Michael Daugherty's Metropolis Symphony, a set of five homages to the Superman comic that can be performed separately or together, has come as close as any other contemporary work to carving out a secure place in the symphonic repertory, at least in the U.S., and Daugherty is catching on in Europe, as well. The key to his music is that, for all its pop culture references, it does not really fall under the crossover banner. The intertextual techniques, as well as the basic motor rhythms, come ultimately from Stravinsky, and ...
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Michael Daugherty's Metropolis Symphony, a set of five homages to the Superman comic that can be performed separately or together, has come as close as any other contemporary work to carving out a secure place in the symphonic repertory, at least in the U.S., and Daugherty is catching on in Europe, as well. The key to his music is that, for all its pop culture references, it does not really fall under the crossover banner. The intertextual techniques, as well as the basic motor rhythms, come ultimately from Stravinsky, and Daugherty has devised inventive ways of tweaking the meeting points between that basic language and the world of popular culture. A later example is Deus ex Machina (2007), which fills out the program; it was commissioned by a consortium of regional American orchestras. The title refers not to the dramatic device of having a savior suddenly appear in a seemingly hopeless situation but to the original sense of the Latin words: god in the machine. The machine in question is the train,...
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