daron aric hagen

From where I stood in my tuxedo at the rail of the orchestra pit, looking up into the slowly filling theater, it looked as though nearly all 2800 seats would have people in them. The interior of the elegant opera house was a wine dark sea of plush red velvet seats. Alone, I had walked nearly every foot of it during technical rehearsals, getting an idea of what the audience would see from every angle, "infiltrating" the theater just as I had the cavernous old Oriental Landmark movie palace in Milwaukee as a teenager.  The dream I had formulated there thirty-two years earlier, lying on the Oriental's stage on my back with a heap of musty safety curtain beneath my head, fingers interlaced at the nape of my neck, watching movies from behind the screen, had become reality.

The culmination not just of the past six years but also of my life so far as a composer, my grand opera Amelia, was about to be premièred in a 3.6 million dollar production by Seattle Opera, one of America's largest and most prestigious companies. The expectant susurrus of the audience's pre-performance chatter washed over me. Happy, confident, I turned my back on the audience, looked into the pit, reached down, and shook the concertmistress' hand. "Thank you, Emma," I said. "My pleasure, really," she smiled, returning to her seat. Classmates from conservatory days now members of the Seattle Symphony looked up and smiled; I waved and smiled in return, grateful.

I glanced down at the opera's full score, closed on the conductor's podium. As Amelia was my sixth opera, I performed a private ritual by discretely tapping the wood of the pit rail six times for luck. The first jitters came. Turning back to the house, I let out a very long breath.

The birth of my son, Father's death, Mother's death, Britt's, my own near-collapse psychologically and emotionally, opening night of Amelia—these were crucial moments in my life. Because for me LIFE = ART, each of these moments was not only itself but also a link to other "selves," real, recalled, or imagined.

I had insisted that the libretto and dramaturgy of Amelia mirror my way of thinking. In the opera, as in my life, parallel realties, times, dreams, associations, would coexist. Since I made no distinction in my mind between the opera between the score's covers and myself, to criticize it would be to criticize me. I had put absolutely everything I was and could be as a man and artist on the table. Tonight, this opera house was my domain. Tomorrow the critics would have their say. They wouldn't simply review Amelia; they would pass judgment on my true worth as a composer, and, by extension, as a man.

I remembered the night before my first humiliating Juilliard audition in July 1979, standing at the lip of the Uris Theater pit, desperate for someone to talk to, pouring out my anxiety about the audition to come and my excitement at standing right where I was during the intermission of Sweeny Todd to its surprised, amused keyboard player.

Reflexively, I turned back to the pit and made eye contact with David McDade, the opera company's brilliant chief accompanist, seated behind the piano. He smiled up at me in return, mouthed, "In bocca al lupo" silently. I smiled in return and mouthed, "Crepi!" Chuckling, he gave a little wave looked back to his music.

In a few seconds, the lights would dim and the conductor, Gerard Schwarz would walk briskly to the podium.

I looked back into the house, and tried to recall the instant that I became aware that music was always playing in my head. Was it the night Father commanded me at age five to sing Friedrich-Wilhelm Möller's saccharine ditty The Happy Wanderer over and over for the only house guests I recall our family ever having had? After the first half dozen times, I realized that Father was drunk, and that nobody was listening; in fact, people were embarrassed for me as, crimson with shame, terrified of what would happen to me if I stopped, I sang on and on. Maybe it was when I was nine, bundled up in winter gear on the school bus, my warm breath as I quietly sang steaming up the window. I sang then because it made me feel better. It still does. At what point did the melodies I sang become my own? Were they always?

I headed for my seat. Catching my wife's eye, I nodded, noting with pure joy how dazzling she looked in her opera dress. I took my seat next to her on the aisle: a composer's privilege. My brother, my nephew, and my wife's generous and loving family surrounded us.

"Am I crazy?" I asked myself as the oboist gave the "A" and the delicious aural primordial soup that a professional orchestra creates in response as they tune before the entrance of the conductor bubbled gently up from the pit. I thought of Monteverdi's Orfeo: "...che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso."

I adjusted my bow tie and cummerbund. Both were tight. I had come to Seattle to attend rehearsals, revise as necessary, to learn as I always did, by observing the process of discovery, and staging. Wife and son in New York, I had returned to a quasi-feral state during the past six weeks: the debilitating insomnia, the depression, the dizzying mood swings—all had roared back. I had felt lost, alone, and agonizingly overexposed.

I felt the Koi jumping in my stomach. "Do I simply suffer from a peculiar form of Norwegian Lutheran Histrionic Personality Disorder?" I wondered, half-serious, the sweat beginning to pool under my collar. "Is it so important to me that this opera be a success that, even if it is not, I will make it one in my mind?" I wondered. I had judged colleagues harshly over the years who I felt had "gone around the bend." Perhaps I had finally reached that point myself.

I thought of my twenties, of how I was once jealous of others' self-absorption because I was certain it held—as I believed mine did—secrets of self knowledge. I assumed that the self-absorbed held, so closely and tenderly, many brave secrets and thoughts that would heighten and illuminate my search for identity. The enormity of deception was due—like my current jitters—to my own arrogance.

As it happened, either these people had checked out, gone benignly insane, or had closed up for sanity—it was as simple as that. At the heart of the Sphinx, through the labyrinthine passages, was the rifled vault of a dead Pharaoh—no more. My frustration and anger were comical. In sadness, I had grown up.

I thought of my infant son, asleep now in his crib back in the rented house on Queen Anne. We had decided that he was too small to witness the shooting of the Vietnamese girl at the end of the first act. Still, I felt him there with me, seated contentedly on my lap, his fingers curled like a frond around the thumb of my hand, golden hair wild and falling in ringlets on his small, strong shoulders. Forever in my heart it will be my boy to whom Amelia coos "Hi, baby" at the end of the opera.

I twisted around and looked up into the balconies. People were quieting. I checked my watch. I commanded my stomach to stop somersaulting. It was time to let go of my own concerns and to be the professional that I had worked for thirty-five years to become. My function was to gauge the effect as an author that the opera was having in real time on the audience around me and to make mental note of changes that needed to be made to improve the piece.

"Worrying once again my 'barb of sorrow'," I thought ruefully as the house lights dimmed. I whispered the most fleeting of prayers, squeezed my wife's hand, and blinked hard as in silence the curtain glided up.

I think of myself as an artist, and know that I have done the work to earn the privilege.

I know that I am able to do what I do because I am protected by others, and because I stand on the shoulders of hardworking immigrants, farmers, laborers, white-collar parents, and mentors. When I was in my twenties, I met many successful fine artists in mid-career. I asked them questions, listened to what they told me with interest, gave them gratitude and respect, and learned from them. I have learned, as most successful artists do, that mentors eventually become competitors, and betray you in the end.

I am a composer. I'm old enough now that younger artists (with whom I have a difficult time relating) seem disinterested in what I do. I make a living writing something called concert music.  That means that it is too musically complex to be popular, but also too accessible to nonprofessionals to be deemed academic. I compose not because I hear music in my head nearly every waking moment (I do) but because I write what I hear down and hand it to people to perform.

I am a professional not by design but by default, for three reasons: I prefer to be paid to compose, my identity is so intertwined with the creative act that I find the amateur's sentimentalizing of "inspiration" embarrassing in its naïvte, and I embody the vast effort of making what I do look (and sound) easy. As a person, I have learned (with no regrets) to accept unending financial jeopardy, unceasing hard work, bad reviews, and a growing sense of irrelevance.

Because I also love words, I nearly always associate my own music with the poetry that I love. Despite loving words as intensely as I do, I chose to become a composer. Why? Because music simultaneously means anything, everything—and nothing at all. Because words seem to me to be too easily twisted, too willfully misunderstood, and too easily used against one—as Henry Adams wrote, "No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."

Nadia Boulanger's dying words are supposed to have been, "J'ecoute la musique sans commencement ni fine." What difference does it make whether that music was happy or sad, or even understood? Like life, it is always both, its meaning mostly sensed—we don't really know much about it, we admit, but we know what we like.

I've been told by people who said that they loved me that love isn't enough, but I know that it is. Like music, love streams endlessly on whether we partake of it or not. One hopes, I suppose, that the music of our lives will be, as Mother once hoped mine would be, "mostly happy." In any event, it is only life that ends; the music never stops.

Milwaukee, December, 1983. I carried her sparrow-light, lifeless body to the car and propped it up in the front seat. Father's feet crunched on the driveway's gravel ahead of me. I thought of him carrying me in from the car, drowsy and happy, after a night at the drive-in, slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, when I was as easy to lift as she was now. He used to smell like after-shave and pipe tobacco, I remembered; how comforting that combination of smells had once been, and how intensely I had grown to detest the cloying odor of Borkum Riff, his acrid, shabby suits, cheap shoes. My hands shot out from my position in the back seat to cradle Mother's head when Father throwing the car into reverse caused it to loll crazily to the side.

Three letters were burnt out over the entrance: N, C, and Y. Mercurochrome-red neon letters, luridly smudged like badly-applied lipstick by what I suppose to have been tears, though I can't remember, read EMERGE. It seemed absurd to pile her remains into a wheelchair in order to present her to the triage nurse, but there you have it: even Charon must abide by the rules. I never cry when I am really unhappy, or when I feel that I am being manipulated, and I didn't cry then. I simply did my job.

A bored resident pronounced her no longer quick. The last time I saw her she was covered loosely with a sheet, her arm hanging out over the edge of the gurney, her husband twisting her wedding ring off, saying, 'These things tend to disappear in morgues, trust me.'

Father dealt with the legalities of death. I walked out into the parking lot, where an empty ambulance and a cop car were parked. An exhausted paramedic and an orderly sat on the curb, sharing a cigarette, blowing the smoke out into the cold night air. I looked up at the Milky Way, stuffed my hands in my pockets, wondered what was going on inside, walked back in, found a pay phone, dropped some change in, called a friend in Colorado. No answer.

Victims of a car wreck were wheeled in. Blood. I've got to get out of here, I thought. 'But where can I go? Where is my life? Back to Philadelphia? No. To Colorado, to stay with friends? Why not? School's on break; it is as good a place to go as any.' I returned to the pay phone and booked a ticket for the first flight out. Father emerged through the crash doors. 'Let's go home,' he said, throwing me the car keys. 'You drive.'

Home. Home? We both stayed up for the rest of the night. This in itself was not unusual: I had been an insomniac for as long as I could remember; so had he. Growing up, we often ran into one another after everyone else was asleep. I don't know what he did, but I knew I was never coming back, so I moved from room to room, trying to fix each one in memory. I took her diary, several favorite books, some pictures, and two small statues she had sculpted—of Icarus before the fall, and of Lear with his Fool. I wrapped them in dirty shirts and socks, zipped them into my cheap luggage, and set them beside the front door.

The sun rose. Birds sang. The cab came. I flew to Colorado. Ten hours later I was astride a horse on the top of Cheyenne Mountain.

'NORAD' is beneath us,' my friend said.

'My name backwards,' I replied, thinking that I had read somewhere that there were three huge underground reservoirs down there, so large that workers sometimes crossed them in rowboats.

'Like Justinian,' I said out loud.

'What?' my friend asked.

'It doesn't matter,' I replied.

Life and Death, Good and Evil, Wealth and Extreme Poverty, Man and God, live in very, very close proximity in Latin America. For me, this proximity inspires a heightened awareness of possibility, an intensification of experience that renders emotions more vivid, the appreciation of the fragility of life more sanguine.

Once, in Nicaragua-the birthplace of my wife's mother, a place for which I have profound affection, and to which we return as often as we can-our visit coincided with the weeklong festival of San Sebastian. During the previous week we had enjoyed a horse-drawn coach ride around the colonial city of Granada-a town which has been dressed for wealthy travelers-and boated on the fresh water of Lake Nicaragua-a lake so large that you could drop Puerto Rico into it. We trekked up the paths surrounding the active cone of the Masaya Volcano, made our way through the bustling markets of Masaya and Jinotepe, and spent our last morning in La Boquita on a ten mile walk on the beach to the shore's point (which revealed another point beyond that) at dawn. All the while, we were treated to incredibly lavish and sumptuous meals prepared by our Tia Leyla as well as delicious foods in fine Nicaraguan restaurants. We were treated so wonderfully that our hearts were bursting.

Either it was a discarded bone needle of the sort used by fishermen to repair their nets, or it was a stingray's barb, a rusty nail-whatever, the four inch long espina passed through my wife's foot like a red hot knitting needle through butter when she stepped on it in the Pacific surf.

The patriarch of the family there, Tio Ricardo, is one of the foremost horse trainers in Latin America. The horse is absolutely central to society there not just as a beast of burden, but as a mark of culture and prestige. One day we attended the Ipica-a huge equestrian festival-in Diriamba where $100 workhorses were ridden proudly next to $150,000 show horses. Because of his personal charisma, character, and his talent as a horseman, Ricardo seems to know and be respected by everyone-from the peasant driving his burrow down the street to the President of the country, Enrique Bolaños, to whom we were introduced at one of the house parties that Tio and Tia brought us to during the festival. We were honored that the president took time not only to meet Gilda, Chris and myself, but also to have an actual conversation with each of us.

She turned chalk white, one foot out of the water, the other in. 'Don't move, I said.' 'I don't know what it is,' she said. The pain moved across her face like a shadow. I bent down in the waves and felt for her foot as, reflexively, she lifted it.

The festival of San Sebastian celebrates the meeting of the patron saints of Diriamba (San Sebastian), Jinotepe (Santiago), and San Marcos (San Marco). Evidently, statues of San Sebastian and Santiago were en route from Spain when the boat carrying them capsized. Fishermen then found the statues floating in the ocean, dry and safe in sealed boxes, as close to each of their intended destinations as they could have been. The folklore surrounding them is that, with this history, they must be traveling companions, and very close friends. Each year San Sebastian invites both Santiago and San Marcos, as he is from another nearby town, to celebrate with him in Diriamba.

Blood poured out of both the top and the bottom of her foot and into the water, on my hands, all over her suit. I checked the entry and exit wounds. Clean. Tore my shirt off and bound her foot. It staunched nothing. 'I've got to get you to the house. Don't look at the blood,' I said, trying to tie the shirt more tightly.

Citizens from each town carry the statues from Diriamba, Jinotepe and San Marcos to Dolores, a town in the middle of all three Saints' homes, where the three meet and then parade back to Diriamba. A huge Mass is celebrated in the basilica there and everyone processes, carrying the saints' statues, accompanied by extravagant, beautiful dances and music. Children as young as four years old, all dressed up in elaborate costumes and throwing themselves into the moment; faithful of all ages walking on their knees to fulfill promises to the saints; the incredible smells of fresh-and delicious-festival foods like picadillo, chicharrón, yuka, and nacatameles as well as of horses, people and the spent gunpowder of fireworks-all overwhelm.

'I'm okay,' she protested. 'I can walk.' Putting weight on the foot, she nearly passed out. I looked back at the house, across a finger of water and far up the beach. There was no one for three hundred yards in any direction. 'I'm going to ferry you, baby,' I said.

We attended Mass in the choir loft above the front door of the basilica with several priests, and five or six members of the family, leaning over the rail and looking down towards the altar. People were packed tightly in as the choir sang. At the appropriate moments in the Mass, probably three thousand voices inside the basilica, another several thousand outside in the square, sang.

'Sit down, brother,' said Chris, as I placed her in the chair on the porch of the little bungalow and he took over. The blood had by that time soaked everything we had on. 'You look like you're going to pass out,' he said, grabbing my arm. 'You should sit down.' My tailbone connected with the ground as I nearly fainted from the sprint up the beach.

The cardinal finished, the procession began. The statues of the saints, covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by dancers, huge waving flags, drummers, and flute players. The basilica shook and I felt what it is like when air itself trembles. Deafening fireworks exploded outside, thousands sang, and-a few feet away from us in the belfries-the bells began to peal.

Now that she was safe, my mind began to fly off like a kite whose string had broken. 'Like stigmata...' I shuddered, trying to steady myself by looking out to sea. The fist around my heart seized. Blood still pulsed from the wound, but her color was returning. 'Kierkegaard called it-what was it?-a barb of sorrow?' I was joining my wife in shock. 'If it is pulled out, I shall die,' I remembered. 'Why couldn't I accept this dissonance as simply as harmony; why couldn't I make order emerge from this chaos?' This was being alive.

Every hair on my goose-bumped arms stood on end in the heat as the procession passed out of the church through the doors below. I was guided to a rope and allowed to help toll the bells. Flying a dozen feet up and down, drowning in the sound of the singing, of the bells, of the blood pounding in my head, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they passed in the plaza, then another to see the enormous Christ hanging above the altar, hands and feet nailed with barbs of sorrow to the Holy Rood, then another to see the huge clappers inside the bells, then another to see my wife's ecstatic face as she sang, and then another to see the bullet holes pocking the belfry's inner walls.

My beloved 15 month old son, early this morning as you slept in your crib, dreaming of Triceratops and Froebel blocks, your Papa finished the orchestral score of his opera Amelia, which he began sketching nearly four years before you were born. Long before you were conceived, your Mama and I knew that this opera (about Amelia, a first time mother-to-be, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in Vietnam who must break free from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband and child), would be our gift to you. Your name graces the score, of course. You'll be shown it when you're older, and you'll be told stories about who your parents were when it was being written. We wonder whether you will learn to read music someday; I wonder whether the score's musical secrets will ever become plain to you. Your mother gave birth to you  just in time to be cradled in her arms as the opera received its workshop; you'll be old enough to sit between us both in your own seat, snappy in your first tuxedo, in a few months, on opening night.

To me, the essence of music is singing: that's why the final ten minutes of the opera are a big instrumental sweep to an extended a cappella vocal nonette at the instant Amelia's baby is held aloft by her midwife, then placed on her Mama's chest for the first time. The orchestra suddenly drops out, and the entire cast (doctors, nurses, family both quick and dead) raise their voices in a glittering contrapuntal celebration of the word 'love.'

Increasingly restrained (Norwegian?) in my expression markings as I age (because music says what it says, and who am I to know what it is saying, even though I wrote it?), I nevertheless allowed myself the only descriptive tempo marking in the two hour score when I wrote above these measures 'unreeling like a montage of kisses.' This is as close as I can come to duplicating the music I heard in my head, my son, when first we met.

The ensemble ends with Amelia singing 'anything is possible' to her baby, ghosted by a woman (who may be Amelia Earhart, and into whom I poured my feelings for my dead mother) wearing a flight jacket and jodhpurs and gazing contentedly out into the opera house, singing my own mother's dying words, 'I was never bored.' New mother and father weep with joy, just as when you were born your Mama and I wept. On the other side of the stage, an old man (who may be Daedalus, and into whom I poured my feelings for my dead father) whose son (who may be Icarus, and into whom I poured my feelings for my dead brother Britt) has just died, following a fall from a great height, slowly departs the hospital, clutching a small cellophane bag containing his son's possessions. The Ouroborus.

Your timing is as excellent as ever, for as I typed the date at the bottom of the final bar of the last page of the orchestra score, you awoke, and the music of your cries erupted from the baby monitor a few feet away. Life is music to me, and the music you and your mother make is the most beautiful of all.

New Berlin, Wisconsin, winter 1969. It was very late. Rain tore down through the thick forest surrounding the Big Cedar House the way that it does in Nicaragua—like machetes whacking at the branches. I was eight. Britt was ten. Through the picture windows I could see the trees flailing in the wind, black and white except for when the lightning turned them a lurid, verdant green. I realized that the basement would flood again tonight—if it hadn't already. Father was out of control. We lay very still in the dark, listening as he hurled pots and pans around in the kitchen downstairs.

The crashing stopped. The rain slapped in sheets against the windows with a sound that I now associate with someone slapping change down on a bar. I wondered what had happened to Kevin, whose bedroom was directly across from the kitchen and who had doubtless been in the middle of it. I knew that we were next. Neither of us had the faintest idea what we had done wrong. Britt whispered in the dark, "When he gets here, stand behind me." My beagle, Cinnamon, curled between my ankles, poked her head up, and cocked her ears.

The door flew open. Cinnamon scrambled under the bed. "Get up, Goddamit," Father roared at me. Britt pulled his knees up to his chest and curled into fetal position. Father grabbed him and pulled him out of bed. He thudded to the floor and then sprang suddenly to his feet. He glared his defiance at Father, balled his tiny fists. I was too scared to cry.

I pulled myself to my feet and stood next to Britt. He put his arm around my shoulder. I looked up at Father. His small, yellow teeth clenched the stem of his pipe so hard that it seemed to vibrate. His eyes were wild. His face was distorted, beet red. The sheer volume of his emotion hit me like a wave. It was overwhelming. I began trembling violently. My flannel pajamas were wet. I shivered. I had peed myself.

He raised his hand above his head. It moved as though encountering enormous resistance. I could tell he wanted to hit something. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep myself from crying. Tasting the blood, I wailed, "Stop it!"

It was as though he had only just noticed I was there, so focused had he been on the playing out of his own emotions. "Stop it. Stop it. Stop it," he yelled back at me, snapping his pipe in two. The word fuck twisted out of his mouth. We stood there looking up at him as he pulled himself together.

He spun around, turned off the lights, slammed the door shut, and stomped downstairs.

Sobbing in the dark, Britt still hugging me, I had an epiphany: it was him not us. We hadn't done anything wrong. It was like flipping a switch. Father never really reached me again.

Britt stripped off my pajamas, pulled out a tee shirt and some underwear, tossed them on my bed. I could see that there were tears rolling down his cheeks, but I knew that to acknowledge them would be to compromise his dignity. I put on the dry clothes and gave him a hug. He shrugged me off. "Do you want to see my booger collection?" he asked, after a few minutes. I was breathless with excitement. "It's right here, on the wall, just behind my bed." I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Harry Shoplas handed me a shiny euphonium when I was nine I think because I was husky and looked like I could manage carrying the thing back and forth to school. He quickly switched me to alto saxophone—my brother Britt played the baritone saxophone in Harry's super-cool dance band and I aspired to playing with him. I loved the smell of wet reeds, and the taste of cane, but I could never get the thing to play softly. Our fifth grade band concert closed with a song called Spanish Eyes which I recall because it was the last time I touched a saxophone.

My sixth grade teacher Norman Cummings allowed me one Halloween to organize, direct, and star in a live recreation over the Linfield Grade School public address system Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds. Rehearsing and performing it with my chums was my first exposure to live theater. I was euphoric; like a cat with his nip. A year later the talented, driven, somewhat emotionally unstable Wallace Tomchek at Pilgrim Park Junior High School painstakingly taught me Norman Dello Joio's lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind. I was a boy soprano with a quavering vibrato; my dead-straight bangs were the work of Mother and a pair of pruning shears. He introduced me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined. If the passion for drama came first, music followed quickly and came with greater ease. Combining the two—becoming an opera composer—seems now to have been inevitable.

The choral repertoire Tomchek taught us was sophisticated and eclectic—challenging Gesualdo madrigals, slick 'swing choir' arrangements in close nine part harmony, and a yearly fully-staged musical with orchestra which he designed, directed, rehearsed, and conducted. Since then I've attended professional productions of my operas that weren't as excellently produced. He cast me in supporting roles (I hadn't the looks or vocal power to carry a leading role), and gave me opportunities to direct. I recall with particular fondness directing Dan Quakkelaar and some other friends in Thornton Wilder's The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

Kay Hartzell conducted the choir at Brookfield Central High School. By then I was more interested in music than words. She allowed me to whip up some parts for small combos for the spring musicals. Kay was a gifted and caring choral director. When, twenty three years after graduating high school, I returned to hear Kay's successor Philip Olsen conduct We're All Here, a work commissioned by Phil and Milwaukee's fine professional contemporary music ensemble Present Music for chorus and mixed ensemble, I was astonished and moved to recognize in the chorus the faces of the children of the boys and girls with whom I attended High School.

I think I learned the most, though, from observing my brother Kevin first organize a professional theater troupe called Act One Productions, then direct and star in (Kevin as Pope Hadrian VII, left; with Britt, right, as His Grace Cardinal Archbishop of Pimlico) a production of the profoundly eccentric Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian VII to an audience of about fifty people huddled together in the middle of a 2600-seat theater. I was in awe of my brothers and the glorious popular failure that was their excellent production. Kevin's next production (highly successful) was Weill and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, in which I was delighted to be cast in a non-speaking walk-on role as one of Macheath's henchmen. Kevin was a fine director, already displaying as a teenager the talents that would later serve him so well in his thirty-year-plus career in orchestra management. I owe my introduction to Blitzstein, Britten, and to opera in general entirely to Kevin.

