Grammy Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty is coming to Columbia for a residency, and the University of Missouri School of Music and the Mizzou New Music Initiative are welcoming him with three concerts featuring his music in October.
Daugherty, who is a professor of composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, will be in Columbia for two days. On the first evening of his residency, the MU Wind Ensemble will perform his works “On the Air” and “Niagara Falls” as part of a concert at 7:00 p.m. Monday, October 8 at the Missouri Theatre. Admission to the performance is $5 for the general public, free for MU students, faculty and staff with IDs.
The next evening, seven more of Daugherty’s compositions will be featured a concert devoted entirely to his music, with performances by Mizzou faculty ensembles ZouM and DRAX; the Missouri Saxophone Quartet; the Mizzou New Music Ensemble; and faculty soloists Eli Lara, Leigh Muñoz and Julie Rosenfeld. That concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 9 at Whitmore Recital Hall, and is free and open to the public.
While he’s on campus, Daugherty (pictured) also will make a presentation on his music, give private lessons to composition students, and work with the Mizzou New Music Ensemble, who will complete the concert trilogy when they play two of his works in their first performance of the semester on Monday, October 15, also at Whitmore Recital Hall.
Daugherty is a composer, pianist, and teacher who’s originally from Cedar Rapids, IA. He is one of the most widely performed American concert music composers of his generation, influenced by Romanticism, Postmodernism, and popular culture, and known for referencing in his music iconic figures ranging from Elvis Presley and Superman to Frida Kahlo and Jackie Onassis.
His teachers included notable 20th century composers such as Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Bernard Rands and Roger Reynolds from 1980-82 at Yale; Pierre Boulez in 1979 and 1980 at IRCAM in Paris; and György Ligeti from 1982 to 1984 in Hamburg. Daugherty was also an assistant to famed jazz arranger Gil Evans from 1980 to 1982 in New York.
Daugherty’s orchestral music has received six Grammy awards, including “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” in 2011 and 2017, and has been commissioned and premiered by major orchestras such as the Albany Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony (U.K), Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, RAI Symphony Orchestra (Milan), and San Francisco Symphony.