Michael Daugherty
             Pulpmeister

* Metropolis Symphony
* Bizarro
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/David Zinman
Total Time: 51:54
Argo 452 103-2
Summary for the Busy Executive: This could be the start of something big.

As an American (northern part of the hemisphere), I feel sorry for
Europeans.  Sure, they've got great high culture and great folk culture,
but the pop generally seems anemic, when it doesn't imitate that of the New
World.  Of course, one can cite exceptions.  Even Yankle-Doodle-Dandy me
can.  The French have Zizi Jeanmaire, Piaf, and Chevalier.  Britain has
Beyond the Fringe, Flanders and Swann, Monty Python, Noel Coward, P. G.
Wodehouse, Sid Fields, and Morecombe and Wise (to list only a few stellar
names), but it seems that it learned all its really good pop music from
Ray Charles and Martha and the Vandellas.  German pop makes me burp up
nightmare memories of Heino and Annaliese Rothenberger in her Dinah Shore
phase.

The culture of the United States in particular seems to generate a lot
more noise than others.  This has its good and bad sides.  On the one hand,
it drives several composers screaming into a cork-lined room.  They become
shut-ins, largely cut off from the genuine vitality of their own home town.
The music becomes not simply not-popular, but bloodless and uninvolving.
At the other end, the distractions and heavy promotion of the pop culture
tend to make other forms of music disappear - and not just concert music.
I'd put Doc Watson and Buddy Guy on my list of national treasures, although
few of our own countrymen know the instruments they play or even recognize
their names.  A lot of raw talent winds up in pop.  Furthermore, those
few classical composers who do dip into the electric stream of pop risk
drowning in it.  They lose an individual message and a sense of unity.
The pop elements seem stuck on, like musical Post-Its, or temporarily put
on, like Helen Traubel warbling "I've Got a Right to Sing the Blues."

And yet, as recently as fifty years ago, American composers seemed far
more at home "at home." We had the examples of Bernstein, Copland, Gould,
Siegmeister, and Moross - to name just a few - essentially following
the path of earlier composers, scooping up the snappy vernacular and
transforming it to the long arch of symphonic music.  To some extent,
younger composers' infatuation with the European avant-garde, beginning
after World War II, killed this off.  Those few composers who tried to
carry it on - Schuller, Russell, Baker, Mulligan, Mingus, Amram, Bolcom,
and so on - did so with fitful success and more than a little uncomfortable
self-consciousness, as if we had to learn all over again how to recreate
our sprawl of a culture in music.  It says a lot that Elliot Carter was far
more hooked by Ives than by the culture which inspired Ives.  Complicating
all this was the revolution of rock, as if jazz alone weren't a big enough
mountain.  Rock's energy has, in the words of Wim Wenders, "colonized
the subconscious" of the rest of the world.  How to get that into the
metaphorical Carnegie Hall? I have great hopes.  The new crowd - Rouse,
Larsen, Weigel, and Daugherty among them - have turned out pieces that
assimilate in individual ways the buzz of the American vernacular with the
concert platform.  Best of all, they've done it without either sniggering
up their sleeves or with a sense of holy mission.  They write the way they
do because of who they are, where they come from, and how they grew up.

An extremely interesting case, Daugherty recognizes the powerful attraction
of kitsch and schlock in American pop.  He's written works inspired by
Elvis, Liberace, legions of cocktail pianists, the Supremes, and so on.  He
must overcome the problem - a big one - of how to use such primary material
without taint.  Can one use the language of a hack without becoming a hack?
James Joyce faced a similar problem in Portrait of the Artist when he wrote
an extremely long, extremely boring sermon, to satirize such things.  I
make it through that section, but just barely.  To me, it's the book's huge
defect.  Daugherty has talent to burn.  I consider him undoubtedly one of
the most musical composers this country's ever produced.  The gambles he
takes often pay off.  Desi, a tribute to bandleader Desi Arnaz (although
Daugherty was probably inspired by Arnaz's Ricky Ricardo incarnation on
the TV sitcom I Love Lucy), is a straight pop conga, written so well and
so imaginatively that it becomes a brilliant piece of "classical" music.
Even more amazing, Daugherty does it all without resort to any distancing
device, like abstraction or irony.  It's poetry from pure pop.

I come from Superman's home town, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (actually the home
town of Jerry Siegal and Joe Schuster, Superman's creators; my dad grew up
with both).  You'd think I'd have a rooting interest, but I don't.  As a
kid, I never found Superman all that interesting.  After all, once you make
a guy super, with x-ray vision and super-hearing added to invulnerability,
strength, and speed, it's just about a given that he can beat anybody up
and catch crooks in the act.  Oh, sure, there's Kryptonite - fatal to all
native Kryptonians - but there's a suspicious and unconvincing surfeit of
that stuff, even given all the eentsy-weentsy pieces the planet exploded
into.  Space is a large place, after all, and too many pieces seem to wind
up within driving distance from earth or walking distance from the fair
city of Metropolis.  However, Superman (or rather the idea of Superman)
grew on me as an adult, long after I quit reading him.  For example, if
you can do anything, does that mean you should? Super-powers are a danger
to oneself and to others.  Like Odin, Superman becomes a god at a tragic
price, the greatest being that he must give up the pleasures of the
ordinary.  One can carry on like this for days, unfortunately, but I just
want to make the point that kid stuff isn't necessarily just kid stuff.
The pop triggers in Daugherty an ultimately meditative response.

