The Show - The Machine

I have had lots of people asking me about the show and I figure "The Cat's Out of the Bag" so here it goes. The is show is based on the music of Deus Ex Machina by Micheal Daugherty. This piece is originally composed for Piano and Orchestra. It has three movements: Fast Forward, Train of Tears, and Night Steam. The music is built around several visual items. Although the original work is meant to depict locomotives, our show focuses on the Machine itself. The music is much more rhymthic that anything DF has attempted before. The following notes are taken directly from Michael Daugherty's website:

I. Fast Forward (Di andata veloce)The first movement departs from the Manifesto of Futurism (1909), in which the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti 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 I 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 French Surrealist Rene Magritte. I synthesize these various avant-garde perspectives on trains in motion and commotion, creating my own musical manifesto. Abstract musical lines, mechanical velocities, contrary vectors, polyrhythmic vibrations, and fragmented reverberations all move “fast forward” to arrive at a modernist utopian future.

II. Train of TearsFrom 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 though seven states, this slow moving funeral train passed through American cities and towns where memorials were held by millions of mourners who lined the railroad tracks to give their final farewell to “Abe” Lincoln. The second movement, Train of Tears, is music for a slow moving funeral train. First we hear a “ghost” melody that I have composed, performed con passione by the strings and accompanied by a lonely bass drum. Metal wind chimes and bowed suspended cymbal echo, as the piano soloist plays a funeral dirge in a minor key. Over the dirge, a distant trumpet and English horn play Taps. I incorporate 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 soldier’s funerals. During the journey of the second movement, I intertwine the “ghost” melody and “Taps” in various guises, counterpoints, transpositions, and orchestrations.

III. 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. Among my favorite photos is Hot Shot Eastbound, photographed in Iaeger, West Virginia in August 1956. In this amazing midnight photo, we see dozens of teenagers in parked cars and convertibles watching a “B” movie at the drive-in theater, while only yards away a Norfolk and Western coal-powered train speeds by at 80 miles an hour in white clouds of steam. Like O. Winston Link’s photographs, I have composed music that sonically captures the final journeys of trains from a bygone era. In Night Steam, 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.

I guess the first thing that might come to mind is how do you take an orchestral work for piano and orchestra and develop it into a marching band show? Well I can tell you, IT AIN'T EASY! and I have lots of help, but when one remembers that a piano is really a percussion instrument you can start to think a bit differently. I will leave it at that. This show is the greatest "risk" I have taken with my bands yet. But you must remember the greatest rewards lay with those who take the greatests risks. So here I go again...I bet you will like the result though.