Grammy recognition doesn't often come to a composer's wilder pieces, of which Lonely Motel is one. "But I'm so programmed within myself to not pay attention to that," he said. "The more comfort I take in that, the more it's going to hurt when the other hand slaps me in the face" - like the critics who, early on, said Mackey had no business pairing electric guitar with string quartet?
Less lofty reasons lurk in the background. "Look, if I miss my world premiere and end up not winning the Grammy, I'll feel like, 'What was that about?' If I win, it'll be whether I show up or not," Mackey, 55, said this week. "I don't have any discs in the pipeline for next year. So my . . . chances to rub shoulders with Beyoncé are squandered!"
Conflicting allegiances are typical for Mackey, who has commissions from some of America's best orchestras, but whose primary instrument is electric guitar (he even has a band, Big Farm). Somewhere in between are rambunctious pieces like Lonely Hotel and Dream House that, through the confrontational tenor voice of performance artist Rinde Eckert, fearlessly critique the complaisant comforts of 21st-century America.
Tonic, whose genesis began under the Chamber Orchestra's previous music director, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, may represent Mackey at his most personal. For all his iconoclastic air, he's a composer who tends to accommodate circumstances, whether writing a concerto that makes the soloist shine, fitting into Dolce Suono Ensemble's recent Mahler 100/Schoenberg 60 concerts, or framing Eckert's brilliant, rantlike poetry.
