CROSS OVER, BEETHOVEN

By TERRY TEACHOUT/HOUSTON

I don't want to bore people with my music," says Michael Daugherty. He needn't worry. Daugherty's zany, pop-flavored brand of classical music is lots of things, but boring isn't one of them. His compositions include Elvis Everywhere, a work for string quartet and three Elvis impersonators on tape; Desi, a woodwind tribute to I Love Lucy; and Metropolis Symphony, a five-movement orchestral salute to Superman. And on March 14, Daugherty's first opera, Jackie O, about guess who, was produced by Houston Grand Opera. Set to a libretto by Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the panegyric 1995 book Jackie Under My Skin, Jackie O is a surreal fantasy in which the former First Lady rubs shoulders with Liz Taylor and Andy Warhol, falls in and out of love with Aristotle Onassis and sings a climactic duet of posthumous reconciliation with J.F.K.

The result sounds a bit like a Broadway show, but one composed by a pop-culture channel surfer on uppers. Jackie is a sweet-toned lyric soprano; Ari, a bass-baritone, is a smarmy lounge lizard (one of his big arias is marked in the score, "Freely sung, a la Dean Martin"). The music they sing jumps joltingly from folk rock to Motown to big-band jazz, all kaleidoscopically orchestrated for a 19-piece pit band with two percussionists. And although the tone is mostly light and lively, an unexpectedly affecting streak of melancholy surfaces whenever Jackie sings of her lost life as First Lady.

Does all this really add up to opera? It's hard to say--and that's the point. For like the rest of Daugherty's music, Jackie O resides in the limbo between classical and pop known as "crossover," the rapidly increasing popularity of which is changing American classical music.

Crossover is nothing new. The Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler recorded Irving Berlin tunes in 1927, around the same time that a Tin Pan Alley refugee named George Gershwin sent wigs flying with such concert scores as An American in Paris. What has changed is that today's listeners, raised in an era of shrinking arts education, are showing less interest in the classical standards. Meanwhile, younger classical performers, themselves suckled on pop, want to play it, not only to make big bucks but also because they like it. When Jean-Yves Thibaudet, famous for his interpretations of Ravel and Rachmaninoff, records an album of piano solos by jazz great Bill Evans, or the Kronos Quartet programs Jimi Hendrix side by side with Bela Bartok, you know something is happening.

But is it possible for serious composers to mix classical music with rock 'n' roll successfully? Though elements of rock can be heard in the works of such composers as Philip Glass, no one has yet produced a truly crowd-pleasing piece that brings rock into the concert hall or opera house the same way that Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein taught symphony orchestras how to swing.

That's where Daugherty, 42, comes in. A onetime cocktail pianist turned University of Michigan professor, he openly adores American pop culture in all its myriad manifestations, from comic books to James Brown. "I can go to the opera," he cheerfully admits, "then go to the bowling alley afterward." Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to a musical family (his father was a dance-band drummer), Daugherty was a crossover musician before the term was fashionable, simultaneously writing "serious" music and playing piano and organ in funk bands. He later earned a doctorate in music composition at Yale and studied as a Fulbright scholar in Paris. "I started out emulating the avant-garde Europeans--Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen," he recalls. But Ligeti, with whom he studied in Europe, told Daugherty he was headed down the wrong road and suggested, "You've worked in rock and jazz. You should look that way." Daugherty returned to the U.S. in 1986 and began composing works that frankly acknowledged his pop roots. "All at once," he says, "I wasn't looking over my shoulder anymore."

The shift is paying off. Metropolis Symphony, an entertaining polystylistic romp for a percussion-heavy orchestra, hit the Billboard classical chart, and a live performance of Jackie O has been recorded, and is set for an August release.

Whether Jackie O will be taken up by other companies remains to be seen. Nicholas Muni's over-the-top production failed to mask the dramatic holes in Koestenbaum's often static and pretentious libretto. Even so, there's no doubt that Daugherty's music deserves to be taken seriously. "Crossover is American," he says. "Sometimes I think maybe what I'm doing is what Charles Ives would be doing if he were alive today. He used the music he heard--hymn tunes, band marches--and I use TV and Muzak." Charles Ives meets Elvis. Sounds like the perfect libretto for Michael Daugherty's second opera.