George Daugherty - Family Life, Education, and Early Career

Family Life, Education, and Early Career

Daugherty was born in Pendleton, Indiana, in 1955, the only son of George Daugherty Sr., an Indiana State Policeman who eventually became Commander of the Indiana State Police, and Charlene Elizabeth Beeson Daugherty, a teacher and educator. Although not from a musical family per se, Daugherty's ancestors included many who pursued their own artistic careers, including his great great great grandfather, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Daugherty lived in Pendleton for his entire childhood and teenage years, and began studying piano with noted pianist Elizabeth Edmundson at the age of 4. He began cello studies in his teenage years. He attended college at Butler University's Jordan College of Music, where he studied with cellists Shirley Evans Tabachnick and Dennis McCafferty, conducting with John Colbert, and piano with Martin Marks and Frank Cooper. While at Butler, Daugherty also pursued a double major in journalism, and was the recipient of the prestigious Eugene Collins Pulliam / Hilton U. Brown Journalism Scholarship to Butler. At the age of 20, Daugherty was appointed an assistant conductor of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra, where he worked and studied under conductor/composer Thomas Bricetti. While there, he also continued his collegiate studies, having transferred from Butler to Indiana University.

In 1975 at the age of 20, he also founded his own orchestra, The Pendleton Festival Symphony, and upon securing grants from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the ensemble became a professional summer festival orchestra in 1976, and continued for the next 10 years. He made his professional conducting debut with that orchestra in 1976, at the age of 21, conducting for Metropolitan Opera leading soprano Roberta Peters, who would become a mentor and good friend of the young conductor. Despite his very young age, he was able to bring an impressive array of international talent to appear under his baton at the Pendleton Festival, including violinist Eugene Fodor, Metropolitan Opera leading mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias, international soprano Nancy Shade, the Harvard Glee Club, and ensembles of principal dancers from American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, and the Joffrey Ballet. One of his major Pendleton Festival productions, a tribute on the 100th birthday of the legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, went on to appear at New York's Lincoln Center Festival, and became a Canadian Broadcasting Company television special starring Leslie Caron and an international cast of dancers.

In 1977, Daugherty was accepted as an advanced opera conducting student at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he studied conducting and opera coaching/accompanying with conductor Kelly Hale, and studied opera repertoire and interpretation with famed Italian basso Italo Tajo. He left the University of Cincinnati in late 1979, when he had the unexpected opportunity to begin conducting for American Ballet Theatre prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, which eventually resulted in a position with ABT itself. His major symphony orchestra conducting debut took place in that same year, in November 1979, with his first performance with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in the Eastman Theatre.