Although I did write the music and libretto for a thirty-minute operatic monodrama called Through the Glass (I staged it and conducted) which figured in Ned's accepting me as a student, and I had written a musical called Together in my teens, Shining Brow was my first professional opera, written when I was in my twenties for the Madison Opera. The libretto was by poet Paul Muldoon, with whom I went on to write three more operas. A big, traditional sprawling opera with a large cast, chorus and orchestra, Brow ran over 130 minutes and established my reputation as a theater composer.

I have only written operas whose characters are coming to grips with the same issues I am as a man at the time of the creation of the opera. I can't imagine working from any other place.

Vera of Las Vegas, which I identified as a 'nightmare cabaret opera in one act' was anything but cabaret—it was a searing, subversive examination of the American Dream's seamy underside. Commissioned by the University of Nevada Las Vegas for its faculty and students and running sixty minutes, with a libretto by Muldoon, it was at first intended to serve as the middle act of a trittico which would have begun with Paul's playlet Six Honest Serving Men and concluded with Grand Concourse, which dealt with the destruction of the Twin Towers. (Maybe someday we'll write them; I hope so.) Scored in two versions, big band with string quartet and jazz quartet, it is my most-revived opera. The Irish revival (a European premiere, by Dublin's Opera Theatre Company) and subsequent tour were some of the best serious fun I've had in the theater.

Having chosen issues common to myself and my characters, I then can (and must) respect them enough to let them choose the sort of music they are going to sing, not me. If my operas have been deemed eclectic it is only because the characters in them have been. First I merge (as an actor does in his role) with the character I am writing. Once I cannot separate the character from myself in my own mind, I am ready to hear the kind of music I must sing. The character's age, access to education, cultural reference points, etc. all function as parameters in my conscious mind; how the character feels emerges from the subconscious: I think, feel, and improvise the orchestral part, sing and play. The rest is instinct and dictation. Exactly to the extent to which the subconscious leads, the character comes across to me as psychologically and emotionally verifiable.

The third project with Muldoon was Bandanna, a two act re-telling of the Venetian story of the Moor set on the Texas-Mexican border during the summer of 1968. Commissioned by over a hundred university bands, it was scored for band, utilized a big cast and chorus, and has proven to be the most problematic of my operas when revivals are contemplated, since the fact that there are no strings in the pit can be a deal-breaker with opera companies large enough to mount it.

I have written, in this order, four major female roles: Mamah Cheney (an upper middle class Caucasian proto-feminist who left her husband to take up with Frank Lloyd Wright and was destroyed by it), Vera (an African American transvestite Lap Dancer from the red earth country of rural Virginia in the throes of personal reinvention—it was Vera's quest for personal reinvention, not his gender issues, with which I identified), Mona Morales (a lower class Caucasian woman married to a Latin man who, in a fit of jealousy, murders her), and Amelia (an upper middle class Caucasian who has lost both parents, is on the verge of childbirth, and moves from loss to recuperation).

The fourth opera with Paul was called The Antient Concert. I subtitled it 'a Dramatic Recital for Four Singers' and string quartet (or piano). The opera concerned itself with the 1904 Feis Ceoil competition recital on 27 August 1904 in the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, Ireland. Legend has it that John McCormack and James Joyce competed that night in the Tenor singing competition. There is no documentary evidence of this; however, Joyce did win the Bronze Medal that year (it is said that he did not agree with the stipulation that competitors demonstrate their musicianship by doing some sight-reading, and left the stage). Many believe that it was McCormack's 1903 win of the Gold Medal that launched his career.

I have identified more intensely with the four major female roles in my operas—especially while writing them—than any other characters I've created. I believe I can track the progression of my own mourning for my mother through my characterizations of these women.

For the purpose of telling a story about the collision of words, music, performance, sex, death, and nationalism, Paul and I chose five traditional ballads that Joyce and McCormack might have performed that evening, and used them as the musical and textual foundation upon which the piece was built. Consequently, throughout the recital, the characters shifted between 'performance mode' and the expression of their inner thoughts. Premiered at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, my favorite production of this work so far has been a site-specific staging that I did at the Century Association in New York. I would like to see it done in a good Irish pub anywhere in the world, with a beat-up upright piano and four singers in street clothes moving in and around the patrons as they enact the story.

My pre-compositional Process has never changed. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect what I intend to do to it musically, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils-say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to 'track' also get colors. Standing with a glass of wine and dreaming on the entire act is as close as I'm likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

A fully-realized trittico called New York Stories with libretti by me and the New York playwright Barbara Grecki followed. Three twenty-minute-long slices of life for a man and woman each, the individual titles were Broken Pieces (about a woman of a certain age who shares a piquant romantic moment with a tile man when he comes to fix her bathroom), Just for the Night (about a bag man who barges in, uninvited on his sister on Christmas Eve, and is turned away), and Cradle Song (a portrait of my wife and myself when our son was about six months old, a young couple trying to get their infant child down at the end of an evening on the town).

Once the entire opera is 'on the wall' I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the 'emotional nuclear reactors') are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose 'from left to right.' I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

In Amelia, a two act opera written with Gardner McFall and Stephen Wadsworth for Seattle Opera, a first time mother-to-be, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in Vietnam, must break free from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband and child in this original story unfolding over a 30-year period beginning in 1966. Amelia interweaves one woman's emotional journey, the American experience in Vietnam, and elements of the Daedalus and Icarus myth to explore man's fascination with flight and the dilemmas that arise when vehicles of flight are used for exploration, adventure, and war. The opera moves from loss to recuperation, paralysis to flight, as the protagonist, Amelia, ultimately embraces her life and the creative force of love and family.

I believe in workshops. But I also believe that if an opera fails, the ultimate blame is the composer's, so he, and not the stage director or librettist, should be the pilot.

***

'Most pieces,' Virgil Thomson once quipped, 'withdraw themselves.'

I've always believed that it is a composer's job to write music, not to waste energy thinking about whether that music will be of use after he is dead. Nevertheless, at a certain point, one has to acknowledge one's strengths and work from them.

After thirty years studying, attending, composing, and coaching opera, I have begun to finally realize that I am only barely beginning to understand what writing one entails. One successfully produced opera is a composer's visa at the border; two means you've bought property. I'm not certain how many operas one has to write before citizenship in the opera world is earned; I only know that every time I finish one I feel further away from understanding how to make one.

My vocal music in general and my operas in particular have engaged me the most intensely, made on the repertoire the closest thing to a lasting mark. Yes, 'all that we see or seem,' as Poe wrote, may be a 'dream within a dream,' but—given my choice—there's no place I'd rather spend my dreamtime than in a darkened theater, observing as the magnificent human and mechanical apparatus of an opera company in motion brings one of my operas to life.

Vienna Zentralfriedhof, February, 1990. I first saw The Third Man on 19 December 1978 at the Oriental Theater and, sitting in the dark as the final credits rolled, I made myself two promises: first, that I would visit Vienna, and two, that I would one day turn Graham Greene's novella into an opera. I wasn't Joseph Cotton and this certainly wasn't a film, but I was standing in the spot where Holly leaned against the cart and watched Anna walk away and knew it.

Harry's cosmopolitan, decadent; Holly's provincial, innocent. Holly's naïveté is suspect in itself. It makes his take on morality dangerously simplistic—he's blind to his own hypocrisy. After visiting the children's ward and seeing the horrible end result of Harry's criminal act, Holly's forced to kill him, forced to sacrifice personal loyalty to moral obligation. Although I loved Welles' portrayal of Lime (who wouldn't: the bad guy always gets the best lines—especially if he's a well-read scenery chewer who gets to supply his own!), I am hard-wired to identify with the character of Holly.

Greene ultimately accepted the satisfactoriness of Carol Reed's ending. Reed had crafted something deeper than Greene had intended, perhaps. Certainly, as many film critics have suggested, Anna might be understood to be a stand-in for Vienna, and Holly for the occupying American forces: one must recall that Holly's on his way to the airport and out of her life. Anna's supposed to betray her love (albeit for an evil man) for not just the fellow who killed him, but for a fellow who is about to skip town?

I had come from Venice to pay my respects. Treading the same streets trod once by the west's greatest composers hadn't had the effect on me that I'd thought it would.  I was prepared for the place's chiaroscuro of timelessness and decay. But I hadn't experienced the sort of ewigkeit in Vienna that I had hoped for and even expected—the eternal now; instead, I had felt smothered by an eternal and never-to-be-forgotten yesterday.

I spent the afternoon in the Musiker section. Beethoven's monument left me strangely unmoved; Brahms' impressed, but didn't warm me; I felt nothing as I admired Schoenberg's chilly modernist cube; it was Schubert's that squeezed my heart and wouldn't let go. Cold, unexpected tears. Slowly, as the afternoon wore on, everything became grayscale. Snow began to fall.

Broke, I could either copy music in a garret on the Margaretengürtel or on Saint Mark's Place—it made no difference. I'd been living abroad for nearly a year. It was time to go home.

13 February 1984. Except for the occasional note that I checked on the piano, the house was utterly silent. 'As if none of us had ever been here before,' I sang, under my breath, jotting the notes quickly. 'And are not now:' I continued, and heard the painfully simple single line ritornello in the piano that followed in my head as I wrote it. I had been composing for over six hours. I was on. I knew I would finish the piece in a few moments.

I heard my friend Karen Hale's voice in my mind's ear, singing, 'in this shallow spectacle,' and raced ahead of her to get the phrase down on paper so that the next could be heard clearly. 'This invisible activity,' she continued. Ah.

I heard the final piano ritornello that would follow in a couple of bars, ending the piece, skipped ahead, and wrote it down. 'this sense.' I heard one long note. A critical voice piped up, said, 'Nobody will understand the sense of sense if you set it, a one syllable word, on a long note.' The other voice asked, 'But isn't that the point?' I slashed the final double bars down, signed my name, set down the date, sat back, and sighed.

My 'farewell piece' to life in Philadelphia, Three Silent Things, a song cycle dedicated to my friends (Karen Hale, soprano, Michaela Paetsch, violin, Lisa Ponton, viola, Robert La Rue, violoncello, with whom in a few weeks I would premiere it in Curtis Hall) and housemates, was done. The last song, a setting of Wallace Stevens' A Clear Day and No Memories, had come in one stream over the course of the past seven hours.

I rose from the piano and poured myself another cup of coffee. Unnoticed, the sun had long since set. I looked out the tall windows of the third floor room facing out on Delancey Place and saw in the windowpane my reflection. Ned had told me a few days earlier that, with my beard gone and just the mustache remaining, I looked like Marc Blitzstein. I toasted myself: 'To New York,' I said quietly. 'And ... to getting on with it.' Clara mewed plaintively from her perch atop the piano. I rubbed her behind the ear. No bigger than my fist, she purred appreciatively and went back to sleep.

I slid out into the hallway as quietly as I could. The light had burnt out again. Pitch dark. Michaela began playing the mournful opening phrase of the chaconne of Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin. An audience of one, I listened through the door as she performed the entire piece for herself.

In the silence that followed, 'No thoughts of people now dead,' sang in my mind. I continued gingerly down the hall to the steps. 'Young and living in a live air.' Reaching the second floor landing I heard through Lisa's door Shostakovich's melancholy Sonata opus 147—his final musical thoughts. Time seemed to slow even more. I sat down on the step, placed my head on my arm, listened as the noble, eloquent adagio in memory of Beethoven unfolded, remembered that the distinguished violist Fyodor Druzhinin once said that Shostakovich—his health shattered—told  him that he could hardly write down the notes, his hand was shaking so badly.

Silence again. 'Today the mind is not part of the weather,' I heard, lontanamente. Dust suspended in midair seemed to cease its constant random motion. My diaphragm kicked; I had forgotten to breathe. As I gasped, from behind the next closed door Robert began to play the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. Palms to forehead, I entered into the moment, and could only think 'Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.'

The ones who are most lonely are those who cling to useless things and, knowing their uselessness, cannot let go.

I realized that I had hit bottom in 1998 and then, worse, was unable to touch the bottom at all, when I dreamed this conversation: 'You know, of course, that you are dead?' asked Charon. 'Oh?' I replied, 'do you recall how I came to die?' 'Yes. You hugged your soul to death. You put your forehead down against one arm and you thought of yourself until you suffocated.' 'Is this, then, my resurrection?' 'No. This is the coroner's report on causation.'

I told myself then that I would stop singing a duet with the past; I would now sing a solo with the present: I would try to regain my sense of self, talk to someone regularly about the depression, rededicate myself to composing.

Soon after Paul Sperry commissioned Songs of Madness and Sorrow, a real-estate transaction involving my landlord and the one across the street in which my downstairs neighbors and I were pawns landed me in a new place on 98^th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. The apartment was dark (the windows, all heavily-barred, looked out at a three-story-high wall of schist), noisy (it was off the lobby and next to the elevator), and smelly (the exhaust from the laundry room below vented just outside my window). But it was mine.

I am aware of how many friends noted my distress and helped me to climb back to my feet. Don Oliver, a former pupil, ran a Broadway copying house called Chelsea Music; he heard I needed work and was kind enough to find a place for me at one of his desks.  The Bandanna commission enabled me to wean myself once more from copying and proofreading. I set to composing it with ferocity. Commissions from old and new friends came over the transom and I sank my teeth into every one of them like a starving animal. Over the course of a year or so, I regained financial and professional viability. As projects came in, were completed, and their premieres happened, the natural rhythm of a working composer's life cycle began to reassert itself. Things were looking up. I was no longer baling with both hands; my craft was seaworthy.

***

Between 1998 and 2001, I composed a fanfare for the Madison Symphony, several band pieces for Michael Haithcock and the Baylor University Winds, a Third Symphony for the Waukesha Symphony, an overture called Much Ado for the Curtis Institute's 75^th Anniversary, an hour long cantata for chamber orchestra, children's voices, and tenor called Light Fantastic for the Ohio Opera Theater, a Serenade for the Oakwood Chamber Players, Phantoms of Myself, a song cycle for Ashley Putnam, an Oboe Concerto for Linda Donahue and the Waukesha Symphony, an overture called Suddenly for the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, and Larkin Songs, a song cycle for Paul Kreider commissioned by the University of Nevada Las Vegas; the Knoxville Symphony commissioned Advance, the New Mexico Symphony and the Buffalo Philharmonic commissioned Seven Last Words, a left concerto for Gary Graffman, and a four movement suite celebrating the 100^th Anniversary of Yaddo called Angels was premiered by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

I began teaching again (but only as a visiting artist) with stints at Princeton, Baylor University, Miami University in Ohio, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I began accepting conducting invitations: the Madison Symphony, the cast recording of Bandanna, Ohio Opera Theater. I also began seriously collaborating as a pianist again, with Ashley, Paul Sperry, and other singers, and cut my first disc as a pianist, accompanying Paul Kreider in an all-Hagen recital. Returning to serious, disciplined practice for the first time in years helped to restore my confidence as a pianist in particular, as a musician in general.

***

I had decided that it was for other people to have children and fulfilling personal lives; I would continue on as I had now proven to my satisfaction that I could, and successfully so, composing, conducting, playing the piano, entirely focused on work. Excellent projects were in the offing. One afternoon, during jury duty-a nasty capital crime-my appendix flared. It was the first sign that, although I had retaken control of my life, I wasn't living a healthy one.

During a telephone conversation one day with a friend I'd known for years I began to realize that my proud 'solo with the present' was a pathetic, selfish, and lonely thing. I appreciated this friend's excellence the way that one acknowledges the sun as a crucial natural resource. She had observed from a distance the sad disarray of my personal affairs and the effect that it had had on me. An accomplished artist herself, she did not judge me, seemed to accept me as I was, offered wise counsel, understood more about me than I did, and respected me enough not to try to fix me. The simple joy I derived from our friendship inspired a reawakening to the art of direct, caring conversation. Talking to her was-and has remained-like standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry on a cold winter morning, leaning into the wind, looking towards Manhattan as it nears, holding in one's bare hands a freshly-baked, warm loaf of bread; wholesome, nourishing, healthy, and good.

A few months later, during another conversation, she revealed an injustice that she had just endured and I suddenly-and completely unexpectedly-felt a violent wave of protectiveness surge through me that I had never, ever felt before. I recognize it now as a physical symptom of my rejection of Sartre's nausée, the reawakening of my soul to the epistemic possibility of actual happiness, the crushing out of 'selves' into one 'self.'

I was astonished when it became clear to me that I had fallen in love with my wife, the finest person I have ever known. There was no haste in our courtship, because we felt as though there was all the time in the world. We dated for a year (traditionally and respectfully); then we became engaged for another year; finally, we lived together for a year before marrying. My wife led me back to being alive, and chained the Black Dog.

Returning to Bellagio after a decade for a second residency at the Villa Serbelloni, it was as though everything I recalled in black and white and from a distance was now close up and in color. This transformation has extended to every facet of my life, including my music.

***

In 2001 a pack of madmen brought the Towers down. Composer and pianist Craig Urquhart reminded me of what Bernstein had written, 'this will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.' This would be my response, between 2001 and 2006: a requiem for AIDS victims called We're All Here (chorus and mixed ensemble); a Chamber Symphony for the Albany Symphony; a brawny, brainy set of piano variations for the extraordinary Ralph Berkowitz; a second flute sonata; a skit for the National Symphony called Susurrus; a sprawling anti-war cycle for baritone and string quartet on Auden poems for Paul Kreider and the Amernet String Quartet; a one act opera (written as part of a second stint on the faculty of the Princeton Atelier) called The Antient Concert with a libretto by Muldoon; a double concerto for Flute and Cello for Jeffrey Khaner, Sara Sant'Ambrogio, and the Albany Symphony; a song cycle for treble chorus and string quartet called Flight Music, based on Amelia Earhart's last flight, and written for Present Music and the Milwaukee Choral Artists; Sappho Songs, for two female voices and cello; and the first of a trilogy of one act operas about life in New York called New York Stories.

Between 2006-2008, I completed Amelia, wrote the second and third acts of New York Stories, Symphony No. 4 for chorus and orchestra for the Albany Symphony, a triple concerto for the Amelia Piano Trio and a consortium of youth orchestras, a double concerto for Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson to play with the Sacramento and Vermont orchestras, two more piano trios, another fanfare for brass, a suite for piano for the Van Cliburn competition, various small choral works, and the first sketches of my eighth opera, Little Nemo in Slumberland, for the Sarasota Opera.

***

From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to have a child. We emerged from the cave on 98^th Street after six years and moved into a cheerful, sprawling Pre-war apartment overlooking Broadway in Hamilton Heights. The place is large enough to raise a family, bright enough to feel the heat of the sun rising as I play in the music room with my son every morning, dedicated to the proposition that these moments of bliss can and should be sustained, blown on like a taper, encouraged, cherished. I am not accustomed to remaining in the moment, but I am trying to learn.

Because of these moments I have come to understand Roethke's poetry more deeply, and why it has always meant so much to me: there was a man who understood depression who undertook the task of braiding together his past and present lives in an effort to bridge the distance between a child's consciousness and the mysteries of adulthood. As I sit drinking my coffee and watching my son (now 22 months old) play with his toy bus, I savor the sound of his voice as he sings. He has an excellent sense of pitch, and occasionally goes to the piano to depress a key. At that moment he invariably looks to me, expecting me to match the pitch, which I do. Delighted, he goes back to his toys, and back to his own singing. He doesn't just repeat the songs he has been taught; he improvises upon them.

Recently a recording of my piano trios was released. The first two were written during the eighties; the second pair during the past several years. He becomes clearly agitated when one of the first two are played, points to the speakers, shakes his head 'no-no-no,' until I switch to one of the second pair. All were written by the same composer, but a different man. One is not his father; the other is. How can he tell the difference?

I retain a vivid memory of being nine, bundled up against the winter cold on the school bus, my warm breath as I quietly sang, steaming up the window. I sang because it made me feel better. It still does. At what exact moment did the songs I sang become my own?

I think of the terracotta sculpture of me for which I recall sitting for my mother during the previous summer, observing and learning how to be as my form slowly took shape beneath her expressive hands, listening to the shrill metallic burr of the dog-day cicadas mingling with the purling of Paganini Violin Concertos as she worked. I only intuitively understood the lessons she was teaching me as a child; it wasn't until my wife helped me rediscover them that I have begun to understand them. Certainly, my son's earliest memories will be of the sound of his mother's beautiful voice, singing to him. Possibly they may also include playing with his toys beneath the piano in our music room, the susurrus of rainy-day traffic five floors below on Broadway accompanying the strains of Amelia, emerging warmly from the piano above him as I composed.

My mother sculpted my image because she needed a subject, she loved me, and because I was available. I have written an opera for my son because I needed a subject, I love him, and because he and his mother have enabled me to finally find my way home.

I am happy.

I now sing a duet with the future: my son will be seated next to me on Amelia's opening night; my wife, talented composer, visual artist, vocalist, educator, and mother, will be seated on his other side. I am doing the best, most grown-up work I have ever done. I have hopes for it. My operas have always been about what concerns me in life. Amelia is no different: the eponymous character, a person who has lost her most beloveds, dreams herself back to health, with the help of her family (quick and not), and her imagination (Icarus, Daedalus), and gives birth for the first time, embraces life in all its glory. That is Amelia's story and it is mine. I, like Amelia, had to learn how to be.

Most days, after playing together for an hour or so, changing, and having breakfast, my boy and I walk together hand in hand to the park. There is a sandbox there in which he delights in scooping up fistfuls of sand, laughing as he watches the grains pour back to the ground through his fingers, and out of his grasp, like receding memories, or half-forgotten tunes. I find not the sifting moving, but his laughter as he watches it happen.

'I was lost,' sang Captain Vere in Billy Budd, 'on the infinite sea, but I've sighted a sail in the storm, the far-shining sail, and I'm content. I've seen where she's bound for. There's a land where she'll anchor forever.' These words and the music to which they are married first brought me to tears as a young child. I thought of them this morning, standing to the side in the park as my boy collected interesting stones for me, just as at his age I collected them for my mother, stacked them on the railing next to me, and beaming as I cooed over each.

My little far-shining sail.

New York

I moved to New York in September of 1984, took a room in an apartment at 467 Central Park West being sublet by the painter Charlotte Hastings on the advice of composer Rick Baitz. We had met at Yaddo earlier that summer, along with novelists Laura Furman and Lynn Freed and poet Gardner McFall, all of whom-along with essayist Nora Sayre until her death-have remained my lifelong friends.

I was an industrious diarist during the eighties, filling thousands of pages in a tiny cramped hand with descriptions of meals with all sorts of interesting and famous people from the worlds of art, music, and literature, accounts of the consumption of an enormous amount of culture: theater, concerts, and the ballet. There are long transcriptions of heart-to-heart talks with colleagues about art. Inspired by Balzac's novels (which I worshipped), I suppose I wanted to portray myself as the ultimate New Yorker: creative, urbane, witty, caustic, immensely well-informed, successful, and attractive.

I had thought to use those diaries as the basis for a description of 'my New York' during the eighties, but in flipping through them I find that the experiences of the nineties have made me disinterested in regurgitating those days in any detail: people I loved dearly and haven't thought about in decades are described in vivid detail, situations best forgotten are revisited, some of the most vicious things that people who are these many years later my friends told me about myself are carefully preserved. I don't view the New York I knew then as some sort of Sodom to which I must not look back. Rather, it served more as an island in the River Acheron.

Six years after throwing up in the bathroom at Juilliard and being shooed back by Diamond, Persichetti, Carter, and Babbit to Wisconsin with my tail between my legs, I had returned and entered graduate school there as one of David's students. My contemporaries were a talented bunch: Richard Danielpour, Lowell Liebermann, Behzad Ranjbaran, Kenneth Fuchs, and Laura Karpman, to name a few. During the three years I attended classes there, I never once set foot in the building to socialize. I didn't like the claustrophobic physical layout of the place itself. I did not take pleasure or satisfaction in being a Juilliard student, though I did learn an enormous amount. While I was a Juilliard student I so kept my distance from others that most people thought that I still lived in Philadelphia.

I had in fact become a dedicated, proud New Yorker.

My most treasured New York activity: running around my adored Central Park Reservoir, the pleasing exactitude and physical satisfaction of accomplishing 3.2 miles each day, the periodic small-talk with Albert Arroyo, the 'Mayor of Central Park,' while stretching, the ritual of saying a little prayer while rounding the northeast corner followed by the perennial exhilaration of greeting Gotham by looking south over my left shoulder towards Midtown over the glittering water and chuffing loudly, season in and out, as above the trees sough and whisper.