Metropolis Symphony contains five movements - "Lex," "Krypton," "Mxyzptlk,"
"Oh, Lois," and "Red Cape Tango." Daugherty allows performers to play
whatever movements they want, which indicates that he probably didn't
conceive of the work as a symphony.  I don't hear a particularly unified
piece, so the question for me becomes how well the individual movements
hold up.

"Lex," of course, refers to Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor, criminal
mastermind (offshoot of the Mad Scientist).  Daugherty begins with a
brilliant stroke - four referee ("police") whistles, differently pitched
and placed quadraphonically in the concert hall - capturing at once the
circus colors of the comic book.  The music takes off like a shot, with a
rapid perpetual motion for practically everybody, especially a solo violin,
representing the arch-fiend himself.  The orchestration sounds both hi-tech
and thin, with cool cross-rhythms interrupting every once in a while.
There's a decadence and mechanistic energy that would make it a good
accompaniment to Fritz Lang's silent Metropolis, come to think of it.
Daugherty also builds into the piece first-class musical slapstick.  During
the solo violin's cadenza, each of the whistles interrupts, conjuring up
the flight of the arch-criminal, turning every which way, with the police
in pursuit.  The movement ends on a tonally inconclusive note (the second
degree of the scale), emphasized like the "home" pitch in a unison
orchestral tutti, and then on a short burst from one of the whistles.
Luthor is still at large.

"Krypton" uses several avant-garde techniques for purely illustrative
effect in a portrait of the instable, doomed planet.  We hear fire sirens,
screaming glissandi, clanging bells (fire bells, according to the composer,
played by two percussionists antiphonally), the rhythm (but not the tune)
of the "Dies irae" chant.  The orchestration is inventive, splendiferous,
and effective and makes most of the emotional points.  For example, the
antiphonal placement of the bells demonstrates disaster everywhere you
look.

"Mxyzptlk" was a nice touch from the writers of the classic comic books.
They realized almost immediately that normal criminals were at a definite
disadvantage when dealing with someone who could, if he weren't careful,
beat them into Jell-O - John Wayne pounding moppet Shirley Temple.  A
balding, pot-bellied Mr.  Milquetoast from the Fifth Dimension (take two
lefts at the corner gas station just after the Fourth Dimension), with
a derby way too small for his head, Mr.  Mxyzptlk nevertheless counts
as Superman's most worrisome foe.  Superman essentially couldn't touch
him because of some law of Fifth-Dimensional physics, although Mxyzptlk
could do whatever he wanted in our time and space.  Mxyzptlk was an imp,
a gremlin given to tricks designed to humiliate our Man of Steel.  The
only way to deal with him was to get him to say (or even spell) his name
backwards.  This pops him back to his home dimension and closes some sort
of gate.  There was a nice blend of cheap laughs, fairy-tale, and even a
sense of underlying seriousness, like the joy buzzer that electrocutes.
Daugherty comes up with a technoid version of Mendelssohnian fairy-music.
Again, the orchestration does most of the work, with Daugherty building in
"spatial" effects, representing the imp's mischievous mastery of time and
space.  However, a slow section of Debussyian languor interests me most,
since I have no idea why it's there.  It's the mystery of a pretty
straightforward movement, which - by the way - ends with a "pop."

"Oh, Lois" - a portrait of Superman's friend Lois Lane, girl reporter
- portrays the frenzy of her apparently thrill-packed typical day.
Essentially, it's too much of a good thing and betrays the fact that this
"symphony" was cobbled together.  As an isolated work, it's spectacular.
Daugherty intends a mini-concerto for orchestra and pulls it off.  In the
context of a multi-movement symphony, however, it's not much of anything.
By now, Daugherty's methods - quick tempi, rapid figures, and glittering
orchestration - have grown too familiar and too unvaried.

However, for the finale, "Red Cape Tango," Daugherty pitches a curve.
By far the longest movement, it is also the deepest emotionally.  It
depicts Superman's death at the hands of Doomsday.  The "Dies irae" chant
emerges full-blown as part of a seductive orchestral tango with variations
(including a "Taps"), on the scale of Bolero.  Daugherty manages to combine
the shock of the cheap with Viking funeral.  Daugherty recognizes that
pulp can move you to tears and finds the genuine emotion in it - the music
becomes a "refiner's fire" that burns away the impurities.  In a strange
way, it also reminds me of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortileges, finding that
"child's play" does indeed matter.

Bizarro constitutes yet another "Superman" piece, although separate from
the symphony.  Bizarro, an imperfect, Frankensteinian duplicate of Superman
- his dialogue anticipated the "Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein" bit of
Saturday Night Live, but without the irony - seemed one of the writers'
lamer ideas.  "Hey, let's have a Superman, only he's dumb." Again, once
you make a guy super, you severely limit the supply of gripping situations
to put him into.  In his liner notes to the CD, Daugherty points out the
"no-strings" orchestration and reports his intent of taking off from big
bands and rock.  Yet the work succeeds on its own terms.  An irregular
rhythm of two dotted quarters and a quarter pervades the movement - in
itself a cliche, but arrived at through contrapuntal, polyrhythmic strands,
which lend considerable interest.  Daugherty builds considerable canons in
the orchestra on a theme closely resembling the military drill-instructor's
"tune" "I Don't Know but I've Been Told." I suspect this kinship as
unconscious on his part.  At any rate, the music conveys the confusion and
the monomania of the Bizarro brain and manages to remain great, goofy fun.

Zinman and the Baltimore give animated performances which convey the skew
of Daugherty's vision and negotiate the hairpin turns of this music with
grace and exhilaration.  The sound is quite fine.

Steve Schwartz