Michael Daugherty was perhaps among the most promising of the young American post-minimalists that came into prominence in the 1990s. His irreverent, yet subtly moving scores, bespeaking of the baby boomer generation’s see-sawing derision of and nostalgia for the postwar plastic-fantastic culture of their youth, were among the new music gems of the short-lived revival of the Argo label. His art is consumed by a boundless fascination with Americana, the mythos of America and what it all means, fact and tall-tale alike.
Over the past decade Daugherty has become closely associated with Naxos’ American new music arm, the latest offering in that series being his This Land Sings: A WPA-meets-Pierrot Lunaire-style distillation of the life and music of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Although the score may echo another Naxos release from years ago called Mr. Tambourine Man, which fatuously reset the lyrics of Bob Dylan to newly composed music by John Corigliano, Daugherty’s score is something else entirely; being only his most recent in a long line of works that takes a figure from American popular culture, pins them down, and scrutinizes them, sometimes ruthlessly, as a lepidopterist would with a rare butterfly. In the finest of these works, such as Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover and Jackie O, Daugherty walks a careful line between satire and pathos, passing no judgment on his subject and leaving it to the listener to sort out the sometimes unsettling ambiguities.
“The music I composed gives haunting expression, ironic wit and contemporary relevance to the political, social, and environmental themes from Woody Guthrie’s era,” the composer writes in his prefatory notes for This Land Sings; “haunting expression” and especially “ironic wit,” however, are qualities sorely lacking in this music. Instead the pokerfaced restraint of his younger self has succumbed to the ongoing pandemic of political hysteria; a scourge to which geriatrics under the toxic spell of 24-hour news channels and the never-ending torrent of cynical faux-outrage clickbait, whatever their political bent, seem especially prone to.
A brief instrumental overture based on This Land is Your Land gives way to a series of vignettes—sometimes sung, sometimes rendered in sprechstimme—which purport to depict various aspects of Guthrie’s characters and biography. Whether the use of a skillful librettist would have helped the final result is anybody’s guess, but Daugherty’s decision to provide most of his own libretto was unfortunate. The dismaying puerility of “Hot Air” and “Silver Bullet” are like Facebook boomer screeds made manifest in sound, the kind of thing one silently shakes their head at and wishes a responsible loved one had counseled against sharing.
How Daugherty’s music is connected to Guthrie’s, if at all, is difficult for me to determine as the latter is a name I know only slightly by repute, and his music (save for one or two songs I learned in elementary school) virtually not at all. That said the composer of This Land Sings has wandered far off the path of his zestful earlier works; its ramshackle gaucheness would not be out of place in a production by Corky St. Clair.
The performance here by Dogs of Desire, the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s new music ensemble, is as fine as one could imagine, though the contributions from the vocal soloists leave a bit to be desired. Baritone John Daugherty (no relation to the composer) is mostly adequate, despite an occasional tendency to bark. Annika Socolofsky’s hooty and thin soprano, on the other hand, quickly becomes wearying on the ear.
As has occurred with a lot of good people over the past 20 years (and especially so since 2016), Daugherty’s apparent obsession with the trivialities of the perpetual (and partially manufactured) culture wars has caused the onset of what seems to be chronic brain rot. Let us hope for the sake of this talented composer that the diagnosis is not terminal.
Big oof.