I remember the familiar rhythm of the concert season itself, rides on the Staten Island Ferry every few weeks just to admire the skyline from the harbor, hours spent studying in the Hungarian Pastry Shop and, across the street, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine; concerts attended grudgingly that turned out to be life-changing, the satisfaction of reading the Sunday Times on Saturday night, the smearing of time that would occur when walking down streets that I had not visited in several years, only to see soaring new buildings already showing signs of weathering where once a favorite mom-and-pop diner once stood. I remember the African American preacher who spent every day walking up and down Broadway shouting 'Hosanna' to passersby, having achieved a delirious, semi-ecstatic state through exhaustion and hyper-ventilation; the fellow who for years entered subway cars on the Seventh Avenue Local wearing a colander on his head who would wave a broken saxophone in front of him and announce 'I am the saxophone player from outer space. Money makes me go away!' The stress and challenge of substituting as a pianist in the pits of Broadway shows, the snarky pleasures of playing in piano bars, or the long hours spent working as a music copyist. The walks from the Bronx to the Battery down Broadway, just because I had the time and loved the City. And work, constant, daily, reassuring, inspiring, and exciting, because it was new, and because it was in New York.

Between 1984 and 1990, I composed my First Symphony for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a birthday tribute to Leonard Bernstein called Grand Line for the Denver Chamber Orchestra, a ten minute skit called Heliotrope, commissioned by ASCAP to celebrate its 75^th Anniversary and premièred by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and my Second Symphony, which was premiered in individual movements at first, by the Saint Louis Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony, and the Oakland East Bay Orchestra. I wrote a long ballet for the Juilliard Dance Division, commissioned by Muriel Topaz, Jacob Druckman's wife, called Interior. Chamber works included my first two piano trios, my first string quartet, first flute sonata, flute quintet, harp trio, and a trio called Jot! for clarinet, marimba and piano for the New York Youth Symphony; solo works for violin, viola, cello, and piano; a Walt Whitman Requiem for chorus and string orchestra, and a dozen or so choral works for various churches.

Cassis

During the fall of 1989 I moved to France. At first I lived at the Camargo Foundation, in Cassis, having sublet my apartment on Saint Mark's Place to one of my students, and cavalierly sprung at the last moment on the chair of the music department at Bard College, where for five years I had been teaching part time, the news that I wasn't coming back in the autumn. 'How long will you be gone?' she asked. 'Forever,' I vowed, savoring the idea. 'Well, let's take it one semester at a time,' she answered. 'I'll find someone to take your place. Just let me know in a few months whether you'll be back.'

During those years I kept a stopwatch and set it each morning to tick off eight hours. Every day I either composed, copied parts, or played the piano until the time had run out. If I stopped to take a walk or go to the bathroom, or eat, I'd halt the countdown. The idea was that, no matter what, each day shall have included eight hours of work.

The Camargo Foundation's composer studio then had for some reason the complete Noel Coward vocal scores, as well as nearly the entire major operatic canon, including Strauss. I had the oddly pleasurable experience of reading through every one of Coward's revues and operettas, from London Calling to Cowardly Custard. If it is true that he read not a note of music, he either had an incredible (unnamed) arranger or a suavity at the keyboard which makes his piano parts play the way butterscotch tastes: if ever there is a chord where an extra finger is likely to fall on an extra chord tone by accident, more like as not, it will be thrown into the chord, the way that a pianist might indulge at the end of a long evening spent covering standards in flattening his hands and 'filling things out.'

It was by reading through Richard Strauss operas at the piano during that time that I learned that they were in fact 'arrangements,' so difficult is it to disentangle the chords running through them from the web of exquisite counterpoint that the orchestra so deliciously churns out, page after page. Otto Singer's 'arrangement' of Der Rosenkavalier, for example, made me develop the score-faking chops that admiration, fear and respect for my score reading teachers never allowed me as a student to develop. After awhile, my hands learned that every key has a geography to it on the keyboard, that, more often than not, once one really internalizes the fustian weave of counterpoint in Strauss vocal scores, they are actually pretty easy to 'put over.'

Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe all were devoured during my first few months in France. I'd make a huge salad in the morning with greens scrounged from the farmer's market - all slightly over; the vendors would give them to me for free at the end of the day. I was lucky; I read all three authors before it was too late. I'd then end each day by writing in my journal for an hour or so. A few years ago, I slogged through that river of words. It now strikes me as the worst sort of pabulum. Nothing I wrote then interests me now.

I returned to New York briefly during this period to attend the Brooklyn Philharmonic's premiere of Heliotrope in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. Before the concert I had a conversation with Lukas Foss, who was conducting my piece. He told me that he understood why I had written it, but that few colleagues would. 'You've written music about music,' he said. 'People rarely understand these sorts of pieces or give them much credit.' He was proud of me for having left New York and counseled me to return to Europe as soon as possible. 'You have plenty of time to work on your career,' he said. 'Read, fall in love, practice, and learn the repertoire.'

After Camargo, I lived off of the commission fees that had come when I completed and submitted the works composed over the previous six months. I worked for cash as a busboy in a seafood restaurant in the evenings, ate dinner for free with the owner and his staff. Most days I spread the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde side by side on a table at a library to work on my French. I'd walk for several hours, and then settle in each afternoon at my regular table at a waterfront café in Marseilles. I undertook the reading of my mother's nicotine-stained 1934 Random House edition of  À la recherche du temps perdu, comparing it to the French language edition I'd just purchased, as slowly the coolly amused waitress dropped ripped receipts, lifted franc notes from the little pile in front of me, stacked saucers, and kept the coffee coming.

I had only the clothes in my backpack. I arrived in Venice for what I thought would be a day trip; I ended up living there for months. I thought I'd never leave. On a lark, I decided to hop a train to Vienna. The actuality of being rootless finally caught up with me while I was walking along the Margaretengurtel: I hadn't composed in months, and there was nowhere I had to be. No matter how many epiphanies I chronicled in my journal, I was basically just a bum.

A treasured former pupil has for several years kept an apartment in Beijing; his beloved lives in Berlin; he returns to the States for business and family visits. We have never discussed what it feels like to be an expat. I find that I am no longer curious. 'An artist,' a close friend counseled back in the eighties, 'is an outsider to begin with. The idea that you can be an expat nowadays is sentimental and misguided.' The night before my conversation with Lukas, I met with Frances Richard. 'You just want to think of yourself as an expat,' she said, entirely sure as always that she had my number. 'You don't actually want to have to live there.'  She was wrong. I wanted to live somewhere; I just wasn't sure where anymore.

Venice

Standing in the Piazza San Marco very early in the morning on a December day in 1989, bathed in that insalubrious, marrow-chilling, surgically gray mist that seems to simultaneously rise from and fall into the canals, I thought about a morning a few months earlier back in Manhattan when I'd risen and descended to the Korean deli in my bathrobe carrying a coffee mug in order to buy a Times and a scone, only to be tackled by a handsome young coked-out Captain America-type arbitrageur looking behind him waving a hundred dollar bill at his aggravated cabdriver and thanked God I was here, here instead on this island where I thought I'd live forever.

I'd arrived at the Santa Lucia Station on the first train of the day from Paris, having spent the past few months in Cassis, first at the Camargo Foundation, and then on my own when the fellowship ran out, busing tables for meals and living cheaply in a room above a restaurant on the harbor. The carabinieris goose-stepped ceremonially up to the flagpole in front of the basilica and raised Il Tricolore; there were no lights on in Caffé Florian, which wouldn't open for hours; a pale, pretty woman in a red dress only partly concealed beneath a royal blue pea coat sped with her head down against the rain past the Campanile towards the aquamarine sea.

The moon burnt like a ghost light over the silent city; the rising sun looked like a blood clot suspended in olive oil beside the Chiesa di San Giorgio. I was twenty-eight, and entirely susceptible to what Mann called Venice's "somniferous eroticism." It seemed to my overheated imagination then to have become over the centuries solipsistic by design, to not exist except as a manifestation of what I (and legions of tourists, though I was determined to stay) imagined it to be, an empty stage in a closed theater; dead, but fecund because of all the things that had died there.

I've since returned many times to the Bride of the Sea, my favorite city on the planet, the Island of No Regret, La Serenissima. I know that my memories are not unique. Like countless others, I've sobbed in La Fenice, filled journals with true lies about myself, returned faithfully to my favorite pensione and observed the innkeeper's children growing up, welcomed the New Year by drinking too much champagne in Harry's, fallen asleep in churches after dancing all night during Carnival, performed there over the decades the real-life, unmasked roles of innamorato, pedrolino and vecchio, read Ruskin while tracing his steps, shrugged when I didn't get it at the Biennale, experienced Stendhal's syndrome when I thought that I did, spontaneously bought flowers for a mother with her little boy on the Fondamente Nuove one sunny summer Sunday morning, then spent the rest of the day with them in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, surprised myself there by discovering tears on my cheeks while standing at the foot of the grave of Stravinsky. I've walked Lorenzetti's walks, and missed everything because I was reading about it in his book; I've spent a hundred days happily losing myself and being lost, lost and not caring; avoided the old tourist traps, fallen into new ones; been given horns.

Venice has given me one memory that is unique and entirely my own, though: laughing in a stiff wind and the crisp Adriatic rain on the Zattere al Gesuiti, I experienced on an autumn afternoon in 2004 Venice's magical 'think-by-feeling-what-is-there-to-know' ability to transmute Life into Art in the arms of my wife, the love of my life.

New York

Psychologically, between September of 1991 and September of 1998, I experienced a gradually deepening depression that I can only compare to Daniel Quinn's version of the 'boiling frog' story: 'If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.'

Emotionally, the period was a lot like witnessing the sun rise very slowly over a field of icebergs into which one has inadvertently sailed during the night.

Nevertheless, during that period I composed three operas in collaboration with Paul Muldoon: Shining Brow for the Madison Opera, Vera of Las Vegas for the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Bandanna, for a consortium of over a hundred college bands. For orchestra, I wrote Philharmonia for the New York Philharmonic to commemorate their 150^th anniversary, Fire Music for the Long Beach Symphony (for which I also served as composer-in-residence), Built Up Dark for the Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, and my Third Symphony, for the Waukesha (Wisconsin) Symphony Orchestra. For soloists with orchestra, I completed a Concerto for Horn for Soren Hermannson and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, a concerto for Flugelhorn for the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, and a Cello Concerto for longtime friend Robert La Rue and the American Symphony Orchestra. For orchestra with voices, I wrote Joyful Music and Taliesin, two large-scale works for the Madison Symphony and Chorus, and Stewards of Your Bounty for the Moravian Music Festival Chorus and Orchestra. I penned a surprising amount of vocal music: Dear Youth, a song cycle for soprano, flute and piano, for the Sonus Trio of Baltimore; Lost in Translation, for baritone, oboe, cello, and harpsichord, for Frederick Hammond, the prominent harpsichordist and scholar; a large-scale song cycle based on Muldoon texts called The Waking Father for the Kings Singers; and Merrill Songs, commissioned by William Weaver in memory of James Merrill. Instrumental chamber works included two large works for brass quintet: Everything Must Go! for the brass quintet of the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Concerto for Brass Quintet, commissioned by the University of Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Brass Quintet to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the School of Music; An Overture to Vera for large mixed ensemble for Present Music, in Milwaukee; and the Duo for Violin and Cello. For chorus, I created an album-length suite of Christmas music arrangements, as well as a handful of smaller commissions from large churches around the country for single anthems.

Paragraphs like the previous one are not very interesting to read. I rang those changes just now because-whatever enduring value those pieces may or may not have as works of Art-they saved my life. Well-not the pieces themselves, perhaps, but the process of accepting the commissions, composing them, working with the performers, hearing them premièred, seeing them through publication with their various publishers (at that time, E.C. Schirmer and Carl Fischer), and then moving on to the next one.

During this time I also taught composition and theory for two days each week at Bard College, served several semesters as a sabbatical replacement at the City College of New York for David Del Tredici, taught for several years on the Literature and Materials faculty of the Curtis Institute (teaching composition to non-composers, though I don't know why, except that I was asked and said yes), and for a semester as composer in residence for the Princeton University Atelier, at the invitation of my friend Muldoon and the writer Toni Morrison.

What was the problem?

Depression. Norman was taken by it. Ned says that he struggles with it. The untreated, destructive effect it had on my father destroyed my parents' marriage. After my mother died, he then lost his relationship with his sons to it. My brother Britt succumbed to it; my brother Kevin struggles with it every day. So do I.

I find depression embarrassing to discuss. I am not talking about feeling blue, or even very sad. I am describing a state in which it can be impossible to feel, to sleep, to even function as a person. Being that depressed is not a sign of personal weakness; one cannot simply 'cowboy up' and get on with things-though many people, including myself, do think that that is exactly what they are doing when they don't reveal to anyone else how severe their symptoms really are. Depression is not self-indulgent. Depression is not a competition. Depression is the Black Dog.

Most of the nineties-even episodes that should have been idyllic, like a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, or working sojourns at Yaddo-were marked by an inability to take pleasure in things, along with every other typical symptoms of depression. If my life was a sinking ship (and I believed that it was) and I was its captain, then, by God, I was going to go down doing my job, composing as prolifically as I could, losing myself in my work.

In 1997, overruling his faculty's recommendation, the president of Bard College denied me tenure; I resigned rather than teach out the rest of my contract. In retrospect, doing so was probably one of the wisest decisions I ever made. I had long outgrown and lost interest in the role in which I had been cast. At the time, however, it felt like a defeat. Having joined the faculty disinterested in Academia and things like tenure, I had allowed myself to be seduced by the steady money and the Idea of tenure into wanting it.

A few days later, Britt telephoned-incoherent for the most part, but clearing for enough brief intervals to tell me that he was sorry that I was going to burn in hell, that he forgave me for having 'defiled' our mother's privacy by having set some of her words to music after she died a few years earlier, and for a host of other things, some imaginable, others not. I couldn't tell what drugs were making him high, only that he was flying and (he said) in an enormous amount of physical and mental pain. 'If I check into the hospital, with my immune system compromised the way that it is, I know I'll catch pneumonia and die ... I'm throwing everything away, cleaning my room here at the Hilton so that nobody will have to come and take care of things ... then I'll get a taxi, go to the hospital, and die.' This he did.

'The rewards,' as Aaron Copland said of being a composer, 'are likely to be small from a practical point of view. No money in the bank. No good reviews in the paper the next day. You really have to be strong. By that I mean in the sense that you must be sure that what you are doing is absolutely what you mean to do.... Composing is a lonely occupation, and perhaps there is some advantage in the fact that many composers must add other more social activities to their schedules in order to make a living.'

Although I kept composing (because composers are born, not made, and I really had no choice in the matter), the ability to dream up new projects-key to the freelance composer's ability to survive-had withered away. For the first time in ten years, I wasn't socializing, teaching, listening to music, or attending concerts-all my usual ways of interacting with the world. I had no commissions to fulfill and none in the offing, no money, no teaching jobs, no piano gigs, and a welter of debts that were not my own, but for which I was nevertheless legally responsible.

I was a free man, yes-an individual, forced to decide for myself what is right, not a victim. I possessed the skills to seize emotions and shape them into meaningful musical forms-but to what end? I have always thought, as Roethke said, 'by feeling. What was there to know?' That I could not feel was what frightened me, because while creating music was a confirmation of life, I was no longer feeling anything doing it. Exactly ten years after graduating from Juilliard, I was in hot water, indeed-not in a tranquil stupor, but rather an emotionally paralyzed one.

I got a job at Starbucks and was grateful (at least I was compelled to interact with my coffee comrades) for it.

The great tenor and teacher Paul Sperry wanted to get together to read through the pile of songs that had gathered on his piano-submissions from composers young and old who were either looking for him to premiere them, commission them, or get them out to his talented students. 'I can't,' I said, 'I have to go to work.' 'What are you doing these days?' he asked. When I told him, he was shocked. 'That won't do,' he said. 'I'll commission something. Come on over and we'll discuss it.'

Paul wrote me a check on the spot (in much the same elegant manner that Bill Weaver, after a delicious dinner at his place in the Village, once asked me to write on a piece of paper what I would like to compose Merrill Songs and simply wrote me a check for double the amount and slid it back across the table) and I wrote for him Songs of Madness and Sorrow. I shall be forever grateful to him for the lifeline that he threw me at a time when I was going slowly under while baling with both hands, no shore in sight.

I remember my older brother now not as he saw himself or as he sought to be perceived by his brothers or friends but as our mother saw him: nine years old, tender-hearted, small fists stubbornly balled at some injustice, fearsomely witty, intelligent, profoundly able to give love and even more hungry to receive it, back turned to the dark and for some unknown reason already the proud owner of a bruised heart. He was a willowy boy with long beautiful eyelashes and a smile that began tentative and blossomed almost with relief. When contemplating mischief, that smile was an invitation to disaster. God he could be funny.

Mother loved him best because he needed it the most. Britt, our Father's image, worshipped her. Father loved Britt as much as he loved himself; he hated him the same way. The violent fights between Britt and Father were hair-raising.  Britt was little; Father was big. The rest was, while not inevitable I suppose, classic. Mother understood her son as completely as she understood her husband. But she couldn't come between them, and she couldn't be there all the time, or for the rest of his life. And then she was gone.

The lovely young woman who taught Art at Linfield Grade School told Britt when he was ten that he had pretty eyelashes. He came home that day and cut them off. Why? Sometimes, when my son, less than two years old, is testing boundaries, he'll look up at me with an exact replica of Britt's smile and I feel as though my heart could break with love and fear and all the rest.

We had a beagle who during the coldest winter days preferred to relieve herself in the basement next to the furnace where it was warm rather than outside in the snow. During the week, while Father was in Chicago, these little accomplishments accumulated, since nobody went down there anyway and they were easier to clean up once they had dried. Friday afternoon after school and before Father's arrival, Britt was charged with the cleanup. He forgot. Came the Three Taps of Death (father's pipe against his metal ashtray) and the Summons. We were lined up next to the furnace and quizzed. My God he was furious, his pipe fairly vibrating between his small, yellowed, clenched teeth: 'What do you think the neighbors think when they look in the windows and they see the floor covered with shit?' he hissed. The terrified silence was broken by Britt's tiny voice, sincerely looking for the bright side: 'Well, at least they know we didn't do it!' Britt's relationship with Father—and Life—can be summed up in the emotions that filled the ensuing seconds, as Father first raised his hand to strike Britt and then let it fall back to his side as he was compelled to acknowledge the painful absurdity of the situation.

During my first years in New York he wired me hundreds of dollars to help me get by. So did Father. His letters were gorgeous and sad, and his voice in them echoed his favorite authors—Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. He never got past them. There are good people in the world I have never met who loved him and understood him, yet he lived in the same city as Kevin for three years before meeting him for dinner. I loved him so.

He reached out for help in various directions—to the Masons, to the Mormons, to unworthy associates. After awhile he stopped writing, but we spoke occasionally on the phone. The last few conversations he rambled incoherently. And then he was gone.

By the age of forty, when the coroner examined him, he had what she described as 'the largest liver she had ever seen,' that he had cirrhosis, of course, but also all three strains of hepatitis, was morbidly obese, and that the insides of his lungs—he was, like mother, a chain smoker—were in some places black. 'This was slow suicide, and it took him years,' she said.

According to his diary, most of which he destroyed, he spent his last hours doing his laundry so that he would leave a good impression.

In 1994 I had just written a song cycle for a young male soprano named Charles Maxwell, based on James Merrill's poetry and commissioned in Merrill's memory by Umberto Eco's translator William Weaver called Merrill Songs, and had fallen in love with not just the actual sound of this young man's extraordinary falsetto, but the idea of a career spent singing not in one's 'natural' octave but an octave higher, in the female range. The Danny Kaye Playhouse in New York City, where together we premiered the cycle, is a pretty intimate place; one can sense the audience's mood quickly and clearly.

The moment Charles began to sing I felt the audience's cool, disapproving discomfort; after a few measures, I felt it begin to warm up a little bit into curiosity; by the end of the first song, Charles' artistry had won them over and he had their attention and a good deal of their empathy and compassion. How hard he had to work to simply be on an even footing with other singers, I thought, as we began the second song. It wasn't until the third song that I began to notice certain audience members sitting forward in their seats because their disbelief had been suspended and they had begun giving themselves over to the deeper truths Charles was addressing as an artist. By the time he launched into Merrill's harrowing account of illness and physical decay, I had the impression that people were engrossed, and that the performance would be an artistic and audience success. When the audience rose to give us a standing ovation at the end I felt gratification as a composer, of course, but far greater fulfillment as a musician living an examined life, having observed firsthand for the first time what I imagine male sopranos go through nearly every time they perform.

***

When Paul Kreider at the University of Nevada Las Vegas proposed that I write an opera for their faculty and students, the experience with Charles was still fresh in my mind. Vegas, built of sand, surrounded by sand, is as false and as true as anywhere—certainly, a staging ground for the Art is Life conundrum. I thought it might serve excellently as the setting for an opera. I tapped Paul Muldoon, with whom I had just written a very different sort of opera, Shining Brow, to serve as co-conspirator and collaborator.

The eponymous role of Vera Allemande ('true song'), an African-American transvestite lap dancer from Las Vegas, was my idea. I knew that I needed, at the center of any examination of true lies, a character that embodied the themes of our opera, and a voice type that did the same. Vera is a female impersonator in the story; but, just as a contemporary male soprano (as opposed to a castrato) is not trying to sound like a woman but rather to create an idealized sound in the female vocal register, Vera dressed as a woman to reveal the deeper truth of her nature through artifice. 'Truth,' Vera sang during her eleventh-hour torch song, 'is a business that needs illusion, some sleight of hand if it's not going to fold or belly up.'

What always makes working with Paul such a pleasure is the extent to which he understands the possibilities for pivoting suddenly from the business at hand into a galaxy of allusions and seeming non-sequiturs and back again; it enables him to first disram, then cut to the point as quickly and in as deadly a fashion as, a misericordie ('mercy')—what knights in the High Middle Ages called a stiletto. One might say the 'subject' of the opera we ginned up called Vera of Las Vegas is the relationship between appearance and reality. What kept Paul on track, he says, during the creation of Taco and Dumdum (both IRA volunteers), was 'the realization that the nightmarish nature of the piece is grounded in, true to, Taco and Dumdum's nightmarish experiences in Northern Ireland, where appearance and reality are extremely difficult to establish, where an expert on the tragedies of Euripides may turn out to be a trigger-puller.'

What kept me on track, riding with Paul on this runaway train? Every note of the effusively eclectic score derives from a single D-A-B-flat (B is a traditional way of expressing the letter 'H' in music; I flatted the B because I liked the sound) motive grafted to a rhythmic cell. The melodic motive spells out the initials of my name-proof of how intimately I identify with the ideas I chose to manipulate; the rhythmic cell sounded like the way these words read: 'ba-dum-BAH.' This was my sestina, and I wrung from it exactly as many changes as Paul did from his, by agreement and design.

About the libretto Paul said, 'I'm thinking of the sestina, the form that rings the changes on the same six end-words in each of its six-line stanzas. This time, the changes were rung on a great thirty-line stanza that, despite its affinities with a juggernaut, allowed me to jitterbug." And dance we did, telling a fantastical story dreamed up together in his office at Princeton, me scrunched up in an easy chair with a pad of paper and an architectural plan of six sections of ten minutes' duration each, and another pad with things I wanted Paul to address in the libretto and I in the music scrawled in short, cryptic notes, Paul with his feet up at his desk, periodically rising to walk around the room while talking, pulling books off the shelves and fondling the spines, tucking them back in.

Some of the thoughts I jotted include: 'Kundera wrote of compassion being the Devil's gift in Unbearable Lightness ... What is Vegas, 'the thing,' pace W. Stevens, 'or the thing itself?' ... Vera = virtu = Captain Vere ... to be truly subversive, Vera must sound like pop music, be organized as rigorously as pli selon pli ... disarm and entertain with cocktail piano, slip the knife in with the words ... these folks are like Auden's bunch in the back of a cab in Age of Anxiety ... Auden, Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee all living together ... Madonna's a bore; it is her production values we study and adore ... Didi, Gogo, Dumdum, Taco ... strippers in stiletto heels singing quintuplets in three quarter time while being sexy ... Vera must reveal her heart to soft seventies folk rock ... dancers never count anything remotely similar to what composers think they will ... all my former teachers will hate the music I write for this show; that's a good starting place ... I will please nobody with this score ... this is a piece that must sound on the surface eager to please but in fact not give a damn ... remember why critics hate Lenny's MASS while remembering what it is about that piece that makes people love it ... one must seem raw while in fact being infinitely polished ... fiction always wins because it is packaged better ... people always think they 'get' music-especially when they don't ... stamp on the hand gets you readmitted, stamp on the arm means you escaped ... Is Vera Garbo?' And on and on.

