CCXCV: DAUGHTERY, Michael: Deus ex Machina

CCXCV. DAUGHTERY, Michael (1954-       )

Deus ex Machina (2007)
1. Fast Forward (Di andata veloce) (7:24)
2. Train of Tears (14:16)
3. Night Steam (11:17)
Terrence Wilson, piano
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, cond.

The title refers to the Latin phrase "god from the machine." Each of the three movements is a musical response to the world of trains.

1. Fast Forward (Di andata veloce)

The first movement departs from the Manifesto of Futurism (1909), in which the Italian futurist F.T. Martinetti declared that machine technologies would propel the world toward a universal culture. The image of a speeding locomotive became an icon in modernist art of European painters in the early twentieth century. Two important paintings Daughtery had in mind were "States of Mind" (1911), the Cubist trilogy of a noisy and dissonant train arriving and departing at a modern railroad station, painted by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and "Time Transfixed" (1936), the strange image of a steam locomotive emerging from a dining room fireplace, painted by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. Daughtery synthesizes these various avant-garde perspectives on trains in motion and commotion, creating his own musical manifesto. Abstract musical lines, mechanical velocities, and fragmented reverberations all move "fast forward" to arrive at a modernist utopian future.

States of Mind

Time Transfixed

2. Train of Tears

From April to May of 1865, a "lonesome train on a lonesome track" with "seven coaches painted black" carried the body of the assassinated American Civil War President Abraham Lincoln from Washington, D.C. to his home in Springfield, Illinois for burial. During the 1,650-mile journey through seven states, this slow-moving funeral train passed through American cities and towns where memorials were held for millions of mourners who lined the railroad tracks to give their final farewell to "Abe" Lincoln. This movement is music for a slow-moving funeral train. First we hear a "ghost" melody that Daughtery composed, performed con passione by the strings and accompanied by a lonely bass drum. Metal wind chimes and bowed suspended cymbal echo the piano soloist, who plays a funeral dirge in a minor key. Over the dirge, a distant trumpet and English horn play "Taps." Daugherty incorporated "Taps" (also known as "Gone to Sleep") because this simple but emotionally charged melody has been used since the Civil War in America as a military bugle call, sounded at soldiers' funerals. During the journey of the second movement, Daugherty intertwines the "ghost" melody and "Taps" in various guises, counterpoints, transpositions, and orchestrations.

3. Night Steam

By the 1950s, trains in America were powered by electricity or diesel fuel. The only remaining coal-burning steam locomotives were those of the Norfolk and Western railroad line, operating in the states of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, where coal was still plentiful. Aware of the impending loss of these gigantic and beautiful steam locomotives, the photographer O. Winston Link documented the last days of the Norfolk and Western trains from 1955 to 1960 and the people who lived alongside them. Using complex banks of flashbulbs and timers that he invented, Link frequently photographed the trains in action during the night, in black and white. Like his photographs, Daugherty composed music that sonically captures the final journeys of trains from a bygone era. In Night Stream, we hear majestic fire-eating steam locomotives rumble and whistle their way through the small towns and lonely back roads of the Shenandoah Valley into extinction.