With his ‘Time Machine,’ Michael Daugherty drives a concerto for conductors

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 he had avidly read as a child. Then as now, audiences were often leery of new music, and that pop-culture connection provided a useful marketing lure. What listeners discovered was a compositional departure that was both fun and musically sophisticated.

Conductor David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra premiered Metropolis Symphony the following year, and the composer’s career milestone has been performed by more than 100 other orchestras since, including the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (its 2011 recording on Naxos won three Grammy Awards, including one for best classical contemporary composition.

Daugherty, who calls 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. Though 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 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 a pair of maestros could lead together. 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.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform Daugherty’s Time Machine on 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.

“She champions a lot of people, and she is a major force in contemporary music.” — Michael Daugherty on Marin Alsop

The event is the brainchild of Marin Alsop, who founded the Taki Fellowship and serves as Ravinia’s chief curator and 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, Source Code by Jessie Montgomery, the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.) Alsop has been a longtime advocate for Daugherty, conducting on 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 20th century, serialism or atonality dominated classical composition, especially in academic circles, and that was still the case when Daugherty, now 68, began his studies at the University of North Texas and Manhattan School of Music in the 1970s. He even spent a year at IRCAM, the Paris academy for avant-garde and electronic music composition, then overseen by Pierre Boulez, one of serialism’s staunchest proponents. Daugherty eventually rejected the strictures of serialism and took inspiration from György Ligeti, with whom he studied in Hamburg, Germany, in 1982-84. Daugherty describes the celebrated Hungarian-Austrian composer as an “eclectic modernist,” with a wide range of influences, including African music.

Since then, Daugherty, who joined the University of Michigan music faculty in 1991, has followed his imagination. The son of a dance-band drummer, the Iowa-born 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 in a circus. He is also a big fan of movie scores from the 1940s and ’50s, and of course, he draws on his classical training, which also includes doctoral studies at Yale University with composers 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 Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. During this time, he began work on the Metropolis Symphony and Dead Elvis, a work for bassoon and chamber ensemble. “Those pieces are pretty out there,” Daugherty 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.”

As Dead Elvis indicates, Daugherty’s works almost all have evocative titles. While his music is abstract, it’s often about a facet of pop culture or historical figure. He likes to have what he calls a “general imaginative construct” in mind as he writes. “It’s sort of narrative, but it isn’t,” he said. Although he might outline his inspiration for each movement 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. 

This approach held true for Time Machine, inspired in part by the 1960 movie that Daugherty first saw as a child. It sparked thoughts of time, time travel and the science-fiction world of H.G. Wells, whose novel led to the film. At the same time, Daugherty discussed “metric modulations” or tempo changes with Gustav Meier, author of the 2009 book The Score, the Orchestra and the Conductor. 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 one another. “That was an intellectual challenge for me, 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, Daugherty 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,” he said. Because of the work’s experimental nature, Jansons led a workshop reading about a year before its 2003 premiere so that Daugherty could make 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 Time Machine has been revived every three or four years, including a performance at the 2018 Baltic Symphony Festival by the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. Daugherty promises more to come. “I like to compose,” he said. “I’m always getting ideas.” 

Excerpted with permission from Ravinia Magazine.

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