Multiple GRAMMY® Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty is one of the most commissioned, performed, and recorded composers on the international concert music scene today. His music is rich with cultural allusions and bears the stamp of classic modernism, with colliding tonalities and blocks of sound; at the same time, his melodies can be eloquent and stirring.
Daugherty’s unique musical style combines elements of American popular culture, art, literature, and history, resulting in a diverse and captivating body of work that orchestras, wind ensembles, and performers around the world enthusiastically perform.
His music, recorded by Naxos over the last two decades, has received six GRAMMY® Awards, including “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” in 2011 for Deus ex Machina for piano and orchestra and in 2017 for Tales of Hemingway for cello and orchestra.
Born in 1954 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Daugherty is the son of a dance-band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. As a young man, Daugherty studied composition with many of the preeminent composers of the 20th century, including Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, Bernard Rands and Roger Reynolds at Yale (1980-82), Pierre Boulez at IRCAM in Paris and Betsy Jolas at the Paris Conservatory (1979), and György Ligeti in Hamburg (1982-84). Daugherty also assisted jazz arranger Gil Evans in New York from 1980-82.
Since 1991, Daugherty has been Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where he is a mentor to many of today’s most talented young composers. He is also a frequent guest of professional orchestras, festivals, universities, and conservatories worldwide.
Kick off the Ocala Symphony’s 51st Season!