At the time I was being dragged down by sentimentality and nostalgia-a self-destructive, sentimental view of marriage, and a self-defeating nostalgic attachment to the way I, after such forcefully formative years at the Curtis Institute and at Juilliard, thought that a 'serious' composer should behave and compose. I knew from the first moment that in order for our new opera to succeed I would have to be ruthless about writing the sort of music that these characters demanded to sing, the kind I was yearning myself to sing. I couldn't write music 'just pretty enough to please the Midtown crowd,' as I wrote to Paul in a letter, 'and just ugly enough to command the grudging acceptance of the Academy' if I wanted to get not just to the character's truths but to my own. 'This piece,' I quipped to Paul later in the same letter,' won't get me a teaching job the likes of which I have just quit at Bard, and I don't want one anymore.'

In the preface to the vocal score I wrote, '[these] four characters in are deeply alienated individuals suffering from denial and an inability to connect emotionally with one another.' At the time I began suggesting ideas to Paul for our 'Las Vegas project,' I was drowning in a loveless relationship, my descent into the depression that culminated during the composition of Bandanna accelerating, my identification with the need for the characters that Paul and I ultimately penned pretty acute. 'Their 'truths,' I continued, 'are buried in pasts to which they return in increasingly spasmodic, acid-trip-like flashbacks... it's a slow-motion spiritual meltdown. These people are desperately unhappy, entertaining themselves in order not to have to face the fact that they feel dead inside.' The last words summed up my personal situation.

'The role of ruthlessness itself-the sort of pathological ruthlessness that even the mildest of writers can reveal when having to choose between truth and decency—this, I would say, is primary,' said Lynn Freed. '... The revelation, through the story, through the characters in the story, of the human condition itself-its loneliness, its familiarity. Is there a safe and decent way to accomplish this? I don't think so. If it is done right, someone will be hurt.'

Vera is a ruthless score. It is not safe; it is angry, uses the power of music and words to reorder truth, to expose lies, to understand. It is about worthy subjects: trouble and love-in fact, the Troubles and, in my opinion, the death of love. In it, I lay claim to the seventies folk rock I wrote and played as a pre-teen, the Broadway mannerisms I come by fairly, having worked there, the cocktail piano licks I ran my hands through as a twenty-something in a hotel lobby. It goes for broke because its characters are broken. Nevertheless, it is completely without sentimentality or nostalgia. It is fiercely ironic in the classic sense that there is an incongruity, discordance or connection that goes beyond the most evident meaning, and that in the expression of our meaning we use language that normally signifies the opposite-inevitable, considering the characters, the setting, and the story. In this case, for example, the lightest of pop music is wedded to the deepest emotions, the confession to a murder is married to the gentlest of melodies and the most disarming of accompaniments.

***

My continuing relationship to Vera as a piece that is periodically revived and rethought and with which I am necessarily reacquainted when I see a new production, can be summed up in the following story: in Oregon, at a reception after a youth symphony concert at which one of my pieces was performed, a young man of about fifteen approached me with a book in his hand that he had liberated from a local library. It was Ned's Nantucket Diary.

'Would you sign this for me?' he asked.

'Why, for all love, do you want me to do that?' I asked.

'Well, you're in here, a couple of times.'

'So?' I asked.

'That means that you have met Ned Rorem.'

I saw that he was creating himself out of whole cloth, that his task would be ever so much more difficult than Charles' onstage at the Danny Kaye Playhouse. It was also clear that Ned's book had come to him at a crucial moment, and that it had helped him. That I existed meant that a Real Life Ned existed somewhere, and not just between the covers of a stolen book. It meant that perhaps it might be possible to be who he wanted to be or become.

Judging from some of the letters I've received over the years, the fictional theater work Vera of Las Vegas has given solace to a number of persons in the throes of personal invention or reinvention. Written from an unhappy place, it seems to help people. They understand it; that is more important than whether they like it or not.

'First,' I said, drawing the boy aside and giving him a hug, 'return the book to the library. Then, order a new one online. Send it to me. I'll take it over to Ned's place the next time I see him and ask him to sign it. Then I'll send it back to you.'

A few weeks later, the book arrived. I took it to Ned's and, over chocolates and tea, told him the story and acquired his signature, along with a dedication to the boy. I was intrigued to see not a flicker of satisfaction on Ned's face upon hearing the story. If anything, I think it made him feel sad. I think I understand why.

The book was duly sent to the boy, who I now recall no better than the Vera I created so many years ago, or the Daron that Ned created in his diaries so long ago as a minor character.

'Ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do,' sang the voice in my mind as I watched Seattle recede on the Bainbridge-bound ferry during the fall of 2007, having spent the morning walking Speight Jenkins, Gary Wedow, Stephen Wadsworth and some key members of Seattle Opera's management staff through the just-completed vocal score of Amelia, the evening-long opera they commissioned me to create for them. Despite—or possibly because of—the fact that Speight and the company had been at every step engaged and resolutely supportive, and the fact that I had never felt so secure in the viability of a piece, I felt during the presentation as though I had a bellyful of spawning salmon. Eager to please the people who had placed so much faith in my work, in/secure enough to strike back out of defensiveness if it was unfairly criticized, it was difficult to remain centered. Afterwards, Speight issued his verdict: 'You have far exceeded my hopes and expectations.' The weight of the next three years of development, revision, orchestration and production settled on my shoulders and it felt good. I imagined that someday I would feel this way standing on the sidewalk in front of my son's school on his first day, watching him walk away and into his own life.

'If you've a penny in your purse I'll ferry you,' a male voice continued in my mind as I suddenly recalled with intense happiness watching the magical village of Bellagio approach from aboard the morning ferry from Ravenna in 2004, the crisp Como air flowing through my beautiful wife's hair, a look of concentrated pleasure on her intelligent face. And then, with a razor-sharp shard of self-reproach, I recalled the same view in 1993, when I was aware but unable to express verbally the effects of a gradually-deepening depression, felt moved by the loveliness, but from afar, as though it was being experienced by someone else.

'I have a penny in my purse. And my eyes are blue...' the song continued in my head, this time in a flirty female voice. The wind had picked up, now that we were nosing out into the bay. Seattle receded as so many times Manhattan had receded aboard the Staten Island Ferry. Sipping my coffee and leaning into the wind, I shivered involuntarily, my thoughts skipping like a stone over water through hundreds of Staten Island round-trips over the years, clutching coffee and a pretzel, trying to summon the courage to continue plugging away as an unknown freelance musician in Manhattan by—through communing with the proud, soaring buildings—triggering a renewal of my determination as a child to one day Live and Make Art there. Like a fist around my heart, then came the recollection of my first ferry trip after the Towers came down.

'So ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do!' the voice in my head purred as I walked into the passenger cabin, installed myself next to one of the tall windows and took another sip of my coffee.  I realized that the voice was Karen Hale's, for whom I composed a setting in 1983 of Christina Rossetti's poem at the behest of Ned Rorem. Ned's setting briefly superimposed itself on mine in my poetic memory, and evaporated as I recalled the pre-dawn mist at the Cimitero di San Michele on a December morning in 1989, when I was a lone, heartsick insomniac waiting on the Fondamenta Nove for the first vaporetto of the day, Venice asleep, the Aqua Alta a clawing pair of icy anklets.

There have always been so many singers in my mind's ear. Who was that baritone ghosting my setting? Paul Kreider, of course, singing, 'Step into my ferry boat, be they black or blue.' I thought of the dozens of singers I had accompanied over the years in Ned's setting and in my own, of master-classes given to cowed but proud youngsters at colleges and conservatories around the country, some getting my songs just right and some so deliriously wrong-headed as to inspire an eye-popping sense of dislocation. How many of those renditions could I honestly say that I remembered? Not many, but the affection for each singer remained. And certainly the poem is about Charon, but it must be the Acheron, not the Styx, yes? And is the other character Euridice?

Charon as conductor, checking Euridice Eva Marie Saint's ticket in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Cary Grant reluctantly beginning his adventure up the Hudson concealed in the compartment above her, a movie first seen as a teenager at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee. —Or Charon as the solitary commuter I recognized but never spoke to every week for a decade as I sped north to teach at Bard on the same train as Hitchcock's lovers. —Or Charon as bartender, serving a drink to The Hero with a Thousand Faces as he begins his Campbellian journey in the cantina scene of Star Wars. —Or as the stewardesses (charming Charons-all) on the planes hurtling towards the Towers in my planned-but-never-to-be-written sequel to Vera of Las Vegas.

'And for the penny in your purse, I'll ferry you,' Charon concluded, and my thoughts finally settled, as the ferry pulled into Bainbridge, upon beginning the Nicaraguan day at Rio Mar, in the liminal zone where the moon greets the sun's rise, the river's fresh water meets the salty Pacific, the horse next door rolls over in the sand a few yards in front of me. I remembered why the poem has always been so important to me. It is, of course, because I identify with Charon, and have steered his craft for him too many times. I thought of the night I sat with James Holmes as he died, surrounded by his pets, Ned in the other room, of waking Ned to tell him that Jim had gone, serving as Charon for my mother, and of my father reaching into my uncle's casket to cover his eyes with coins.

I grew up in a big, beautiful, drafty, Frank Lloyd Wright-style cedar house ringed with eight foot high picture windows in New Berlin, Wisconsin into which my parents had poured as much money as they had. My mother was a sculptor, visual artist and writer; she was also a gifted gardener who cultivated dozens of different irises, roses and annuals.

When I was small, Father was the breadwinner; he would leave Milwaukee on Monday mornings and return home on Friday nights, each week slightly more unraveled from the fabric of our family's life than the last. Sometime during the late sixties, my parents—while I, for whom they couldn't find a sitter, waited in the car—went from one Chicago Loop hotel to the next for hours one awful night, looking for her beloved brother, a sensitive, talented visual artist who had taken his life.

Proud, hard-working gardeners, in the summer we would buy bags of cocoa bean shells from the Ambrosia chocolate factory and spread them over the generous, manicured flower-beds. The smell, in the midday sun, was an intoxicating mélange of cocoa and countryside, the aromas of the various flowers mingling with freshly-mown grass.

Mother was a writing protégé of Mari Sandoz at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After serving as a radio man in the Navy, Father courted her there, earned a law degree, and promised her that he was going to support the family so that she could pursue her Art and together they could raise their children. After graduation, he worked for the American Bar Association. At some point they moved from the flat on Milwaukee's South Side that they rented on the second floor of my grandmother's house to the place they bought in New Berlin.

Mother loved the wren's call, and managed to entice at least one to move in each summer. She disliked blue jays ('Nasty, bossy birds,' she would say, stubbing out her Pall Mall and pulling on her gardening gloves) and crows, and fought multi-year battles with a very intelligent squirrel we named Ralph, who seemed able to pillage every birdfeeder we installed. The cicadas each summer were deafening. I'd run into the middle of the lawn, close my eyes, lean my head as far back as it would go, feel the sun on my face, spin around, and imagine I was swimming in the hot, healthy air above me, awakened after a seventeen-year-long subterranean slumber.

She wrote short stories and submitted them to the big east coast magazines: The New Yorker, Dial, Saturday Review, Ladies' Home Journal, and so forth. Her cover letters were written on stationary inscribed with our home's name, Brightwood, and the return address. She raised her three sons, made Art, submitted manuscripts.

On the weekends, Father set his sons to work beautifying the yard. We designed and erected retaining walls from truckloads of broken concrete, built traffic bond pathways, cut down trees. Father built for my brothers and me a sandbox nestled into a crook of the stream surrounding our property that was as big as a tennis court in which I constructed labyrinthine sand cities. What began as a request for permission to throw up a few boards in the crotch of a tree turned into a multi-summer project to construct a scale version of our own home, with running electricity, windows, and a porch perched on fifteen foot high stilts.

I recall standing in Denoon Lake as a very, very young child. I looked back to the beach and watched my mother doing the Saturday Review acrostic, having spent a perfect summer day collecting interesting stones from the lake bottom and piling them on the dock for her to admire.

I remember summer evenings at the Blue Mound Drive-In, falling asleep with my brothers in the back of a lumbering old station wagon that we called 'Thunder-n-Lightning' halfway into the first film of a double feature, orange Nesbit soda, Dad's Root Beer, Graf's 50-50, piles of sandwiches doled out by my mother from a green wicker hamper, the drowsy bliss of being carried in from the car to the house afterwards over Father's shoulder, with heat lightning flashing above and gravel crunching beneath his feet. He smelled good then—like Mennen aftershave and Borkum Riff pipe tobacco, sweat and Ivory soap.

My ancestors on one side came to Upstate Wisconsin from Norway (the Skajestaads-from the town of Hagen, which means 'garden' in Norwegian) and on the other Ireland (the Taffes-we're related to President Taft) during the 1800's. I was at first shocked, and then deeply moved by the fact that the people who figured in the Charles Van Schaik photographs (as featured in Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip) looked uncannily like the ones in our family's photo albums; the stories in the book were eerily similar to the family lore I had grown up hearing.

We kept country dogs and cats, rabbits and guinea pigs, snakes and turtles; Father fed bags of day old bread to the several families of raccoons that lived under the garage. I spent entire days making believe I was Le Long Carabine in the woods surrounding our property, crying 'My death is a great honor to the Huron, take me!' to no one in particular.One night, shortly after having seen The Ten Commandments at the Drive-in, playing Moses on the back porch as a 'ringy-ding-ding-ding' party tootled away in the neighbor's backyard, I declaimed at the top of my prepubescent voice, 'GO TO GOD!' heard Sinatra's voice ('Strangers in the Night') stop abruptly, a record player scratch to a halt, and a glass shatter in the ensuing silence. I spent my earliest remembered days playing at her feet while Mother made Art. The long stretches of silence were broken only by the susurrus of wind, bird calls, the classical music she so loved, and the steady thrum of cicadas. I was drawn to the piano because my older brother Kevin, whom I idolized, was a gifted pianist. At the same time that I first noticed the numbers tattooed on our piano teacher's forearm I discovered on a very high shelf, along with a lot of other books about the Holocaust, an oversized book of horrifying photographs called Despotism. As soon as I discovered their existence, I returned to the pictures every time I had the chance.

I was tested by the school district and sent to kindergarten a year early. Around the age of six I began repeating silently afterwards everything that I said. Like some other obsessive compulsive children, I developed early on a prophetic, unequivocal, almost resigned feeling that I would die young; that feeling, combined with the discovery of my namesake Daron's death certificate, motivated me to grow up as quickly as possible, while living for two.

My ancestor Dorn, a devout Lutheran who, wrongly-accused of making off with an envelope from the Sunday collection plate (it was later found exactly where he had said it was) and poorly treated by his brethren, hung himself. I recall the summer I was told about him—a summer otherwise spent contentedly working on my uncle Clifford's dairy farm somewhere just shy of the Upper Peninsula bailing hay, shoveling shit, and being justly, gently and affectionately mocked for being a city-slicker from Milwaukee.

Although I didn't yet know I would become a composer (that happened when, a few years later, my family gave me the score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd), I did decide one day, at the age of seven, in 1968, to become a musician. Kenneth Schermerhorn was conducting the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; they were performing the Largo of Antonin Dvořák's Ninth Symphony.

In the deep winter, beautiful sheets of ice formed over our lovely home's picture windows, making them seem like frosted Depression glass. Heat escaped through the roof, so immense, glittering, dangerous icicles—some as long as ten feet and too heavy to lift—hung down from the eaves like enormous fangs. My brothers and I used to knock them down with shovels. Much of the tar and gravel roof was flat, and required shoveling after a heavy snow. It leaked steadily in every season, sort of like a grand upside down ark, or—as I fantasized as a child lying on my back on the floor and looking up into the front room's lofty rafters—a capsized Viking Longship.

By the age of thirteen I had already begun to think of myself as a composer, spending three or four hour each day at the piano. After two years I began taking lessons from a sweet-natured young man at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Father ferried me to them, forty minutes in each direction. I remember nothing about what we talked about during those weekly trips, only that I dreaded them. Around this time, mother caused father to agree that, if I were sitting at the piano, I would not be disturbed. After that, I began not just composing and practicing at the piano, but taking my meals and doing my homework there.

Mother's manuscripts were returned in big manila envelopes. Sometimes they hadn't even been opened. Not a single one was accepted. She had better luck when she used a mail drop in Chicago as her return address. The rejection letters from the same magazines that I have good friends and colleagues published in and working at today that she used to read, standing in her Midwestern kitchen, surrounded by children, the odor of pot-roast, and a husband running to fat, must have been devastating. It broke my heart when my mother stopped making art; I think it broke hers, too. By the time I was twelve, she stopped saving the rejection slips. When I was fifteen years old everything—the manuscripts, the slips, the letterhead, the typewriter—disappeared; she destroyed them all, gave away the typewriter, and stopped writing entirely. Even the clay and the paints were thrown out.

As the neighborhoods around us grew, so did the volume of seasonal run-off into what I recalled as a child as having been a charming brook ringing our property; by the time I was eleven, heavy rainstorms typically filled the basement of the house with several feet of water, the six-inch-deep brook became a dangerous eight foot deep river, and the sprawling backyard, into which we had poured hundreds and hundreds of hours of manual labor and so much love under our father's stern command, became a flood plain, covered with a half a foot of muck. Heartbreaking.

Around this time, I began to pretend I was asleep when Father returned from Chicago on Friday nights. He could tell. It must have hurt him terribly. It was explained that Father would now be at home all the time; he and Mother had decided that he would be happier in private practice. Mother would get a job to help make ends meet. She started as a maid at a Ramada Sands hotel managed by her brother Garth, moved into paste-up at a local advertising agency, then copy-writing, layout, and so on; she learned fast, and, by the time I left for college, she served as the creative director of a glossy regional magazine, supplanting Father as the family's principal breadwinner.

Mother took my older brother Kevin and me to New York City when I was fifteen. Kevin trembled with excitement as we stood together in the middle of Lincoln Center Plaza and gazed up into the beautiful Chagall tapestries hanging behind the tall glass windows of the Metropolitan Opera. She took us to see John Cullum in Shenandoah. I have a clear memory of seeing Raul Julia's terrifying turn as Macheath in Threepenny Opera at the Mitzi Newhouse, of loving the production, but of feeling betrayed by the new translation—I was already a Blitzstein partisan, proud of having been cast—along with my other brother Britt—by Kevin as members of Mackie's gang in a production he had produced and directed. We walked in Central Park, ate vichyssoise in an overpriced sidewalk café in Midtown (I now walk past the spot and think of her every time I go to my club) and rode the Staten Island Ferry. I recall the satisfaction my mother took in me when, viewing a picture at the Met together, I noted how 'beautiful' the man in it was. 'Yes, men can be beautiful,' she said, wistfully. I treasure a single memory of our mother hugging Kevin and me around the shoulders and telling us that we could accomplish anything in life; that as long as we did our best, nobody could ever think ill of us. I determined one day to become a New Yorker. At the age of twenty-three, I did. I've lived in Manhattan ever since.

After the worst of a series of floods, my parents allowed—except for a sliver near the house—the  yard to run back. It was verdant, but neglected, loved but untended. It was painful to look at. The house was only about thirty years old, but it felt older. It was hard not to think of what the place had been and what it had become as a metaphor for what had become of our family.

Father's depressions lengthened; the distance between my parents increased. The beautiful house they both loved and where we all lived became a hotel: the upper floors were Ours; the lower half was His. My brothers left for college; I slept at home but rarely saw my parents. I disappeared into music, after-school activities, and late-night double features at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee.

I left for the University of Wisconsin myself after a discouraging audition at Juilliard. In the middle of my second year in Madison I was accepted by Ned Rorem as a pupil at the Curtis Institute of Music. I shall forever be grateful to him for having done so. I moved to Philadelphia. According to Ned's diary, my first lesson occurred on 15 September, 1981; I was nineteen, 'the new one from Madison, bearded, bright, and seething with a desire to please.'

A few months later, Mother was diagnosed with a particularly virulent type of lung cancer, but concealed the news from me. When I finally learned of it, I insisted upon returning from Philadelphia to take care of her. I was sure that the Curtis would grant me a leave of absence. 'Christ no,' she said, with a degree of passion that absolutely barred discussion. 'I want you to get on with your life.' I returned to Philadelphia. I spoke to her on Saturday mornings for twenty minutes, made do with writing proud, excited letters home. I returned to the beautiful old cedar house for the last time in December of 1983.

That was when I placed the Tylenol in her mouth, chased it with a finger of amaretto. Her cancer had spread everywhere. The doctors had sent her home to die. It was one of those stupid, small, cold winter hours. She writhed on the floor at the foot of the bed, where she had collapsed on her way to the bathroom to throw up. Cigarette burns in the carpet. Why was I, their twenty-year-old son, sitting on the floor, cradling his mother's head? Her husband, my father, was downstairs in his den, playing Solitaire. 'I love you more than I can say,' she said, stroking my face. Her eyes rolled. I gently wiped the crusts of sputum from the corners of her mouth. 'Oh, Lord,' she sighed through her pain, 'the dosage wasn't high enough.' She looked at me with pity as I held her. 'I was hoping to die tonight, Sweetheart,' she said, looking up at me like an infant seeking the breast. A few hours later, after murmuring 'Well honey, I was never bored,' she did.

Presenting contrasting emotional and psychological states simultaneously is the trump card of contemporary opera. Simultaneity aggravates some listeners, who prefer opera to consist of a singer, a tune, and an orchestra playing an accompaniment pattern, preferably with the tune doubled in the orchestra.

The singers were rarely doubled in the orchestra in Brow, and there was almost always another line, some sort of obbligato accompanying each character. This line was like the sound-track accompanying the images on film stock. It conveyed a parallel stream of information—the character's true motivations and feelings may not have been fully expressed in his vocal part, but rather in the oboe solo that accompanied him, because he was lying (to himself or another character) or in a state of denial. The orchestra assumed at various times the roles of each character's subconscious, omniscient narrator, or disinterested bystander; occasionally it just accompanied. A listener could either ignore it, be just attuned to simultaneity enough to be aggravated by it, or revel in it.

Shining Brow was intended to entertain casual music lovers, intrigue and inspire further study from mainstream opera fans, and to be a source of ongoing, deepening pleasure for opera aficionados as they delved deeper and deeper into the piece. The score was intentionally affable on its surface; its sophistication was in the extent to which its underlying complexity was concealed. This aesthetic was consistent with my personality and values as a person; and with the Midwestern value system shared by the opera's characters.

Composing operas is not a science; it is an art which calls upon the composer's ability not just to empathize with but to live through the story's characters: Brow's inebriated newspapermen sang a barbershop quartet because these men sounded this way in my imagination, based on their educations and the time and place in which they lived-a place in which I happened to have been reared. The characters demanded the sort of music they needed to sing, not the other way around.

That the piano trio should accompany an onstage cocktail party at Taliesin with a set of off-kilter variations on one of the themes from Der Rosenkavalier struck me then (as now) as historically appropriate—just what a well-off, musically-literate couple who had just attended the première of the Strauss opera (as Wright and Mamah Cheney did) might have requested of their hired musicians. That Wright should have misremembered the 'presentation of the rose' music from the opera in order to remind his mistress of their love in an offhand fashion as he walked away from her struck me as what a man like him might do; that Mamah shall have been a sophisticated enough woman to exactly quote the Marschallin's music back at him to not just show him that she knew he was pitching her second-hand woo but that she remembered the source better than he struck me as one way this intelligent couple might have sparred.

I imagined Wright baring his most intimate feelings to the same sort of music with which I bare mine: clear, tonal, diatonic, direct, nearly folk-song in nature. I intended for one of the century's great modernists to identify, at heart, with folk tunes and Americana. Wright was accompanied by plush, tonal harmonies in the arietta 'And her scent was it musk' and in the final aria 'I think of the balsam fir.' He often sang in a floating, vulnerable falsetto; this was in intentional to contrast to Sullivan, whose tenor was intentionally supported throughout, and Cheney, who was lofted into falsetto only when expressing weakness. Use of extended range for dramatic and psychological ends—especially in the male roles—required the casting of singers who were willing to take vocal risks which occasionally strained traditional opera fans' conception of 'good' vocal writing or 'vocal beauty.'

The gentle lyricism of Sullivan's 'I cry out from the slough of despond' was intentionally similar to Wright's 'internal' music. I was submitting that Wright and Sullivan had consonant souls—it was their personalities and life decisions that compelled them to lead such different and dissonant lives.

Mamah Cheney heard her 'translation' of the exquisite faux-Goethe 'Hymn to Nature' as a Protestant hymn because that is the music she knew and loved. The Chef was without music, apart from the 'coherent reality' shared by the other characters. Offstage murders are always scarier than onstage ones. Explaining why Carlton went berserk would have been as wrongheaded as trying to do anything but ask questions about Wright.

Shining Brow was about Wright, but it was not a traditional biographical story. Like stripping away layers of an onion, Muldoon and I explored his character first through negative space and then gradually revealed him at the opera's core. Accordingly, the first act concerned itself primarily with the tragic effect his behavior had on the lives of Cheney, Mamah, and Sullivan. The largest set piece of the first act was Mamah's fifteen minute scena; the counterweight was Wright's disastrous second act press conference in which he alternated his internal thoughts with external pronunciamentos. From then on the focus tightened on Wright until he was left very much alone.

Sullivan, in the prologue of Brow, was meant to remind any serious operagoer of Captain Vere at the beginning of Billy Budd; the townspeople and workmen's chorus intentionally made a nod to the ensemble writing for the Borough in Peter Grimes; Wright's final forty-five seconds were intended to bring to mind Peter on the beach at the end of the same opera. When Wright's melodic motive is coupled to 'Suburbia' from Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti I am making a dead-serious comparison between Wright and Bernstein; when that is answered, later by Sullivan alluding to music from Marc Blitzstein's Regina the comparison between the relationship between the two composers and the two architects and two composers is made clear. The many musical allusions in the score and literary allusions in the libretto explored the central argument between Sullivan and Wright—what constitutes 'borrowing' in Art, and what constitutes 'purloining?'

Like many operas, Brow was constructed of numerous musical motifs that were constantly developed by being placed in new contexts, whether by being wedded to new words, new rhythms, or keys, subjected to elongation, diminution, or combination with other motives. Most motives did quadruple or quintuple duty, representing not only a character but a phrase (or several phrases) of poetry, a concept associated with that character and the evolution of those characters and concepts.

Bitonality and polytonality served as the harmonic building blocks for Brow. Characters interacted through the interaction of the 'home keys' in which they were written.

Wright was identified with the tritone (often used in opera to portray the extraordinary, the eccentric, or the ill-omened), arrayed both horizontally and vertically, and a rising motif which includes the tritone. The augmented fourth and diminished fifth, so crucial in tonal music to the act of modulation, was used to portray the mercurial nature of Wright's character, his inborn need to modulate others out of their own keys and into his—a sort of harmonic seduction. His home key was B-flat major (a tritone from Mamah's home key of E major), and he was associated throughout with the woodwinds.

Mamah Cheney, whose home key of E major is historically associated with the idea of Heaven, radiance, and grace, was associated with the strings throughout. When Wright sang his final aria after her death his transference from the winds to the strings signified his identification with her; when the Maid delivered her aria it was likewise to the accompaniment of strings and two bassoons—Wright and Mamah were in the orchestra. Mamah was identified with the melody of the 'Hymn to Nature' and the love aria 'There is no balm in Gilead' with which the first act closes.

Louis Sullivan's home key was A minor, a half-step below Wright's. The fateful tolling A's with which he was associated arise from his Catholicism, the time he had spent and lost, the brooding, repetitive, circular nature of chronic deep depression; he provided the opera with Wright's chief victim and moral conscience. He was associated with the percussion section—especially the tubular bells and timpani.

When the timpani played, it bridged between Sullivan and Edwin Cheney, whose home key was C major—the relative major of Sullivan's home key—and  the obsessive rhythms expanded into ostinatos. A stolid, religious man himself, Cheney was associated with the brass. His aria, 'My mouth is full of nails' moved from the brass into the strings when he sang about his wife; he was dogged by a shrill E-flat clarinet when he sang about Wright; the tolling bells returned when he identified with Sullivan, and so forth.

Catherine Wright was associated with the falling motive do-si-sol-re, which was also associated throughout with the concept of home, connubial transport, and duty. The melodic rise of a ninth followed by a long trailing descent was associated throughout with mourning, loss and destruction—whether of a person, a place, or a relationship.

The words that began and ended the opera, 'So much so,' sung initially by Sullivan and finally by Wright, were set to nearly identical music—that is, to an oscillation between A and B-flat. The oscillating musical figure, combined with the words, were spun to comic effect at the beginning of Act two, when the chorus of reporters echoed Sullivan's and Mamah's words to a somewhat altered musical line. (Cheney and Mamah oscillated between G and G-sharp; Cheney literally 'bringing her down' from major to minor.) Wright's reprise of Sullivan's utterance reinforced his identification with his old teacher; he fell downwards to a G-sharp at the very end, indicating that Mamah's spirit was hovering over him and would continue to do so; for the moment he 'lost' himself harmonically as so many characters had 'lost' themselves to him, and as Mamah had lost herself (to identical music) at the end of the first act.

I once wrote of poignancy and sadness shocking me into recognition of other times and realities, of a child's awakening to the horrors of the Holocaust caused by a glimpse of his piano teacher's tattoo, of an ecstatic street preacher waving a bible as he shouted himself hoarse, unheard, as he stalked up Broadway, of cradling my dead mother's head, midnight drives in search of suicidal relatives, the grace of gifted teachers, of the simple joy of running.

Not only Proust's 'other selves' being joined to the present touched off by a sip of tea and a mouthful of 'one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites Madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.' I was, I am, I will be? No. More shattering: I was, but can never be again; I will be, but never equal to my hope. There, perhaps, is poignancy and sadness, a sense of dying selves totally incapable of being re-invoked. Instead of Proust's pattern (a mosaic for a complete self) a dis-organization, the incapacity to find a connective meaning.

I wrote of the 'intense satisfaction taken in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven's did two centuries ago,' of places like Yaddo 'where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free;' I've penned stream of conscious paragraphs covering two decades' worth of Venetian memories, woven delicate word rondos alternating Ned's diary with mine; I've described moments when I realized that the world was opening up for me, described watching my son as he 'held infinity in the palm of his hand'-if only fleetingly.

Why does Virginia Woolf also insist upon continuity? Does this insure personal significance and sanity? Suppose you were rifling a deck of cards-turn up one card, then another, unrelated suits. Chance turns up the card. This, we'll say, is one moment-a strange moment, saturated with a sense of profundity: (because it is shared with a loved one, because your finiteness is pressed home by externalities, because of a revelation of beauty in actions, character or things.) It is an important moment. There is no method of predicting the time or place that card (or moment) will turn up. It's a casual, chance thing. In the card allegory, why must the suits be forced to match? Or-

Say you had an uneven necklace-one thick bead, a small one, etc. The only connection being these beads (these moments of revelation) occurred on the thread of a single life. They are totally unrelated in size, importance, and comprehensibility but are connected by physical occurrence.

This is the sense and continuity of life, but these are the sudden moments of beauty and their beauty is in their mystery, their inability to be explained: you can't strip them to the bare and ugly bones. It's all that makes life possible, perhaps.

'Music is never about anything,' wrote Bernstein. 'Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that's all it is.' Critics of words use words, as Ned quipped; so do critics of music. As long as a composer's craft is complete, he cannot (or should not) be criticized for the way it is expressed. Critics can attack the how but not the why of a piece. That's why program notes are so fraught. Virgil told me once that he felt there were three kinds: gossip, musical travelogue, and musicology. Each sort appeals to a different sort of listener, and each aggravates another. Alas, a composer must write them anyway, or others will, and they're bound to be even more misleading than one's own.

A music critic can think they understand your music enough to disagree with what you were saying, but since music is abstract, they're bound to be wrong. The only place a critic can really look for a clue to your intent is in your program note. Composer-written program notes (including mine) are inevitably just as misleading and trivializing as those by program annotators. Tim Page aptly described Bandanna as 'neither fish nor fowl ... as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care; a melding of church and cantina and Oxonian declamation.' A theater work about the liminal zone between Life and Death, Man and God, that consciously blended and juxtaposed high and low, Music Theater and opera, was destined to fall between stools and to be willfully mischaracterized by partisans on each side. Bandanna, mongrel that it is, is very close to my heart perhaps because it is so easily and frequently misused by critics.

Gossip

A re-casting of the Venetian tale of the Moor in a 1968 Tex-Mex border town, Bandanna was commissioned by a nationwide consortium of college band directors who stipulated only that I could not use strings (except for basses) in the orchestra. Neither fish nor fowl; neither opera nor musical, Bandanna was destined to please very few of its commissioners.

When, a few months before the premiere, I presented Frederick Fennell with a copy of the score, I asked him how he thought the piece would go over in the band world. Eyes twinkling, he told me that he felt that there were three kinds of band conductors: 'First, you have what I call the Educators: they teach high school band and play simplified arrangements of pop songs and movie themes; then there are the Spit and Polish Men: they play marches, and for them music history stalled around the time of Holst; finally, there are the Maestros: they could have been orchestra conductors but chose to conduct bands because they love them. These men and women are hungry for new repertoire, and can have a better grasp of the symphonic repertoire than their colleagues in the orchestra world. Almost none of them know anything about opera, my boy, so you are doomed.'

The gifted composer Eli Marshall, who stayed at my apartment during some of the period of its composition, tells me that during the weeks he was there my routine never changed: I composed for six hours, wailing away at the piano at the top of my lungs, went out to the same Mexican restaurant for dinner, brought home a bottle of wine, drank it while copying out the fair score of the day's work (I wasn't yet using Sibelius' engraving software in 1998) in the evening, passed out on the couch, repeated.

The way I 'felt' while composing Bandanna doesn't (or shouldn't) matter. Rumi describes my psychological and emotional state during the composition, orchestration, and first production of Bandanna as a 'sad neighborhood.' I suppose that my psychological distress (clinically diagnosed at the time as depression) could account for some of the opera's feverish intensity, but unhappy composers write happy music all the time, and vice-versa. William Styron's Darkness Visible was a great help to me in understanding not just what I was going through but how the characters in the opera felt. It was the raw practice of my craft though, that served as the most effective therapy-St. Thomas Aquinas: 'Why do you seek peace? You were only meant to labor.' So work continued; it was life that had become mezzotint.

In retrospect I recognize what a desperately sad, aggressive, and brutal piece Bandanna is, physically hard on the singers and intentionally crude in the way it slams together Muldoon's text and different styles of music, vulgar in its use of craft to force certain moments.

I had put my head down. I was 'toughing it out,' exactly as I had during the hours when my mother was unconscious during the last week of her life. The melancholia that had been deepening for some time continued to intensify its grip. The first production, by the University of Texas Austin Opera Theater, as centerpiece of the College Band Directors National Association's annual convention in 1999, didn't do anything to lift my spirits: it was only remotely representative of the work I had created, greeted with hostile incomprehension by most of the conventioneers; consequently extremely traumatic-exactly as Frederick had predicted, 'doomed.'

I did not find personal closure until the release, under my baton, thanks to the efforts of Michael Haithcock, Paul Kreider, Thomas Leslie and Robert Schuneman, among others, of the complete recording, in 2006.

Musicology

The idea I used to generate the compositional dialectic and aesthetic of the opera was the idea of demarcation, as well as the fact that on either side of an absolute 'dead line' exists what Wallace Stevens called a 'the liminal zone.' I strove at every step to manifest in music each character's emotional, metaphysical, and psychological state by finding a musical and aesthetic metaphor for that state.

In the broadest sense, this led me to equate tonal centeredness with moral centeredness. Tonality itself was presented as sacred; everything else was secular by degree. Bitonality and polytonality were used to evoke a state of amorality. Highly chromatic passages were used to evoke the transitions between various states. Octatonic and twelve-tone passages were used to evoke a state of moral confusion, even anomie. I was writing from an emotionally extreme place manic music that was about emotional extremes, racing back and forth along technical and aesthetic continua, looking for balance. The figure below evolved on a large piece of paper over the piano as I composed:

Emotional States:
Life - Innocence/Simplicity - Bandanna Chord - (Hyper-Complexity)/Decadence - Afterlife

Moral States:
'Good' - Moral Absolutism - Moral Relativism - Amorality - Immorality - 'Evil'

Emotional Intensity:
Everyday Emotions - Heightened Reality - Emotional Crisis - Madness

Singing Styles:
Spoken Word - Recitative/Dialogue - Pop - Musical Theater - Parlando - 'New Music' - Opera

Musical Forms:
Spoken Theater - Musical/Singspiel - Art Song/Aria - Parola Scenica

Harmonic Language:
No Music - Simple Tonality - Bi/Polytonality - Chromaticism - Octatonicism - Dodecaphony

Libretto Styles:
Simple Prose - Indirect or Allusive Language - Poetry - Deliberate Obfuscation or Ambiguity

Orchestration:
Solo Voices - Mariachi Musicians - Winds/Brass - Idiophones - Orchestral Tutti - Saxophones

An octatonic idée fixe was associated throughout the opera with both the handkerchief/bandanna MacGuffin and the idea of the 'liminal zone' itself. This melodic motive and its verticalization as a chord struck me as the notated 'death-cry' of tonality; associating Mona's death cry with the death of tonality was, for me, an important touchstone-it helped me to anchor the opera's musical argument.

Musical Travelogue

As in Brow, I associated each character with a different array of instrumental colors. As their characters evolved, so did the orchestration that accompanied them. At the same time, emotional, psychological and moral states were evoked by the orchestration that-when juxtaposed with or superimposed upon a character's self-professed emotions-commented upon what each character was going through.

The idea of breath itself became a central orchestrational metaphor. Wind players need to breathe-for me, this fact is a powerful metaphor for life itself. For over ninety minutes, the audience listened to wind orchestra. Unveiling the three mariachi violinists-who did not have to 'breathe' as they 'haloed' the doomed Mona as she said her prayers-at the end, allowed the orchestra to tell the audience that Mona already knew that she was going to be killed, that breath itself was at an end. Following ten minutes of sustained violins, Mona's husband Morales strangled her with her bandanna, and the winds returned-as she fought for her final breaths of air-in a wheezing 'air attack' statement of the octatonic 'bandanna chord.'

I also employed procedures and formal structures customarily used by commercial and Broadway songwriters, including so-called 'first and second eights', various kinds of introductions, verses, bridges, and choruses, using the 'release' of a melodic phrase to highlight the libretto's central image, and so forth. I chose musical/lyrical structures that would best underpin or frame each dramatic event and asked Paul to execute the scene using the verse (or lyric) structures customarily associated with those musical structures, describing what I wanted by way of lyrics when possible, sending him actual examples from the song lyric canon of what I wanted when necessary.

I built upon what I was trying to accomplish in Vera by attempting to create (or dissipate) dramatic tension by causing a sub-strata of song and dance forms to proceed 'below' in the orchestra-both in accord with and in opposition to the onstage drama-whilst the demands and expectations of through-composed drama proceeding 'above' in the voices. Imposition of musical forms were used to 'slow down' the action (I:ii - 'Double Duet'), or to provide cohesion to an otherwise sprawling expositional scene (I:i) or to 'speed up' the action (all of the 'Dialogue' sections scattered throughout the opera, which in the orchestral fabric serve as variations on the 'bandanna' motive).

I adhered to this maxim (and its corollary): the longer an audience is in the theater, the slower it perceives 'time' as passing and the more important a dramatic event is, the more time the audience should spend experiencing it. Consequently, as with Shining Brow, Paul and I began by co-writing a highly-detailed, 'filmic' treatment. Dramatic events were mapped out and the amount of time-to the second-to be spent on each was decided before I had composed a note.

The pictures were often in black and white, but the music was always in color.

That afternoon I drove downtown to pick my father up at a tavern on Wisconsin Avenue. In no condition to drive, he pounded on the driver's side window and ordered me to slide over. I was sixteen. For the first time I had the nerve to refuse him the keys. I drove us home; it was not pleasant. The little boy in me felt like Toto from Cinema Paradiso. It was as though father, who we had been losing as a family to drinking and depression by dribs and drabs over the course of my childhood, had finally made himself into the Man Who Lived Downstairs.

Music alone couldn't yet fill the emptiness I felt, and I was too sheltered a suburban Midwestern adolescent to adequately come to terms with the wild, impractical, somewhat lurid thoughts and desires my brain was generating. My first pilgrimage to the Oriental Landmark Theater, a Grand Prewar Temple to the Tenth Muse—as the Italians refer to Cinema—in Milwaukee on the evening of 4 August 1978, provided me with a refuge, a chance to see grown up movies, of which many our parents would never approve, a place to dream, to share Communion in the Dark, to play. Brian Anderson put it beautifully: 'We didn't just visit or even inhabit the Oriental. We infiltrated it, climbing the organ loft and spelunking the tunnels. Any movie would do. If the media can be the message, sometimes the venue is the vision.'

In writing about the Oriental do I not succumb to what Gore Vidal in Screening History described as 'the American writer's disease, the celebration if not of self, of the facts of one's own sacred story?' The Oriental was the crucible in which I first began ginning up mine. Hormones and an unshakeable belief that in some specific way I had something unique to offer the world provided the cocktail of raw material. An extraordinary English teacher named Diane C. Doerfler provided the catalyst. Doerf, as we called her, was an inspirational teacher, a planter of seeds. I recall her now as I saw her then—gamine, a lovely combination of Hepburn and Moreau, seemingly something of a Transcendentalist, personally elusive. She began the year by etching in a quick rat-a-tat-tat of chalk on the board LIFE = ART, paused, turned back to us grinning like a Siamese cat, scanned the room, purred, 'Well, what do you make of that?'

'The universe,' as Thoreau wrote in Walden, 'is wider than our views of it.' Thanks to the movies I saw at the Oriental and the books Doerf gave me, my world was enlarged at the expense of myself, enabling me to grow into and desire access to, the world at large.  When I told Doerf I intended to move to the east coast, she presented me with the volume of John Cheever's short stories I have to this day: 'Read these,' she said, throwing me a rope. 'He and Updike seem to get it right.' Only a few years later I would get to know and grow fond of the writer Susan Cheever at Yaddo. I imagine Doerf would be pleased to know that I told Susan about her gift, proud of how artfully life had connected the dots.

During my first few years at Bard I emulated Doerf's teaching style. I taught music history, albeit in reverse chronological order, among other things. My students kept diaries and notebooks. Exams were open-ended. The more connections one could make between seemingly unrelated concepts and themes, the higher one scored; this rewarded associative and assimilative thinking, because students who thrived on regurgitating facts and dates always scored far below the ones who thought creatively. Most students hated it.

Designed by Gustave A. Dick and Alex Bauer, the themes of the Oriental's decor are in fact East Indian, with no traces of Chinese or Japanese artwork. It is said to be the only standard movie palace ever built to incorporate East Indian decor. Opened to the public on 27 July 1927 as the flagship of a chain of 47 movie theaters operated by John and Thomas Saxe, Irish brothers who began as sign painters at the turn of the century, the 1800-seat Oriental incorporated elements of East Indian, Moorish, Islamic, and Byzantine design, including three eight foot high chandeliers adorned with images of the Buddha, eight gleaming black porcelain lions flanking a massive tiled ceremonial staircase to the balcony,  hand-painted frescoes of Turkish scenes, dozens of custom draperies, and literally hundreds of elephants—elephants everywhere, from the bathrooms to the 1920's smoking lounges to the remotest corners of the balcony.

Faltering, after fifty years of continuous operation as a traditional movie palace, it came into the hands of Robert and Melvyn Pritchett, Milwaukee brothers and electricians who acquired it in 1972. In 1976, they agreed to a proposal by the Landmark Theater (then Parallax) chain to take over programming.

There were six enormous Buddha statues—three on each side of the broad orchestra—adorned with glowing 'rubies' in their foreheads, smoldering green eyes, and dim orange pools of light that warmed their ample tummies from below that remained on until the marquee was shut off, the work lights extinguished, and the lonesome ghost light turned on. The Pritchetts clearly loved the palace, and tolerated my adoration to the point where, on several occasions just before locking up for the night, I was allowed to perform the ritual.

The Oriental also boasted a shallow orchestra pit suitable for a vaudeville-circuit-sized ensemble of about 25 players, access tunnels, storage rooms, dressing rooms (with smeared autographs of once near-famous performers still on the walls), a spacious stage with the original rigging still in place, and an organ's pipe loft. During my day, the organ was in disrepair. Sometime during the eighties, it was lovingly restored. Now, every Friday and Saturday before the 7 pm show, the plush sounds of the Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ—the largest of its kind in a theater in America and the third largest in the world—introduce the film before the instruments sinks into the pit.

For a time the theater was also used as a live performance venue—I saw Laurie Anderson there. The Violent Femmes got their start by standing in one night as the opening act for the Pretenders. But when I knew it best, the Oriental was still a calendar house, a place where adult things happened. It had danger implicit in its darkness, its smoky smell, in the avant-garde and erotic films on its monthly bill of fare. In 1978 a double feature set you back $2.50—well within the budget of a teenage refugee from the suburbs in possession of a probationary driver's license and his mother's car.

Communion in the Dark, the sitting around a campfire telling stories to explore the unknowable, remains one of the chief reasons I have chosen to pour my heart and soul so into the creation of operas. Truffaut's La nuit américaine explores the theme of whether making art is more important than life for the people who make it. First seen at the Oriental, this film led me to a comprehensive engagement with Truffaut's films over the years which climaxed in meeting him at the end of a retrospective of his work at the Regency Cinema, a second-run house on Broadway near Juilliard, in 1986. When I began Shining Brow, which explores similar territory, I asked Paul to make this one of Wright's foremost concerns: 'Can a man be a faithful husband and father,' asks Frank Lloyd Wright in Muldoon's libretto, 'and still remain true to his art?'

Suspending disbelief is the crucial first step in making art, and I made conscious note of the strategies filmmakers used to do it. During these formative years I assembled the psychological and emotional skillset required for coping with life as a creative person. I couldn't help watching films critically; I was keenly aware of the artifice, and loved it. The venue was a refuge, but the films were not an escape. Four years later, Norman confessed that he could no longer watch films, as he found it difficult to separate the fantasy on the screen from reality. 'What scares me is this,' he confided over coffee and donuts at the now-gone Rindelaub's Bakery a few steps from the Curtis Institute where we were students, 'I've always seen my life as a play. Now that it's a tragedy I don't know how to get out.'

That August night in 1978 the double bill was Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. From the moment Max Steiner's grand Warner Brothers Fanfare began, I was enthralled. Steiner worked with orchestrator William Friedhofer, a composer and cellist who studied composition with Boulanger, Respighi and Schoenberg. Steiner's godfather had been no less a musical force than Richard Strauss; his piano teacher was Brahms, and he took composition lessons from Mahler. These men took their work seriously: as the saying goes, 'there was also a movie going on.'

The large and appreciative audience knew the film, hissed the villains, and cheered the great lines. It was the first time I ever felt surrounded by an audience so in tune with the rhythm of a script and set of actors that they literally sighed in unison. A few folks mouthed the dialogue along with the actors. Men wept openly during Rick's breakdown scene; people stood up when partisans at Rick's began singing 'La Marseillaise' in order to drown out the Nazis singing 'Deutschland Über Alles;' couples consoled one another when Rick and Ilse parted.

I was transported. During the intermission, I began prowling around the theater, which already felt like home. (The only other place that has affected me in exactly this way is Yaddo.) My parents were on their own Revolutionary Road in the suburbs, their lives together unspooling. Mine was rapidly expanding here, in the semi-darkness, among the threadbare velvet seats, the mildew-perfumed draperies, the dicey wiring, illuminated only by 'emeralds' and 'rubies' and a shaft of light slicing down from the projection booth to the broad, off-white screen with a blemish in the upper left hand quadrant.

The second feature began: Hemingway's story, adapted by Faulkner, directed by Hawkes, with Bogart and ... Bacall. 'You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together and ... blow.' The frisson was real. Seeing the film thirty-five years after it was made, I could not in my wildest dreams imagine that I would one day meet Bacall—well, fall at her feet, anyway—on a stairway at the Dakota.

Twenty-six days later, I brought friends to see Toshirō Mifune in Hiroshi Inagaki's great Samurai Trilogy. There were only about thirty people scattered around the theater. The first of countless games of hide-and-seek was played out in the soaring balcony; the illusion that we were alone in the vast screening chamber became, during the third hour, a reality. No doors were locked and we got into everything: the dressing rooms, the tunnels, the service closets. I watched Musashi's duel from behind the screen, lying onstage on my back with a sand bag beneath my head, my hands interlaced at the nape of my neck. Magic.

That October, I was given a tour of the projection booth during the screening of Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and 8 ½. My epiphany came during the latter, when I realized, watching the screen through the same hole (the 'fourth wall') that the powerful projector was throwing the image through, that all of the settings in Fellini were intentionally artificial so that they would appear on film as hyper real. Opera.

Powerful and dangerous stuff, an invitation to see the world not as it is, but as it is.  The next week West Side Story continued to counterpoint my evolving young thoughts. I'd seen the film on television, of course, and had spent fifth grade walking to and from Linfield Elementary School singing the tune of 'Maria,' substituting my first Great Love's name. But I had never seen the Jets swoop across a three-story tall movie screen. The boys leapt; so did my heart. The Oriental provided me a secure place in which I could suspend my disbelief. The hair on my arms stood up. We were being invited not to buy into the idea of a bunch of tough street kids dancing but of witnessing their spirits flying through the air.

The Oriental provided my first introduction to serious camp. The double bill was Johnny Guitar and Humoresque. (Truffaut famously referred to it as a 'phony Western.') The film was to me like Weissbier with a slab of lemon in it: all the roles, from Crawford to Hayden, seemed clearly gender-swapped. Paired with an even higher-camp classic starring a beautiful young prizefighter of a James Garfield, a leonine Crawford, a rumpled Levant, and Isaac Stern's hands, it made for a swampy, soupy, delightfully sentimental evening at the movies—one I'll never forget. At the end of each school year at Bard for nearly a decade I played the film—as a serious lark—at an after-hours party for my students. As late as the early nineties I recall singing and playing the theme from Johnny Guitar at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts as the prelude to a presentation by a gender studies specialist.

And somewhat lower camp was also on the bill. The Oriental is the world record holder for a current and continuing film engagement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has played as a midnight film since January, 1978. I dressed the part for a dozen or so showings, danced the 'Time Warp,' brought bags of rice, toast, squirt guns, newspapers, and so forth, knew my lines ('Dammit, Janet!') and delighted in the lovely community of genuinely joyful people that evidently still thrives around screenings of the film.

On 8 December 1978 during a double bill of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause I held hands at the movies with a date for the first time. I didn't yet know what to do next. Leonard Rosenman's sophisticated modernist scores (he studied with Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, and Sessions) for these back-to-back knockouts floored me. Thirty years later conductor and pianist Scott Dunn passed along to me the story of how his friend Rosenman had met Elia Kazan in New York.  The director had come to visit his roommate, James Dean. Dean told Kazan he should hire Rosenman. Kazan asked if the young composer could write a tune. He left the room, penned the great love theme from Rebel and was hired on the spot.

Eleven days later I saw The Third Man for the first time and immediately determined someday to turn it into and opera. In fact, I pitched an updated adaptation of the Graham Greene screenplay in 2006 to Speight Jenkins, who instead commissioned my Amelia. Lyme's entrance, the bemused, amused anti-hero reveal of a very handsome young Orson Welles, about whom I was already something of an aficionado, is entirely operatic, hand of author. It is hard for me now not to have in mind beside it the much later anti-hero reveal of Welles in Touch of Evil, a movie that heavily influenced my opera Bandanna. By this point, an unattractive didactic streak had kicked in to my movie-going. Longtime friends tell me that I quizzed them about what they thought on the way home. That couldn't have been much fun for them. And so I returned, alone or with others, night after night....

Several years after having made it to the coast, I returned for the holidays. My mother, with whom I had come to see a Hitchcock double feature that included as its second half her favorite mystery The 39 Steps, broke the news to me during intermission that she had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. We both looked at the blank screen as we discussed it. Then, holding hands, we watched the movie.

Coda

There's a splendid, self-sufficient egoism in being young. Closed about with unearned affection from parents who will love you no matter how selfishly or casually you behave, you're free to indulge independence and individualism.

Becoming an adult is realizing alone-ness, understanding how tenuous the integration of lives really is, and facing the unpleasant necessity of having to earn affection. You're not born into other people's lives, people who will love you immediately and irrevocably; pamper your whims and love you for them or despite them. This is a sober fact that's shattering to comprehend, but it makes an individual sooner than the cocoon-like, womb-like protective existence of adolescence.

Love is lost so easily: you can't strangle it by putting it on a golden chain, expecting it to understand it's free to move only a few feet in either direction. Nor can you pick it up and fondle it only when your fancy so pleases. You treat it gently because it is volatile, owes you nothing except if you prove there's been a continuous effort to earn it. Then you've crushed out 'selves' into one 'self' that's the basis of all sympathy and human understanding. Love is selfish-but you must never be, for fear of losing it.

 

The late August 1981 air streaming up the escalators into that glorious thirties Art Deco celebration of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad at its height Thirtieth Street Station, long past midnight, having just disembarked the Owl, felt like cold sweat on the back of my neck. I'd just dropped the moving van off in Bridgeport after a straight-shot drive from Wisconsin to Philadelphia. Unloading the truck and then driving off hadn't felt like an arrival. This did.

I had read somewhere that the roof had been reinforced so that small planes could land on it — it was that big. The original station even included a chapel and a mortuary. To me at that moment, it was the belly of the whale, site of my final separation from known world and self. I was nineteen, ripe for transformation, and had accomplished nothing; I was filled with potential, eager for the road of trials to unfurl before me. I'll never forget the first time I looked up into the sad, blank eyes of Walker Hancock's ebony statue of the archangel Michael cradling a dead soldier, or the first whiff of the city itself as I left the station's cool stillness and felt as though I were swimming through the clingy, alluring fetidity of the night air.

I'd been many times to Chicago, but Philly was my first Big City. Too excited to be scared, I walked for the rest of the night. After a few hours, I ended up at Day's Deli, a block away from the Curtis. The refrigerated air that poured out as I opened the door smelt of burnt toast and grease. I learned later that what I smelled was scrapple. The coffee I ordered as dawn broke was just terrible, the eggs not much better. I just loved them. Two old men drank tea and argued about Goethe. My sixty-something waitress had a broad south Philly accent and called me 'honey.' When I told her that this really qualified no kidding as the first day of the rest of my life she smiled wistfully and brought me a free piece of pie.

The most powerful scent, as I stepped through the heavy front doors of the Curtis Institute for the first time, a few hours later, that sweltering morning was of furniture polish. The second was of dust; the third was the cologne of Clarence, the burly African American security guard, who drawled, 'Now who might you be?' Back then the stairway was not yet enclosed, so the odor of the chunks of camphor that were placed in the pianos in the studios upstairs drifted faintly down.  I experienced a frisson as I took it all in.

Clarence jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. 'Speak to her,' he said, returning to his newspaper. I introduced myself to an elegant and dignified woman named Shirley Schachtel who welcomed me with an agreeable kindly formality and, noting my pallor, guided me quickly to a chair near the fireplace. I smelled her delicate perfume as she placed her hand on my shoulder. There were goldfish in my stomach; I looked down at my hands to steady myself.  'So, you're brand new. Did you come to compose?' she asked. 'Yes. Oh, yes,' I answered fiercely, looking up. Oh, I was on fire.

When asked, I now encourage young composers to self publish. My sentimental attachment to, and my belief in, the physical object that is a beautifully engraved or hand copied score provided for two decades my justification for willingly relinquishing copyrights to the two publishers with whom I enjoyed long-term exclusive contracts.

Ah, the allure of being 'in print' — the allure of the tome! First, there is the satisfying weight of the object. I heft it in my hand, flip it so that the gold capital letters on the spine face upwards: BENJAMIN BRITTEN: PETER GRIMES. I run my index finger over the elegantly indented, overlaid initials on the front cover, and open the volume. It's a score, of course, not a book, and Britten's name is the largest thing on the first page in a clean, un-seriffed sort of Arial typeface. It sails proudly above the title of the opera. An opera called PETER GRIMES, in a slightly smaller point size. Below that, the imposing appellation, OPUS 33 before still more space, and then, an explanation: AN OPERA IN THREE ACTS AND A PROLOGUE DERIVED FROM THE POEM OF GEORGE CRABBE. Ah! More space; another line: WORDS BY MONTAGU SLATER. A vast field of white flows down to the publishing company's contemporary imprint and address in London at the bottom of the page. On the next page comes the legalese in suitably fine print. And then, on the next, in the composer's handwriting, the dedication, 'For the Koussevitzky Music Foundation dedicated to the memory of Natalie Koussevitzky' followed by his signature and the date: February, 1945. What romance!

Really, the 1963 edition's design is exquisite in every way. The hand engraving is never less than sane, and the artistry of the engraver is always evident in the elegantly broken notational rules and unavoidable collisions that human frailty, fallibility and the music occasionally demand. British practicality seems to emanate from the rather too-round, but affable note heads. It is personal autography at its finest; as exquisite in its own way as what may be the most monumental of all engraving jobs, the Universal 1955 edition of Alban Berg's Wozzeck. This edition is friendlier, has more personality in its crafting than later Boosey and Hawkes projects, such as Gloriana, though the 1966 edition of The Turn of the Screw is exquisite as well. My favorite Britten opera, Billy Budd, the full score of which was not first published for sale and study until 1985, a half century after the opera's premiere, is beautiful, too, but already mechanized and sleek, in appearance somehow corporate.

I don't remember who engraved the vocal score of my Shining Brow but it is an attractive, friendly-looking object. The lyrics and notes have the edgy look that Finale engraving software had back in the early nineties, but the character names and stage directions, at my request, emulated the rounded Arial of the Britten scores. For the cover, Ari Georges, a Taliesin fellow at the time, was kind enough to take a few measures of the score that I supplied him and adapt a design originally made by Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Curtis Besinger that appeared in print for the first time in the 1943 edition of Wright's An Autobiography. Great care was taken by E.C. Schirmer, which paid for the engraving, to ensure that the score was accurate and a joy to hold. I love it still.

Correcting proofs for Carl Fischer's score of my Bandanna a decade later was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life as a composer: English was possibly a third language for the engraver, who was engaged by the house, and each page contained at least a half dozen mistakes. It took three sets of proofs (and a superb editor) to get an accurate accounting of my manuscript, and I was never satisfied with the look of it. There did not seem to me to be any sensitivity on the part of the engraver to my music, or to my style of notation. Consequently, at my own expense, I hired outside designers to create the covers for subsequent Fischer releases of my music, engraved them myself, began the demoralizing process of reluctantly taking on every chore music publishers have traditionally freed their contract composers from doing. Ironically, it was the unfairness of this arrangement, and not a desire to possess my own copyrights, that led ultimately to a cordial parting of ways with Fischer.

Last week eight very heavy, very large boxes of performance materials for nearly fifteen years' worth of my compositions were delivered by a swearing Federal Express driver to our home. They are works whose copyrights have come back into my possession after being controlled for a decade or so by Fischer. Each composition was assigned an envelope. Inside that envelope was the manuscript and set of parts that I furnished. Most look as though they had simply been warehoused. Over the next few months, I'll work my way through the boxes, store whatever rental sets exist of the orchestral works and throw away the hard copies of those works for which I have Sibelius score files — nearly everything. The rest are available on the Burning Sled website for sale either as PDF downloads or as print on demand.

What have I lost, embracing 'boutique publishing' and walking away from Big Music Publishing? Subscription sales to libraries, of course; it has always been gratifying to be able to step into the public library in a new town and to find one of my scores on its shelves. My new works won't be available from (the remaining bricks-and-mortar) music retailers. I lose the the potential for the advocacy of the brilliant, talented gatekeepers who curate and represent the great catalogues, but I know these people socially now, and they would promote my music if they could, but can't, or won't. If I write something terrific, I know they'll take an interest because that's what we all do: take an interest. I do my own engraving, rely on trusted consultants and lawyers for the legal heavy lifting, and have a storefront on the Internet. There may be a deal out there that can inspire me to turn over my copyrights, but I've no romance left in me: it would have to be a pretty good one.

The weighty tome is now a prestige object. Copyright is a weightless, all-powerful thing, and no matter how much 'activity' one's catalogue has, I suspect there's no longer enough 'margin' for a traditional music publisher to justify the cost of having these gorgeous documents engraved at their own expense. I'd be lying if I said that the way the music business has changed doesn't make me a little blue when I flip through some of the ozalid prints of scores that I hand-copied during the eighties and early nineties, still smelling slightly of ammonia and yellowing wherever they'd been exposed to sunlight. Instead of pulling a score of Amelia from the shelf above my desk and running my fingers appreciatively over the score's exquisite hard cover, I tap a few keys and it glows at me from my computer's screen. A good friend, pianist Hugh Sung, runs a business called Air Turn which makes a sort of musical Kindle; it aims to make sheet music obsolete.

Perhaps music will be 'freer' now that the fetishism of first the creation and then the sale and ownership of the physical document has proven to be mediocre business. Flown are the days of the 1963 edition of Peter Grimes and the Paul Revere Award for engraving, as gone as the cool reverie I so loved while roaming the stacks and pulling things from the shelves, entering each score's secret world and learning its song. Gone, mourned, but not forgotten.

Sighing, my father poured each of us an amaretto and stretched out behind his desk. At that moment, I thought him ugly. I'm sure we were both in shock. I could tell that he wanted to talk man to man for the first time. The liquor smelled like death. I didn't want to.

Mother had told him in front of me the day before that, if he didn't find a way to communicate with his sons, then we would turn our backs on him. His last words to me, a few months before he died, two decades later, in 2002, were, 'I probably should have gotten psychological help when you were boys, but there always seemed to be other, more important things.'

He talked. I couldn't keep myself from feeling that on some level he still thought that the past few days — my mother's, his wife's slow motion quadrille with death —  had been about him. Father could be a captivating, charming man; he was capable of real eloquence. He loved the law and could conjur beauty when talking about it. He had the sort of mind that remembered all sorts of things; he was skilled at recalling trivia and injecting it into conversations both to delight his friends and to disarm his opponents.

I don't know whether he was a good lawyer or not, but he adored my mother; she loved him for that. He loved her and the law with a fiery, flawed purity that I can't help but admire. His friends and clients seemed to love him and to respect him. He was often and for long periods profoundly depressed. When we played chess, even when we both knew I was going to lose, he never permitted me to resign. He liked to work with his hands, and taught his sons countless practical skills. He was smart enough to know a lot, and he was proud of his intellect, yet it seemed to me that he did not understand that  it wasn't enough to know a little bit about everything, that one must know a lot about at least one thing. I often disliked him, but I always loved him; I never doubted that he loved me.

We were in his den. 'All your good qualities,' he began, the evening that she died in my arms, the evening before the morning I left, never to return during his lifetime, making a steeple of his fingers, 'you got from your mother; all the bad ones come from me.'

At the end of Act Two, scene two of the opera I am working on with my librettist Gardner McFall right now called Amelia, pregnant Amelia, surrounded by hospital staff and her husband, awakens from a coma, in the early stages of labor. Everyone's been discussing her as if she weren't there; she cries, 'Who said anything about dying?' and, after a brief exchange with her husband and doctor where she insists on natural childbirth, she is wheeled to a birthing room. The next scene begins a few hours later, with Amelia laboring to one side, and a conversation between her Aunt and her doctor on the other.

I have executed this tricky sequence of events several ways, now. The first time, before in real life my wife had our baby and together we went through the process of natural labor, and before the opera was workshopped, I determined to track Amelia's joy and apprehension from the moment she regained conscious. She did so suddenly, with no preparation but an upward roulade in the orchestra and entry on a high G on the word 'Who' — big stuff for a mezzo. It was terrible. What I perceived as a dramatic shift from one psychological state to another came off as unprepared, the roulade was melodramatic because it telegraphed for three precious awful seconds that something 'big' was about to happen, and the high G sounded ridiculous blurting, as it did, suddenly from the mouth of someone prone on a hospital bed. Worst of all, the music I thought was joyous, empowered, and apprehensive all at once sounded like something by Carl Stalling. It rankled.

Although Gardner's words were perfect, the musical tone was wildly off; it seemed ham-fisted, like a man's complete misapprehension of the dynamics of the situation. It ended with quiet burbling in the orchestra as she was wheeled out on a gurney. Here the tone seemed right. The production design was at that point such that the curtain would not close but rather the set would reassemble itself; Amelia would never leave the stage, but she would move behind a scrim and the next scene, between her Aunt and the doctor, would begin, about twenty seconds later. There would be a brief exchange, and the balance of the scene would be performed in pantomime, with the drama moving forward in the orchestra, utilizing themes from the opera associated with the characters in the scene as they came and went — very filmic and, I think effective. In this scenario, the scenelet where Amelia awoke became the transition in the course of the larger drama. This was another error in judgment on my part: demoting it to transitional status served to undercut the drama of the moment, to trivialize it, even.

Six months later, the second draft, after the workshop, an intense work session with Gardner and with Stephen Wadsworth, our stage director and story man, and after having helped my wife through her Birth Story, was more realistic, and more responsible, I think. Since the scene falls at the critical 11:30 spot in the book, it was important to begin tying up, once and for all, the various motives that had been unspooling for the previous ninety minutes. A neat solution presented itself: I backed up from the moment of Amelia's recovery of consciousness and imbedded a motive in the timpani (an S-O-S rhythmic tattoo also associated with her disappeared pilot father and the famous aviatrix in her dreams) that became a musical manifestation of her contractions. This grew until it served to wake her up, and remained, rising and falling in volume, throughout the scenelet between Amelia, the doctor, and her husband. All the joy was muted, the apprehension ratcheted up by stripping out most of the orchestral flourishes. Appropriately enough, since it was already parlando in the extreme, I needed to change very few notes of the text setting.

My collaborators and I decided to throw in fragmentary comments for the men, snatches of phrases that Amelia would 'step on' musically; this highlighted her centrality and position of power, diminished theirs, and kept the focus on her and her contractions. I was able to grab little swatches of music from her dream aviatrix's final plunge into the ocean and place them in the orchestra to complete the identification in her mind. The transition remained the same, and the next scene unfolded unchanged.

After a year, word came from Seattle that the production team needed three minutes to change the set and that my worst fear would be realized: a closed curtain — which could bring the whole story to a screeching halt at the very moment forward momentum was most needed — would be required. Although it felt like a lifetime was being asked for, what it meant practically was that ten seconds were needed for the curtain to come down, another two and a half minutes for the set change, and another ten seconds for the curtain to rise on the next scene before the exchange between Amelia's Aunt and the doctor could begin. This required yet another rethinking of the reawakening scenelet and the ensuing scene. My concern from the start had been that, once Amelia awakens, there is drama only in the rapid, successive tying up of the various stories in the opera, the emergence of the healthy baby being the most important.

The final scene drove forward entirely to the instant when the baby is held aloft by the doctor, and placed on Amelia's chest, at which point the orchestra, which had been telling the story through underscore, would drop out, and the voices carry the opera alone to its coda, dropping out sensibly as characters left the birthing room, until we heard only Amelia, her husband, and, haloing her in her mind, the voices of her aviatrix and her dead mother. An orchestral interlude of at least 150 seconds' length would need to be wedged between the moment Amelia was wheeled out and the nearly five minutes of filmic underscoring that would serve as an apotheosis of the opera's various musical ideas.

The third solution that resulted, executed nearly two years after composing the initial musical sketches of the scene, required backing up again, only this time from the moment Amelia was wheeled out of the room, and introducing into the scenelet solo strings here and there playing held clusters, up-bow, from quiet to very loud, that sound to me like what spasms of pain might feel like. These would then carry into the transition, where I would solidify Amelia's relationship to another character in her dreams with whom she identifies, Icarus, by recapitulating an ensemble set piece from a few minutes earlier in the course of which the boy in the next room 'who had fallen from a great height' had just awoken to seizures and received sedation.

The trickiest measures were the introduction of a rising figure in the strings under Amelia's cry, 'I can do this!' over the S-O-S tattoo in the timpani and the spasms in the solo strings. Then it was smooth flying (or not) as the orchestra revisits for forty seconds the boy's seizure, his sedation, and a reminder of two motives associated with 'near-death' in the opera, the 'sound' of a heart monitor in the orchestra and a swooping motive in the low strings that was a musical manifestation of what the blips on a heart monitor 'look' like, first introduced as we met Icarus an hour earlier in the opera. The effect was that we were now tracking Amelia as she labored offstage.

A very important dramatic cadence took shape just after the heart monitor's return and the begininng of the upward phrases: to me, this is Amelia's crucial 'I can't do this' moment. This moment, where the music grinds to a halt, counterbalances her earlier optimistic 'I can do this' moment, reveals her to have achieved (offstage, during events transpiring between scenes) the emotional state required for the final stage of labor. What follows are 'rising lines' from the original beginning of the last scene — themselves based on the S-O-S rhythm, and associated earlier in the opera with the aviatrix's plane taking off — atop the heart monitor figure. Amelia is heard to have found musical closure: she has moved past her intense identification with the boy, with Icarus, and with the aviatrix, rejected their fates and embraced the 'rising line' of her own Birth Story.

I believe this last solution served to make Amelia's awakening scarier, more psychologically verifiable. The transition between scenes now served a purpose: to track Amelia's progress as she labors during the hours between the last two scenes of the opera, increasing the drama of the colloquy and events that follow and, I think, enhancing the dramatic effect of the vocal nonette that unfolds like a montage of kisses when the baby emerges and our story ends.

'Before I forget, I want to tell you that Marc used to like to sit over there,' said David Diamond during the winter of 2006 at Yaddo, pointing at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We were sitting on one of the pews in the Music Room. His eyes brimmed with tears.

'Marc cared. When he wrote Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny's Trouble in Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?'

I knew David was capable of making things up, but I trusted him that evening. I had served as curator for a concert of music by composers who had worked at Yaddo, and had just introduced a lovely, spirited performance of his early Flute Quintet by Michael Boriskin and the Music From Copland House ensemble. I had suggested that he be invited and, to everyone's astonishment, he had agreed to come. He told me that he had wanted to visit Yaddo one more time before he died.

'You know,' he said, 'I can actually see them all around us: Lenny, Aaron, Virgil, Marc.' He meant it. Tears.

'I think that it is an illusion that the dead have left us, David' I ventured. He smiled, patted my hand.

'They're all here, Daron,' he said, with conviction, 'especially at Yaddo.'

At that moment, school children from the audience surrounded us; they had loved his piece. David smiled like a child, accepting their praise, asking them their names.

He died of heart failure a few days later.

When my mother was a kid there was a man in her neighborhood who used to get methodically drunk every weekend. At the peak of his damp oblivion he'd take a package of pennies and burst it open. Then he'd toss the pennies into the street with a beery nonchalance, and my mother and her friends would all scramble after them — down on their hands and knees, pushing, snatching and shrieking. Then he was Olympian.

One night just before my teens my father, throwing his suits into a valise and pledging to move out, emptied the change from his pockets onto the floor and ordered me to pick it up.

How our Gods come tumbling down. Whether our buttocks are raised away in prayer, or in a gutter chasing pennies, we'll squeeze our eyes shut to avoid watching our idols totter.

Lukas Foss was music; he could transport you, make you forget where you were.

'The melting major to minor chord at the very end,' Lukas enthused, hands massaging the air between his chest and the dashboard, 'is original here. Some say that this is where Mahler got the idea for the same effect in his sixth.' We were riffing on Beethoven's third, the great 'Eroica,' the score of which sat on his lap, the piece I was driving him to the Performing Arts Center to rehearse with the Milwaukee Symphony, for whom he was then (this was the early eighties) serving as Music Director.

'At the end of the second movement, I'm going to try something interesting: as the theme disintegrates—the part marked sotto voce—I'm going to remove players one by one from the tune.'

'Like Beethoven's hearing leaving him. Cool. How do the players feel about the idea?'

'Oh, they are not too happy. They are a little cross about the scherzo, too.'

'How come?'

'I'm making a little Rossini-esque accelerando through the theme so that it sounds like nervous laughter.'

'Beethoven's nervous breakdown?'

'Night fears following the loss of his hearing....'

'Chattering teeth in a death skull...?'

'Worse. The effects of lead poisoning.'

'Wow,' I said, turning the wrong direction on to a one way street. The sound of horns.

'What's that?' asked Lukas, abruptly conscious of his surroundings.

'We're driving the wrong way down a one way street,' I answered, as mildly as I could.

'Oh,' he replied, completely disinterested. 'Then, when the finale begins, the variations are a triumph of the...'

I pulled over. We were now five minutes late to the rehearsal and I was hopelessly lost, even though I had grown up in Milwaukee.

'... a triumph,' I attempted to complete his thought, 'of the rational, conscious mind, expressed through the excercise of craft that composing variations requries, over the irrational fears of the subconscious?'

'That's interesting you should say that,' he smiled. 'I've always thought that fugue, so rational, was, in the end—take the Grosse Fuge—his avenue for exploring madness.'

And so the conversation continued, as I drove us around for another ten minutes, exhilarated not only by the wrong turn but by the fact that I had completely screwed up the simple task of getting the Maestro to his rehearsal on time that I'd been assigned and by the welcoming embrace of Lukas' wonderful, joyful mind and musical spirit: he had literally made me forget where I was. And so the musical conversation between us continued for another quarter century.

The last time I saw Lukas was a few months before his death. My wife and I sat immediately in front of him and his son in the mostly-empty Miller Theater at Columbia University where his Time Cycle was being performed. We visited awhile. I told him that Time Cycle had not only transported me, made me forget where I was, the way he himself had when we first met, but that it had also made me forget what time it was, and he squeezed my hand, eyes twinkling. He asked after my brother, sent his love, reached out to pat my wife's pregnant belly to greet our son, and said, 'Welcome, Little Man.'

After his piece the audience whooped and hollered. Lukas asked, 'But nobody knows I am here. Should I go up?' His son said, 'Yes, of course.' He did, and received a long, loving, appreciative ovation.

Lukas was music, and profoundly worthy of love. We remained faithful friends for over a quarter of a century, and I shall miss him more than I can say.

'I don't understand the business of trying to be accessible,' George Perle once said. 'When I write a piece, I write a piece that I like and I want to hear, and that I think will be fun to listen to and fun to play. That's all you have to think about.'

'This,' I recall thinking, while serving as his copyist in 1986, extracting the parts to his Dance Overture for the Houston Symphony, 'is not fun.' The meter changed every bar, metric modulations abounded, ranges were extreme; the orchestration was hyper-kinetic, almost academic. I came to realize, when I listened to a recording later, that George's music sounded nothing like it looked on the page: it evovled with seeming effortlessness, brimmed with humor, and had a pixyish sense of orchestral color. This was difficult fun for virtuoso players, and it had flowed from the mind of a very, very smart, very musical man. Lesson learned.

I learned this lesson in another way from George while copying one of his wind quintets—I think it was the one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It required the clarinet player to alternate clarinets in A, B-flat, and E-flat, and did not stipulate at the beginning which instrument the player was playing. I played the first few bars at the piano, carefully transposing the horn into F and the clarinet into B-flat: sounded great. Then I did the same thing, transposing the clarinet into E-flat. Same deal: sounded great. Heart sinking, I played through the opening measures one more time, transposing the clarinet into A. This one seemed to me to be the least likely, since the range would be extreme, the choice of color highly unusual. Sounded great.

Feeling like an utter flat, I paged through the score, looking for the first change of instrument. That eliminated one of the three choices, but left me with a fifty-fifty chance of looking like a jerk when I went for my first working visit to his apartment on Central Park West. In the era of hand copying, the one thing a composer couldn't control was his copyist's human errors; they could derail an important rehearsal or recording session, and make the composer look foolish, or, worse, unprofessional.  My pride notwithstanding, I wouldn't be hired again if my client didn't have faith in me. Consequently, asking George wasn't an option. That was when I sat down and analyzed the piece. Over the course of the next few hours, score study made the answer obvious. I learned that George Perle's music did not reveal its secrets easily. I chose the correct clarinet, and I chose, like so many others, to become a fan of George's music.

He hired me for a couple of other projects—his Cello Concerto, and something else. But, as much as I admired him as a composer, as a copyist I wasn't making enough money working for him. His music was just too labor-intensive. As copyists still say, 'Footballs [that is, whole notes] are where you make the money,' and there were precious few footballs in George's music. So I chose not to take the next job he offered, and am poorer in experience for having made that choice.

I brought the score of my first symphony to our last work session. 'I love the way you build climaxes,' he said, 'and your harmonic language is supple, but what you can really do is write tunes. I hope you know that.' Some of the best advice any composer ever gave me. That was over twenty years ago. Since we didn't move in the same circles, we never had occasion, save for the occasional holiday party, interval, or green room encounter, to speak again.

I remember standing on the sidewalk near his place shortly after that final meeting, trying on hats with the help of a street vendor. His wife Shirley walked by, nodded approvingly at a rakish Harry Lime-style Homburg I was creasing before the mirror, and said, 'Be careful which hat you choose. A hat can change your life.'

George was a master of making tough choices; tough choices that resulted in difficult, and beautiful music. He was careful about the notes he chose, and those notes changed my life.

The Mills Music Library stacks were to me a place of exploration and mystery during my early teens. My entre into the world of serious music occurred not through listening to recordings but through cracking scores. I would take the Badger Bus from Milwaukee to Madison, drop my backpack at my brother's apartment, and, pulse purring with anticipation, run to the cool, silent, stacks where I would spend the entire weekend paging contentedly through the treasure trove of music there. My romance with score study began during those blissful days of musical spelunking.

Notational style is as readily identifiable as a composer's fingerprints; it reveals the psychological state and personality of the author as surely (and as imprecisely) as the musical ideas that it endeavors to document. Indeed, the Arts of Engraving and Music Copying (arts obliterated, for better and worse, by the introduction of musical engraving programs during the 1980's) are as revealing to the reader of the score of the marriage of intentions of composer, editor and amanuensis as the composer's original manuscript.

Notation provides a glimpse into the inner world of composers: 'augenmusik,' a term that describes graphical features of scores that when performed are unnoticeable by the listener, is a hard concept to define—as hard to define as 'word painting,' the musical technique of attempting to have the music mimic the literal meaning of a song. As far back as the 1300's, Cordier's chanson about love is in a heart shape; another of my favorite examples is John Bull's 6-part circular canon Sphera mundi from the 1800's.

I'll never forget my delight in opening for the first time the score of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King. There, forming a cage, were the bars of music of the composition itself. A bracing flood of associations ran through my mind. I thought if Ilse Aichinger's Bound Man, whose bonds served him as a source of inspiration and strength. I recognized for the first time the irony of music being composed that seemed so free—especially aleatoric pieces like Music of Changes—by a man named Cage. I think now of Maya Angelou's lines:

'The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.'

Measures, bars of music, attempt to cage the bird of song in an effort to preserve it, just as mad King George attempted to rescue his sanity by placing himself in his doctor's care. Of course, music, an abstract art, doesn't in itself mean anything; a composer can attempt to create through notation a psychological context in which the performer sings, but the resulting song in performance is as much the performer's creation as the composer's.

A notated score serves as an imperfect magical mirror through which the performer steps in order to enter the world of the piece itself; the performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. The mystery is that anything vaguely recognizable comes out of all this.

I found then and still find the impossible transaction between composer, performer and audience that musical notation hopes to enable eternally puzzling. It is the reaching without end for the elusive note just barely heard in one's imagination and just beyond the grasp of one's conscious mind, what Shreker called Der ferne Klang, Mahler Das Lied von der Erde, that is to me endlessly enthralling, and what keeps me composing.

For I've always felt that music streams endlessly whether we're listening or not, that it is a manifestation of the 'world without end' described in Ephesians. Nadia Boulanger's last words, according to Leonard Bernstein, were 'J'ecoute la musique sans commencement ni fine.' In sadness, a composer comes to understand that as surely as the scorpion in the old story is compelled by his nature to sting the frog and drown them both while fording the stream, a composer must attempt to notate what he hears, and by so doing, clip his songs' wings.

Even for Bird, the chart was a cage; inspiration during performance was the key. The key.

This year, with my healthy, joyful son taking his first steps, I have felt Daron’s presence even more intensely than in the past. Daron Aric Hagen was born on 26 January 1960 at the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He weighed six pounds and ventured into this world at 2:55 AM – during one of the day’s smallest, coldest hours.

His poor heart: he arrived with congenital heart disease, atresia (absence or closure of a natural passage or channel of the body) of the aortic orifice, hypoplasia (a condition of arrested development in which an organ or part remains below the normal size or in an immature state) of the left atrium (the main part of the left auricle) and the left ventricle (the chamber which receives blood from the left auricle and forces it into the arteries).

Despite this, Daron lived for four days – long enough to be baptized, and to develop some sort of impression of his parents and of the world; certainly, long enough to have been held by them, and for them to have given to him, completely and without reservation, their hearts.

I write this based on notes written on a copy of the postmortem examination, notes written in my father’s hand. Before dying of heart disease, he disposed of very nearly every personal effect, and would have managed to erase this artifact of his interior, personal life as well, had my mother not given it to me just before she died.

Probably my father jotted the words I am looking at right now on the yellowed sheet of tissue used back then when generating carbon copies on a typewriter so that he could explain to my mother, recovering in another room in the hospital, what had happened. In the lower left-hand corner, in pencil, is written ‘Cause? German measles. Unknown. Flu.’

One of my most potent childhood memories is of finding this document among my parents’ papers. I was old enough to read, and I read my name; I read that I was dead, and I wondered how this could be true. A sense of displacement – the earliest whisps of being able to imagine adult woe, of my parents before me, of me after them; of secrets, of things so personal that they are never discussed.

For a long time, I kept the embryonic awareness of self, the sweetness and the sadness of it that were awakened by the discovery of the other Daron, secret. When I asked my mother to explain, she smiled, and told me that I had been given his name in his honor, that I was living for two, and to not be sad, that she missed him, but that she felt him with her always, always. We never spoke of him again, but he has always, always been with me.

About a decade ago in Pittsburgh, my wife (who I was then commuting from New York to court) and I were having dinner in an intimate little Japanese restaurant called Nobu. Returning from the restroom, she asked me who the happy little boy was she had seen out of the corner of her eye sitting next to me. There had been, in reality, no boy. I believed then (as I still do) that she saw not the boy but rather, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the boy himself. That was when I told her this story. Someday I will share it with my son, hoping it will help him a little to understand his father.

Atop the bookshelf in my son's room sits a terracotta sculpture of me for which I recall sitting for my mother during the summer of my ninth year. As she smoked Pall Malls and fashioned the gritty clay on the back porch of our house, I saw my form slowly take shape beneath her expressive hands. I remember the dog day thrum of the cicadas mingling with the purling of Paganini Violin Concertos—to which we listened, mother having been a violinist well into her teens—one after another, as she worked on the statue for the entirety of that idyllic summer.

My mother sculpted my image because she needed a subject, she loved me, and because I was available.

On particularly fine days, or when my buddies would swing by to ask me to play Last of the Mohicans, or Star Trek, or Rat Patrol in the woods with them, mother would say, ‘Listen, go ahead if you like, but if you want it to look like you, you have to stick with it; don’t be surprised if it starts looking a lot like your brother Britt.’

At one point, while modeling the feet, I remember her simply slicing them off with a bit of cutting wire and dumping them into the clay pail. I fished them out, saying, ‘They look fine to me.’ ‘Yes,’ they’re okay,’ she replied, ‘but they’re not your feet.’ ‘But nobody will know that except us,’ I protested. ‘But we’ll know,’ she sighed. ‘Where’s the satisfaction in not getting it exactly right?’

A wet cloth was draped over the statue, and for the next few days she executed sketch after sketch of first her own feet, and then mine: ‘I’ve got to freshen up my skills so that I can understand what a foot really looks like,’ she explained. Resuming her sculpting, she was pleased with the results: ‘Let’s roll up your pants a bit, like Tom Sawyer,’ she said. ‘Now that I’ve captured your feet, I want people to recognize them.’

As far as I was concerned, we were done, and I was headed for the Greenfield Park swimming pool. She had more to teach me: ‘You have to have a secret,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, this will just be a statue of a little smiling boy. What do you want your secret to be?’ she asked.

I was a serious child. ‘How can a statue have a secret?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. ‘I could be hiding something behind my back,’ I ventured. ‘Good,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t peek; I’ll put something in your hands behind your back when we’re done working on the front.' In due course, the piece was finished and fired; when we picked it up at the kiln, I learned the boy’s secret: he was clasping an enormous toad.

I had learned that all good works of art require six ingredients: hard work, love, dedication, discipline, craft, and a revealed secret. Mother has been gone for a quarter of a century. One of Art’s consolations is that someday the terracotta boy's timeless secret smile and all that it embodies may beam down in answer not just to my mother's grandson's smile, but even to her great-grandchild's.

'Good luck, boys,’ Michael Carrigan said as he handed us each a small envelope with thirty dollars in it. Stamped on each in a heavily-seriffed typeface that seemed to evoke the Ages were the words THE CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC. Below that was scrawled in loopy letters our name and the date — something-something-1982. Our train-fare and lunch money: we were Ned’s first generation of students at the Curtis; we were on our way to New York for our lessons.

Letter to Ned, 1 January 1983: ‘My mother died in my arms last night….’

We were punctilious about ringing the buzzer at precisely the appointed hour. To be early or late was to begin our lessons with explanations. Not good. I remember that I nearly always wore a suit and tie, because I understood that respect was due, and because I also understood that a lesson with Ned wasn’t just a lesson, it was a performance.

Ned’s Diary, 12 January, 1983: ‘Daron’s mother has died. …I still see her transparent skin, the eager eyes like candles as she leaned across the table in the Barclay bar, pride subduing fever. Daron at twenty lacks the protection that I at fifty-nine still retain from my parent, tant bien que mal.’

Lessons began with lunch laid out on the red dining room table. There was always a quiche from Soutine’s, Godiva chocolates, and sometimes berries. Always, there was a pitcher filled with liquid of indeterminate color that we dubbed Mystery Juice. Years later Jim revealed to me that it consisted of a mélange of whatever unfinished juices there were to be found in the refrigerator on the morning of our lessons.

Letter from Ned, 2 May 1984: ‘I read your whole diary in almost one fell swoop and was quite impressed. Diaries are dangerous, being the most subjective of literary forms (and subjectivity is boring), but yours makes it, and is the real thing.’

There were books everywhere; paintings of Ned on the living room walls. Jim might pass through on his way to an engagement. On the piano would be placed copies of whichever of Ned’s pieces Boosey had just put into print. Wallace the cat, fat, foul-tempered, and plagued by seizures set off by rhythmic sounds, would flit in from the bedroom, rub on our legs, and then hiss at us imperiously before stalking out.

My Diary, 22 October, 1987: ‘Over to Ned’s for tea and to play him the St. Louis Symphony performance of Fresh Ayre. ‘What a sexy piece,’ says Jim. Ned sighs: ‘Well, it isn’t entirely successful, is it? The orchestration is too thick, too subtle — can’t you get those sounds more easily?’ He’s right, of course, but how I hate that! Finished copying the Schuyler parts — my seventh copying job for Ned — how many more of his pieces will I copy over the years?’

Over lunch, Norman Stumpf, Robert Convery and I would be quizzed on the concerts we had attended, the music we had listened to, the books we had read, and whatever gossip had manifested itself at Curtis since our previous lessons. Ned didn't talk about himself. Although we were never explicitly instructed to do so, it was clear that we were expected to express ourselves as concisely and as articulately as possible. I was good at this part, so I relished it.

My Diary, 29 February, 1988: ‘Leap Year Day. A letter today from David Diamond, in which he admonishes me to ‘read, read, read, especially 19th-century novels, and be more introspective,’ and one from Ned saying, ‘Don’t try so hard to be Rastignac. A little more egoism would do you good.’

Talking Part finished, Ned would move into the living room and seat himself at the piano, followed by whoever had volunteered to go first. The rest of us would sit in the dining room at the table and talk quietly, or peruse Ned’s library. (It was considered an honor to be entrusted with a book for the week.) One squirmed (or not) on a little, uncomfortable cane-seated chair next to Ned as he played through whatever one had brought. Bringing sketches to a lesson could be disastrous — we had learned through bitter experience that an entire lesson could be devoted to cleaning up our notation if we didn’t bring our work in as immaculately notated as possible.

Letter to Ned, 30 March, 1994: ‘I was delighted with your students’ seriousness and technical facility when I taught them for you last week; they adore you and are good young men. I think I offered them a lot and felt both fulfilled and invigorated by the experience. I think that A. is the most talented, B. the most ambitious, and C. the most sweet-natured. But they’re all first-rate, aren’t they?’

Listening to somebody else’s lesson was as illuminating as one’s own; eavesdropping when Ned periodically took a phone call to talk business was equally enlightening. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that I was fortunate to have read all of his books before joining his studio, because he occasionally vamped — or was he testing us? we never could tell — by making points that he had already made in his published writings. We called this ‘playing tapes’ and it seemed to please Ned when we caught him at it.

'Instruction is not offered, it is seized,’ Ned would explain, pulling a pencil from the juice glass on the piano.

Letter to Ned, 29 August, 1996: ‘Young Eli, on the other hand, is a pleasure — very sweet and serious. He works harder than this school deserves, though not more than I deserve. I have encouraged him to take a tutorial with Bill Weaver and to seek out Ashbery when he’s a senior. Bill says he’ll take him as a student. A very good kid….’

I had a habit back then which probably annoyed Ned enormously. If he asked me whether I had read something I hadn’t, I would say that I had, and then read the book the following week. Needless to say, I ended up reading a lot of books. I was eager to impress, and too eager for him to get to the point, to (I thought at the time) risk having my lesson derailed by my lack of erudition. It took me a few too many rather nasty, embarrassing moments to be cured of this character failing. Twenty-seven years later, it irritates me when my students do it to me with an intensity only possible in one once guilty of the same thing.

Letter from Ned, 5 July, 1997: ‘Yaddo tells me about October 23. I said no. I simply can’t do things like that anymore. Then they asked again, and said that you and Lowell would do all the work, perform all the songs — that all I had to do is curtsy. So I said yes. About your songs: Do bees make sandwiches?’

I also liked to try to impress Ned by bringing in what I thought were finished pieces. ‘Ah, another fait accompli,’ he would sigh. ‘Of course, it’s finished, so nothing I say matters.’ Beat. ‘On the other hand, there’s always something to criticize; that’s why I'm here,’ he would say, drawing a pencil from the juice glass like a stiletto.

Ned’s Diary, 14 January, 1999: ‘Daron at 3 A.M. came into my sleep-sodden room to say quietly, ‘We think you should get up.’ With Sonny and the cats beside him, Jim lay there….’

He was at his best with me when he was the most brutal, and the better my music was, the more merciless his critique would be. He never pretended to be an academic; he was a mid-career professional. Consequently, his reactions were like dispatches from the creative and intellectual front lines, uninflected, and deadly serious. I often disagreed with Ned, but I never for a moment doubted that he was speaking from vast experience and from the gut.

Letter to Ned, 12 July, 1999: ‘Gilda visited me at Yaddo today … and showed me the letter you wrote her about her songs. What a lovely note, and boy, what a generous gesture: she was excited, honored, and grateful to hear from you.’

Afterwards, Norman and I usually walked down Broadway to Times Square together, talking about our lessons. I remember that we did enjoy being Young and we talked about it, as well as the romance of Manhattan and our excitement at feeling as though we were on a meaningful journey. As ubiquitous as Starbucks is now, Brew and Burger was then; we would step into one and spend our lunch allowance on a pitcher of beer and burgers, wrangle like pups over the Big Issues, Music, Tonality, Modernism, Minimalism, and —isms in general. We laughed a lot, and the Big City on those evenings opened for us like Pandora’s Box. We were Young though, and Resilience and Hope always sustained us.

I remember when Norman took his life a few months later. I know that Ned does, too; the symphony I wrote in Norman’s memory at Curtis; Ned sitting with Norman’s weeping parents in the hall as I conducted his classmates in its single performance

Birthday Piece from Ned, 1 November, 2002: ‘Coming or going, our names are forever intertwined. Betwixt us we share eight musical letters: two D’s, three E’s, two A’s, one G, from which for your birthday, I have composed this rhapsody … the remaining letters spell RNOGRH NROR which, in ancient Celtic, means ‘Love Forever’.’

Music has intertwined our lives contrapuntally for over a quarter of a century. I was hurt by the way Ned portrayed me in his diaries. But I understood that an author inevitably hurts the people around him when writing memoir well, and forgave him. We've remained ever in touch, and he's respected my privacy. Ned is one of the few people I know who 'gets' me; that's more important, as he would say, even than friendship, in the end.

Letter from Ned, 7 August, 2006: ‘Very dear Daron—My heart and soul are with you now and forever. Too tired to write more. Always—Ned.’

Composing concert music for traditional symphony orchestra (as opposed to commercial music for games and soundtracks, which is intended to be performed for microphones in a studio, recorded, and manipulated by audio technicians, which is quite another thing) requires an understanding of the culture of the orchestra as a performing unit, a specific set of musical skills-many of which can be learned only through hands on experience, and an appreciation of what it feels like (and sounds like) to both play in an orchestra and to hear an orchestra from the audience.

Orchestras are Big: they are particularly good at being Big and at expressing Big Thoughts. Rehearsal time is limited: composers who write practical pieces that are orchestrated in a fashion that makes the orchestra sound good in the allotted time get programmed. An orchestra can make complicated music sound straightforward if the composer is a good orchestrator. An orchestra all playing one pitch together in various octaves is as beautiful, opulent, and as stirring as the greatest organ: consequently, an orchestra-like any first-rate performer-can make superficial, even stupid music seem profound-at least while they are playing it.

The goal is to compose idiomatically for the orchestra as an instrument so that your music will 'sound' well in as many different contexts as possible. (An opera composer must also know how to score for an acoustic orchestra playing sixteen feet below the stage as opposed to one onstage, how to accommodate singers singing without amplification without overpowering them, and so forth. Amplification skews everything, and orchestrating for pit orchestras in which half of the players are wearing earphones (or are even playing in other rooms and their performances 'piped in') or synchronizing their performances to pre-recorded parts being mixed and broadcast into the house requires yet another set of skills.

How I Learned to Orchestrate

First, of course, there was the book: Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov's Principals of Orchestration. At the age of ten I found it at the Brookfield Square Mall Walden Books around the same time that adolescence found me. Leaning against the elm tree at the northeast corner of the intersection of Meadow Lane and Elm Grove Road during the winter of 1971, waiting for the school bus alone, poring over the Korsakov, I could feel the pull of the secret world of Musicians. In retrospect, its allure was a combination of things: its contents seemed to offer a path toward beginning to understand the unfathomable language of music; it served, as an object in itself, as a talisman or icon from the world of music, helping to make real to me a world that was still out of my reach, but might one day welcome me; finally, simply handling the book made me feel special. I read and re-read it obsessively. Had the scriptures affected me as viscerally at that age, I'd have become a minister instead of a composer.

At fifteen, Harry Sturm, assistant principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner, took me under his wing, devised a great summer-long introduction to the ways of the orchestra: first, I was to play piano in the ensemble for a concert; second, I was to station myself in various parts of the ensemble and listen to how they interacted as he conducted rehearsals for another concert; third, I was to take lessons in the rudiments of conducting from his assistant; fourth, I was to compose, rehearse, and conduct the premiere of my piece. The result was Suite for a Lonely City-the piece that my mother sent to Leonard Bernstein that triggered a letter from him that changed my life forever. In his review of the concert, Jay Joslyn, the Milwaukee Journal critic back then, wrote that I must have felt like Moses atop Mount Pisgah, looking down from the podium into an orchestral Promised Land as I led my fellow teenagers in the premiere of my first orchestra piece. I did.

Although I've taught orchestration, I've never taken a class in it. I've learned by doing, composing for everything from high school band to the New York Philharmonic and everything in between. On 13 July 1979, the summer after graduating from Brookfield Central High School, I proudly accepted my first professional fee as an orchestrator-a Burt Bacharach tune for the Milwaukee Symphony-courtesy of John-David Anello, the fascinating founding conductor of the Milwaukee Pops. I still have the pay stub. The same summer Anello also gave me my first music copying gig-extracting the solo piano part for the Yellow River Concerto.

