Michael Daugherty: Blue Electra, Last Dance at the Surf & To the New World

There was a time when air travel was seen as a romantic, high-risk adventure that somehow overcame erratic communications and seat-of-the-pants navigation. That’s the era that composer Michael Daugherty evokes in Blue Electra, a violin concerto inspired by the life of Amelia Earhart, the aviation pioneer who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Earnhardt’s story ended in tragedy in 1937, when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, vanished over the Pacific while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. Neither has ever been found. Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers introduced Daugherty’s concerto in 2022, and has now recorded it with the Albany Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Alan Miller. She calls it “a beautiful, soaring, and inventive work” that traces the stages of Earhart’s life in four movements. Its title refers to Earhart’s plane, a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. “It showcases how she was a very diverse, wide-ranging person, being able to write poetry, fly planes across the world by herself, and be an advocate for women’s rights. She was a really contemporary woman, and ahead of her time.” As a best-selling author, newspaper columnist and Purdue University professor as well as a pilot, Earhart used her stature to advance aviation and women’s causes. The concerto’s first movement, “Courage,” is named after a poem that Earhart wrote just before her first transatlantic flight. “I would put this poem at the front of my music, just to help me visualise and feel the courage that she had to fly these planes,” Meyers notes. “The first movement has these very soaring, lyrical lines, where the violin is reaching up really on the tippy-top of the E string on the fingerboard. It’s spinning this tale, and this poetry that’s so beautiful and ethereal.” After Earhart’s transatlantic flight, the French government awarded her the Legion of Honor. The concerto’s second movement, “Paris (1932)”, imagines her as a guest of honor at a Parisian soirée. “This is sort of an imaginary party, where champagne is flowing freely and she is the belle of the ball,” says Meyers. “You feel a lot of jazz and the influence of [jazz violinist] Stéphane Grappelli throughout it as well.” In the third movement, “From an Airplane (1921),” Daugherty ruminates on another poem written by a much younger Earhart, “imagining what it would feel like to fly through the clouds and feel the wind through her hair, just fantasizing and dreaming of what it would be like to be a pilot,” says Meyers. The music suggests a wispy waltz before ending “with this really fast perpetual motion that’s very exciting and intense”. Then comes the work’s searing conclusion, “Last Flight (1937).” The movement opens with a rhythmic impression of an SOS morse code signal, and later suggests the growls and stutter of aircraft propellers. “I can just really imagine the anguish and the fear that she had,” says Meyers, who remains open to the theories that Earhart initially survived. “I don’t know if she crash-landed. No one knows what happened, but there’s this piercing top note towards the end of the movement, where she is basically falling from the sky.” Blue Electra is joined on the album by two other Daugherty pieces inspired by American icons and aviation. Last Dance at the Surf (2021) is a tribute to the Surf Ballroom, a dance hall in the Iowa resort town of Clear Lake, where the rock legends Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper gave their last concert before they were killed in a plane crash (“the day the music died”). Completing the aviation theme is To the New World, a 2019 salute to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon. The piece captures the awe and trepidation felt by the mission crew, and translates Armstrong’s iconic words into a rhythmic pattern (“That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind”) before ending with the rousing finale, “Splashdown.”