Motorcity Triptych

DAUGHERTY b. 1954

American composers all have to find their own paths toward an American voice, their own way of forging an American sound. Michael Daugherty’s journey has been a particularly self-aware one and, as in Motor City Triptych (2000), he sometimes directly invokes the idea of manufacturing. Daugherty’s is an America of icons, born and made. Many of his works portray famous and infamous personalities, from Superman, to J. Edgar Hoover, to Jackie O. His two musical portraits of Elvis—Elvis Everywhere, a string quartet with recorded performances by Elvis impersonators, and the (costumed) bassoon concerto Dead Elvis—are among his most popular works. Several of his band and orchestral pieces evoke iconic landscapes: Niagara Falls, Route 66, the Sunset Strip, and Mt. Rushmore. His wry and often humorous style combines American popular music, including jazz, blues, rock, and funk, with energetic polyrhythms and counterpoint, all balanced with a sensitivity to timbre and timing. Motor City Triptych summarizes Daugherty’s vision of America in its threefold depiction an iconic sound, place, and person. The title itself hints at this tripartite portrait—a triptych traditionally being a three-panel artwork depicting related subjects—while also evoking the quintessential American road trip. A “triptik” from the American Automobile Association is a fold-out trip planner (now available as an app for your smart phone or other portable electronic device).

The first movement, Motown Mondays, draws on one of the most popular musics made in America, the iconic hits produced at Barry Gordy Jr.’s Motown Records. Drawing on a sense of place, Daugherty imagines “an exotic world of harmonies and rhythms that might have been heard performed by Motown artists on a Monday night at The Roostertail Club.” He also reinterprets the sound of the typical Motown arrangement, a blend of glamorous string lines, rhythmic drive, close vocal harmonies, catchy horn riffs, and memorable melodies pioneered by the team of Lamont Dozier and Brian and Eddie Holland. Like a kaleidoscope of Motown ensembles, the orchestra is divided into duets, trios, and quartets before breaking out into a funky fugue in the coda. Opening with a gritty bass clarinet solo, ironically framed by dreamy harp glissandi, Motown Mondays only gradually comes to life, unfolding a series of soulful, blue-tinged melodies. The first of these appears in the woodwinds over a steady vamp laid down by the string section strumming pizzicato chords in imitation of a blues guitar. As the movement gains momentum, syncopated interjections and inventive polyrhythms between the winds, brass, and low strings provide a counterpoint to the lush violin lines (replete with dramatic tremolos) typical of Motown tracks arranged by Holland-Dozier-Holland—think of “My World Is Empty Without You” by The Supremes (1966).

Pedal-to-the-Metal barrels along, depicting a drive down Highway 12, or Michigan Avenue in Detroit. The featured solo trumpet alternately conveys a Copland-esque serenity (as in his Quiet City), the Latin jazz of the 1940s, and an exotic chromaticism that, for Daugherty, hints at the Middle Eastern restaurants that now populate the avenue. Recalling the symphonic jazz of the 1920s, the brass and percussion sections echo the grinding and booming sounds of industry, making use of siren and a brake drum. The narrow, winding melodies that gradually move from the string section to the rest of the orchestra mimic the twists and turns of a road traveled at speed, an American whirling dervish.

Travelling along another avenue, Rosa Parks Boulevard honors the spirit of Rosa Parks who initiated the long march toward Civil Rights in 1955 by refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery Alabama. The trombone section serves as the soul of this movement, trading statements of one of Rosa’s favorite songs, Oh Freedom. The solo trombone also evokes the impassioned delivery of an African American preacher, somewhere between speech and song. According to the poet James Weldon Johnson, the trombone alone possess “the power to express the wide and varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice-and with greater amplitude.” Johnson’s description of the preacher in the preface to God’s Trombones (1927) is just as accurate for Daugherty’s soloist: “he intoned, he moaned, he pleaded, he blared, he crashed, he thundered.” The trombone section leads the way between lyrical passages that depict the spirit of Rosa Parks and more dissonant and percussive sections that jar us like a turbulent bus ride. Of the finale Daugherty says that the ominous beating of the bass drum “reminds us that while progress was made in civil rights in the twentieth century, there is still much to be done in the twenty-first century.”

  • Katherine Baber

Concert Performance

Orchestration

Piccolo, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, Eb clarinet, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings