all my dang bellyaching. I have always enjoyed Grofé’s music, just as I really get a kick out of British equivalent Eric Coates. So maybe one day I’ll enjoy the good-spirited romp of Coates’s Three Bears Fantasy, and then the next crank up the volume and let Deus ex Machina rattle the walls. Then a little Bach to flush out the ears and re-engage the mind, and all will be well.