My conducting teacher at the University of Wisconsin, Catherine Comet, was a prodigy, had studied privately with Nadia Boulanger for three years as a pre-teen, graduated from Juilliard. 'Nadia never told me that I couldn't be a conductor,' Comet said. 'She never charged me for a lesson, saying that when I began making money as a conductor, I could pay her back. I did.' A drop-dead beautiful Parisian with absolutely impeccable technique, she terrified me. I idolized her. I left the University of Wisconsin before taking an orchestration class, but not before her razor-sharp disquisitions about orchestral combinations and the proper notation of string harmonics during my lessons had left me both edified and traumatized. I am still proud of the five measures of an orchestra piece I composed at the time that she singled out as 'deliciously orchestrated.' Ned, during my first composition lesson with him, about six months later, zeroed in on the same five bars.

As a student at the Curtis, I enjoyed each Saturday morning what I felt was the catbird's seat, perched behind a grand piano on the stage of Curtis Hall, stationed slightly above and behind William Smith (who became a treasured mentor and friend) as he rehearsed the Curtis Orchestra in whatever repertoire the Philadelphians were playing that week. Bill collected composer facsimile scores, and would bring a copy of the work at hand, if he had it, for me to look at; Clint Newig-the coolly capable Philadelphia Orchestra librarian-would send over their full score, which contained all the bowings that helped make the Philadelphia Orchestra glow; and I would bring my own score. As I listened to rehearsal and Bill dispensed his profoundly useful, unpretentious brand of wisdom to my classmates, I would array before me for comparison all three scores, taking notes, listening, and learning.

Curtis didn't offer a class in orchestration when I was there and, in any event, I was by this point developing my chops by composing as much orchestral music as I possibly could, since the Director, John de Lancie, had miraculously (and with what now seems Olympian generosity) decreed that I was to be allowed (nay, required, since he told me when I asked him why he was allowing me this golden opportunity that he cordially detested the idea of composers 'sitting on their hands' while conductors and performers tried to make sense of their scores) to conduct the premieres of whichever orchestral works I was able to complete. He kept his promise, authorizing me to compose and conduct the premieres of about six hours' worth of orchestral music-concertos for violin and cello, an orchestral song cycle, a suite, an overture, a symphony, and Prayer for Peace for string orchestra-while a student at the Curtis, along with a dozen chamber works, a one act opera which I staged and conducted, songs, and cycles.

By the time I reached Juilliard, I was already fulfilling commissions from major orchestras, so I didn't see the point of submitting to the (then) rather Byzantine process of competing for a chance to have one's music sight-read by the second-level orchestra there. I had begun learning the brutal professional orchestra world lessons before graduation from the Curtis. For example, orchestra players (like small children) are brutally honest in their criticism of composers. And they should be, since performing a bad piece of music is for them much more like being trapped on a coast-to-coast flight with a screaming infant than most composers seem to understand.  Halfway through the first rehearsal of Prayer for Peace, the composition with which I made my professional debut as a composer with the Philadelphia Orchestra at nineteen, I felt the tide of opinion turn in my piece's favor when William dePasquale turned to Joe dePasquale and said, 'I know he's young, but c'mon, Joe, let's give the kid a break.'

Dealing with Players

Orchestral players are proud members of an exceedingly close-knit community with strict codes of behavior who customarily function in a highly stressful work environment. From their earliest days at conservatory they've labored to blend well with their colleagues, to simultaneously stand out, yet serve as a cog in an enormous eighteenth century music-making apparatus. I recall observing John de Lancie's wind sectional rehearsals as a student: he would beat four, command each player to enter on beat one with their softest note, grow louder as the beat proceeded to four, and then diminish to nothing as four more beats went by. The tension was incredible. This developed the players' nerves, taught them how to perform under severe pressure, and served to shape them into a section.

Working for many years as a professional music copyist (for both concert and commercial projects) taught me a lot about what orchestral players need to see in the part that is put in front of them. Although when the parts go on the stands the composer has all the Power, his Authority diminishes every time something is harder to play than it needs to be, the notes are unidiomatic for the instruments, or when technical mistakes and errata emerge in the performance materials. Adhering to the Major Orchestra Librarians' Association guidelines is a good start. (If you use copyists, make sure they do; if you copy your own parts, know them.) Observing Norman Carol (back then the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra) conducting my classmates in a string sectional, I once saw him toss a Krzysztof Penderecki score over his shoulder in disgust because the string parts were so poorly notated. 'Maybe he's a genius, who knows?' he cried, exasperated. 'I certainly can't tell by looking at these parts!'

If asked by the conductor to address the orchestra, speak no more than three minutes and save the description of your inner motivation for your program note-if anyone cares, they can always read it later. Don't take personally the 'Don't tell me why you wrote this thing fella just tell me if you want it fast or slow, loud or soft' attitude that can seem to come off the stage like air out of a walk-in freezer. If you've written a good piece, the temperature in the room will rise. You might even get a 'good job' or two. Orchestral players are people who want to express themselves: embraces, gratitude, even tears really are possible, if you the piece has earned them.

Orchestra players don't care about synthesizers-except if they're being used to take the place of humans. Commercial orchestrators and composers are using fewer and fewer living players, more and more gadgets. This concerns everyone.

A composer must first ask himself how he failed when something doesn't sound the way he thought it would. Making changes during rehearsals, dreaming up extra-musical rationales for why something isn't working, is for amateurs. Don't try to make up for your failure to properly notate what you heard by explaining yourself to the conductor, or by coaching the players; leave them alone. Let them do their jobs. Period.

Dealing with Conductors

Respect the chain of command. Speak when spoken to. Never address a player directly during rehearsal; all interaction should be through the conductor.

Obey the house rules: if you compose for an orchestra hurl not your sabot into the machinery. Whether or not you think the person standing on the podium deserves it, tradition dictates that he be addressed as Maestro. Orchestras are tyrannies ruled by conductors, not democracies, and that fact can be really hard on people who became instrumentalists partly out of an urge to express their individuality. One thing a conductor can count on, to paraphrase Oscar Levant, is the knowledge that the players in their orchestra will inevitably grow to despise him. With the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in my early thirties I alienated the conductor forever when, in response to his request for a few comments, I mounted the podium (another mistake) and, in five minutes, rattled off all of my notes to the orchestra. The players shuffled their feet, applauding me, but really they were just enjoying the discomfiture of their sovereign. The composer is the only person in the room who knows the score better than the conductor. Accordingly, conductors prefer that we smile gratefully and to remain mute, no matter what.

Don't be a backseat driver. Unless you are waving the stick, your tempo is not necessarily the correct one. The conductor's job is to make his orchestra and (secondarily) your piece sound good. He has already taken a risk by programming your work. I don't vouch for the veracity of this story, but I repeat it because, if it is apocryphal, then is truer than truth. It involves Serge Koussevitzky and Béla Bartók, who during a rehearsal of the majestic Concerto for Orchestra, kept piping up with comments. Maestro asked maestro: 'Can you please hold your comments until the break, and we will discuss them in my dressing room?' The maestros met; through the door a furious battle. When the rehearsal resumed, Maestro announced to the players that the Maestros had agreed that everything was going just fine.

Dealing with Management

Composers and performers rarely think about the fact that orchestras are charities, that ticket sales cover only a relatively small portion of the cost of concerts, that donors underwrite everyone's salaries. Composers are paid a fraction to compose the concertos that soloists are paid to play a single time-for entirely understandable reasons. Audiences, boards, players, and conductors are-with famous and noble exceptions-resistant to programming new works-even ones that are stylistically ingratiating. When you think about it, it's a miracle that there are as many orchestras as there are.

Try to understand that the audience isn't there to hear your piece, and behave accordingly. As far as programming is concerned, folks are there mainly to hear the soloist play the concerto; the standard repertoire celebrates the artistry of the orchestra and the players; to the audience your piece is a new piece of music is at best little bit like the relative from out of town who tags along on a date; at worst, your piece is, well, another version of the screaming baby in an airplane scenario. Management knows and accepts this, even if you do not. Usually folks in management have never heard of you; your piece has been programmed on the say-so of the music director, or the executive director joined a consortium and now they have to fulfill their side of the bargain. Be nice. Be real. Ask questions. Study the myriad practical issues they are facing, and they will try to understand yours.

Dealing with the Audience

It isn't just important that young people should meet and speak with a living composer; it is important for composers to be reminded about the fact that, to most young people, we simply don't exist. We can do something about it. If you are asked by your conductor or the education folks at an orchestra to visit schools, say yes. Be friendly, unpretentious, accessible, and do not condescend.

If you are asked to speak to the audience, keep your remarks under three minutes and don't make things up or try to be clever. Speak from the heart-that's eloquent enough. Let your music do the talking.

If you are asked to speak to donors, ask the development people in management to explain to you who they are and what they do. Respect yourself and the people around you by wearing a good suit and tie or a dress to the concert and surrounding events.

If you are asked to give a pre-concert talk, you have been given a marvelous opportunity to be an advocate not just for your piece, but for contemporary music. It isn't about you.

The soloist and the conductor are the most important people in the Green Room. Don't feel badly if people don't recognize you, or know what to say to you. Take up only as much space as your personal value system is comfortable with. Stay centered; be happy (you've just had a première!); look people in the eye when they shake your hand and congratulate you; listen to them; don't dig your toe in the ground-actually or metaphorically. Thank your conductor; thank players. If a player compliments you, savor the fact that that is not a given and thank her: we are all professionals, but no composer is entitled to a good performance.

Every artist’s Yaddo Story is as personal, as different, as meaningful, and as true, as every woman’s Birth Story. This one is mine. I think I have always felt more at home at Yaddo than anywhere else in the world because my Yaddo story is also my story, a story about the presence that absence makes; how everyone we thought we lost is, in fact, still here.

'I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.’ — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

David Diamond had given me the impression that student composers at Juilliard were forbidden to take lessons with anyone except our principle teacher; so, meeting with Vincent Persichetti felt sort of illicit, dangerous – especially because of the way he leaned forward over the desk that separated us on which the full score of my first symphony was spread. It was the spring of 1985, and near the end of what had been a delightfully instructive lesson. His piercing, bird-like eyes shone as spoke, his sentences came out in short, conspiratorial bursts; his cigarette smoldered, forgotten, between his fingers, the long, drooping ash hanging from the business end was on the verge of falling off.

‘Golly,’ he said, you’ve got a handsome hand there,’ Vincent said, paging through my score one last time. He got to the point. ‘Arnie tells me you won’t take his class.’

Arnold Arnstein, appreciated and respected with quiet ferocity by an entire generation of American composers, including Bernstein, Diamond, Harris, Schuman, Barber, Piston, Persichetti, and Diamond, among others, was generally believed to be the finest living American music copyist. And he really was. Years of the work had destroyed his eyes, which were reamed in red and watery, hugely enlarged by the thick glasses he wore. He taught a class in music copying at Juilliard that all of us composers were required to take. I had been working already for five years as a professional copyist, and had some pretty heavy clients, including Diamond (a somewhat sadistic employer), Elliot Carter (whose wife Helen would telephone me very, very early in the morning to ask how the work was coming along), Ned (an excellent, patient employer who customarily paid other copyists more than me), and others, and so I had figured, with casual ignorance, that I should be exempted from attendance.

‘We’ve got to figure out some sort of way to work this out, Daron,’ said Vincent. ‘Arnie’s a great copyist, y’know; he could teach you a lot.’ He shot me a quick look. ‘But, but,’ he not so much stuttered as took quick gulps of air, ‘y’know, if you weren’t so talented, I’d say, uh, sure, y’know, go ahead, take these copying jobs. But, I think you’ve gotta not do that. Um, do anything, uh, be a garbage man; just stop copying other people’s music for them.’

‘But I need the money,’ I replied. The cigarette ash fell on my score, just as I had feared it would.

‘Yeah, I know. Oops,’ he said, brushing off the ash, ‘Sorry.’ A quick, sweet smile, ‘Plus, you get half the money up front and all that; then you have to work it off,’ he sighed, looked at the floor. ‘Well. Maybe I could ask Arnie to put you on his crew for this Menotti opera he’s copying right now. I hear it’s pretty wildly behind schedule and he needs extra guys. Then you could learn from him, y’see, and get paid at the same time, and not have to take his class. How about that?’

I remembered my first 'copying job' — extracting a piano solo part for the Yellow River Concerto in blue ballpoint pen for John David Anello and the Milwaukee Symphony during the seventies while I was still in high school. And then, my astonishment upon winning a job as a music copyist a few years later at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia when Sam Dennison, the curator, pulled from the shelves the same Yellow River part I had copied in Milwaukee. And then, working at Fleisher while a student at Curtis, spending hours in the stacks, combing through the collection of scores by South American composers copied by hard-working WPA chaps during the Depression — all exquisitely done, many in three or four colors, most never looked at again, let alone performed.

One of my work study jobs at the Curtis had been to copy parts for the school’s orchestra when necessary, to transfer bowings into them from the Philadelphia Orchestra string parts that Clint Newig – their coolly capable orchestra librarian – would send over. Another was to help Edwin Heilakka, the gentle, fascinating man who ran the Institute’s orchestra library, to organize Leopold Stokowski’s papers and scores – the maestro had just died and his widow had gifted them to the school. I remember opening some scores and having bread and butter letters from Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, Samuel Barber, Ned, others slip out from where he had left them. My fingers practically tingled as I drew out of one of the boxes Stokowski’s full score of The Rite of Spring, which contained not just his clever orchestration changes in one color, but Stravinsky’s own modifications for performance specifically in the Academy of Music in another.

Twain: ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!'

Computer software ‘engraving programs’ such as Score, Finale, and Sibelius have rendered mine the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in the ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner of extracting, by hand, using quills, India ink, and vellum, the individual parts (which are all presented together in the conductor’s full score), from whence the musicians play the single lines the composer has crafted for them. We music copyists were like monks, running into one another at Associated Music just south of Columbus Circle when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our clients, share with our colleagues ‘secret saves’ and anecdotes from the trenches of our drawing boards.

I never took Arnie’s class, but I know that I should have. Despite Vincent’s advice I went on to serve as a copyist, proofreader, or editor on hundreds of projects over the next fifteen years. Sometimes I hear a piece of music on the radio I’ve never ‘heard’ before and realize that I copied the original set of parts for it during my salad days; it is even stranger to attend a rehearsal of one of my pieces and see yellowed, dog-eared, old rental library parts on the players’ stands next to mine for someone else’s piece that I don’t even remember having copied.

The money was pretty good, the work was always interesting; and there is absolutely no substitute for learning a piece by another composer from the inside out by extracting all the parts by hand. Every musician should do it once. It is possible to copy music mechanically, without really engaging intellectually – sort of like driving while having a conversation. Sometimes I did marathon jobs during which I would listen to every Mahler symphony in order, go back, and begin again. But, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is actually ‘playing’ the composer’s process the way a pianist ‘plays’ a composer pianist’s piece – your brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when he wrote it. Several composers’ styles and methods grew so familiar to me during those years that I blush to admit that I could still probably compose something in their style that would be pretty hard to spot as a forgery.

Twain, again: ‘Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?’

My worst experience as a copyist was working for David Diamond: he had written a concerto for a soloist who, while in every other way professional, urbane, and musically sublime, hadn’t looked at his part very carefully before the first rehearsal; the conductor was frustrated by the fact that three or four errors had eluded my proofreader’s eye, but had only come to light piecemeal because not every player had attended every rehearsal. I recall the conductor spinning around and facing me from the podium at one point, shrieking, ‘Copyist! I thought you had corrected these parts!’ Everything turned out just fine. Correct them, I did: David had me change every one of the seventy or so printed parts by hand, using an electric eraser, over the course of the next few weeks to teach me, I suppose, a lesson. As far as I know, the piece hasn’t been performed since.

My loveliest experience as a copyist came one afternoon at the Fleisher Collection sometime in the early eighties: Karen Campbell, Kile Smith, Norman Stumpf, and I were all copying the parts to Louis Gruenberg’s enormous cantata Song of Faith, when I began softly humming the song ‘Another You.’ Norman picked up the tune, louder; Karen, who I could hear, but not see, began improvising on it an octave higher. Soon, the composer Romulus Franchescini joined in, and the saxophone-player copyist Bill (who actually preferred to be called Art but nobody knew that until twenty years after he retired) Daniels, and then Sam, growling in the bass, and finally, Kile, pattering a soft beat with a pen in one hand tapping a water glass and the other tapping his desk. After a little while, it died away naturally and we went back to work. It was such a moment of perfect grace that nobody ever mentioned it again.

When first we met, Virgil Thomson looked like a crazed space creature, sitting in his wing chair, plucking alternately at the squealing hearing aids in his ears and squinting at me like a swashbuckler as he quizzed me about my background. His belt was wrapped around what had to be his chest; his chin seemed to stop where his tummy began. He was shaped like the illustrations of Tik-tok in L. Frank Baum’s books. When, a few weeks earlier, Ned had told me that his teacher was looking for someone to do some orchestrating for him, I had pounced on the opportunity. ‘But you’ll have to submit to an interview,’ said Ned. ‘No promises.’

It was a humid August afternoon sometime during the eighties. I had come back by bus from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to interview for the job. I was hot and tired, broke and cocky. To the left of the front doors of the grand old Chelsea Hotel hung a plaque on which were listed the names of former residents – some of the greatest artists of the twenties and thirties. At the bottom of the plaque, someone had scratched ‘and Sid Vicious!’ with a knife.

‘So what’s it like being a young composer these days?’ he shrieked. ‘Where do you get your money?’ he continued, not waiting for me to answer. I leant forward in my chair, clasped my hands together in what I hoped was the picture of earnestness, and rolled out some sort of answer. I don’t think he heard me. The ear pieces started up again, this time on different pitches. He batted his ears. I winced. He turned his head just so and they were both silenced. ‘I know all about being a young composer,’ he shouted, triumphantly. ‘It’s all about optimizing your leisure time!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s that? Call me Mr. Thomson, or Virgil. Or boss,’ he finished. Now his eyes were twinkling.

‘Okay, boss.’

‘No, I don’t like that. Stick to Mr. Thomson.’

‘Okay!’ I shouted.

‘What was it like studying with Ned?’ he asked, suddenly in a normal tone of voice.

‘Wonderful,’ I shouted. ‘Great!’ I gave a ‘thumbs up.’

‘You don’t have to shout!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not deaf, you know! Okay. Right,’ he barreled on. ‘Look, I have some piano pieces I want you to orchestrate, and some orchestra pieces I want you to turn into piano pieces. Plus, I need you to do a piano reduction of Louisiana Story. Can you do that?’

I was hired, and worked for Virgil for six or seven months. He wanted to supervise my work, he said; consequently, I was to bring my gear to the Chelsea and do all of the work at the table in his living room. I don’t recall that he ever asked to see what I had done, or that he ever demanded a single change, and I can’t honestly say that I remember a note of what I did. He was exceedingly kind to me, and treated me in a comradely fashion, like a younger colleague who, as he would say, was ‘on the make.’ Lineage means a lot to me, so I was proud that Ned had taken orchestration lessons from Virgil in the same room forty years earlier. There were three great things about the job: one, I got to listen as he conducted business on the telephone from his bed in the next room; two, I received a guided tour of his art collection; and three, I got to ask questions and to hear lots of terrific stories.

My reflexive response, when asked, one July afternoon in 1989, by Roland Johnson of the Madison Opera, who I wanted to serve as my librettist for an opera they were interested in commissioning about Frank Lloyd Wright, was Paul Muldoon. Back then, the only way you could reach someone at the MacDowell Colony was by way of two telephone booths in Colony Hall, where Paul was seated, a few feet away, reading the newspaper. I leaned out of the booth and asked, ‘Say, Paul, how would you like to write an opera together?’

We read everything we could about Wright before reconvening, a few months later, to write together a filmic treatment, which ran perhaps a dozen pages and determined what would happen in each scene. I then planned out how long each scene would last, and the sort of musical form I thought would work best to underpin the action of that scene. Giving my notes to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some ‘parallel’ poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn.

Paul’s libretto in hand, over the course of eight weeks at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts that winter, I composed the music for the first act. I began then the process I have happily adhered to ever since: I retyped and reformatted the libretto to reflect what I intended to do to it musically, storyboarded it on the wall, and illuminated it with various colored pens and pencils – red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I wanted to ‘track’ also got colors. Standing with a glass of wine and dreaming on the entire act is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

I composed the most important bits first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (the ‘emotional nuclear reactors’) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a ‘home’ key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. Our lovers’ keys were associated, of course, by the tri-tone, the ‘forbidden’ interval that Leonard Bernstein had used to such advantage in organizing West Side Story.

When it was done, I played and sang it for Paul, who then went off to write the libretto for the second act. Here’s a page from my diary from 16 February, 1991: ’I’ll base Act Two, scene two, a cocktail party which spotlights a sequence of gossiping couples, a set of variations — everything said is about Wright and how he affects others — on the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier introduced over the previous barbershop quartet  by an onstage piano trio hired to entertain at the party. This will manifest several of the core themes of our opera (including the ‘borrowing’ versus ‘purloining’ argument & the union of the so-called ‘high’ culture of opera and the ‘low’ culture of barbershop) by musically ‘stealing’ from Strauss and doing variations on his theme, just as our Wright is building upon the achievements and ideas of Sullivan; furthermore, Wright will be observed in the act of seducing someone else’s wife in front of his own mistress to the strains of this ‘stolen’ music.’

Whereas I had written the first act of Brow entirely without input, the second act I took several times to meetings with Bernstein.

We had had over the months enough soul-searching heart-to-heart talks about inspiration and authenticity, ewigkeit and the human spirit to fulfill the rankest amateur's most sentimental expectations of what serious composers ought in private to discuss. I was honored at last to be treated like a colleague by Bernstein: the ebullience and exhilaration of craft-what professionals really talk to one another about-Marc Blitzstein once described as "something called the artist's personality, plus the equation of content and form; [they] are part of the story. For the rest, listen to the stuff"-came in due course, and when it did, it proved entirely more useful.

Our ritual: a glass of Ballantine's together, a round or two of anagrams, the Times of London crossword (which he would do left to right, in rows, in the time it took him to write the letters), some light gossip, and then I would sit down at the piano and play for him one of his Anniversaries, which I had memorized for the occasion. At last, I would play and sing the scene from Brow that I was working on. He'd become tough, all business, focused like a laser beam, speed over to the bench, push me to the side, and start playing off of my manuscript, squinting, sort of wheeze-singing as he briskly double-checked parts he wanted to speak to.

"Okay, baby," he'd begin. "Try this." He would "put over" a few bars of what I had written and veer off in a new direction, improvising an entirely different line reading. Then he'd stop, suck on his plastic cigarette holder, quickly page to a different part of the manuscript, find something, and say, "Or you could have used this from before, like this." He'd play a few bars. "No, that wouldn't work." I'd improvise a different line reading. "No, no, you can't do that!" he would laugh, "Marc did that in No for an Answer! Do you know that one?" He'd noodle a few bars. "No, that was Tender Land. Ugh. God." Laughter.

Around this time, Paul and I spent a week at Taliesin West, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Especially helpful in my portrayal of Wright in the second act were the insights that Wright protégés Edgar Tafel and Richard Carney shared with me. In the beautiful recital hall there, Paul read some of his libretto aloud, and I played and sang several arias from the opera-in-progress for the Taliesin Fellowship. I was privileged to stay for a few nights at Taliesin in Spring Green during the fall of 1991, to dine with the apprentices, and to attend a cocktail party in the same room in which Paul and I had set our fictional one. Did I feel Wright’s presence? I did – as strongly as, a few months later I felt Bernstein’s, when Brow was workshopped after his death at his home in the Dakota. Allan Gurganus suavely describes what I think I felt in both places as ‘some essence quorum of [their] souls’ intensities.’

After the company accepted the opera, it was time to choose a stage director. I suggested a young writer named Stephen Wadsworth. Bernstein had described to me how Stephen had just helped him to flesh out and extend his one act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, into a two act opera called A Quiet Place – a tricky, thankless job. Stephen masterminded a beautiful, heart-rending first production of Shining Brow which was as much a memorial to Lenny as a meditation on the career and life choices of a famous architect.

Six months of orchestrating – some in New York, the rest at Yaddo. Production. And then it went up: I remember standing during a performance at what is called ‘the rail’ of the house, behind the audience, where the authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen, as the tragic finale unfolded.

Stephen said, ‘Look!’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Look at them,’ he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. ‘They’re all weeping.’

‘Yes, that’s where we want them,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s where they want to be. You did that. I did that. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.’

 

'The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.' - George Bernard Shaw

As Gardner McFall, Stephen Wadsworth and I listened to the first read-through of our opera Amelia, we carefully monitored the 'feel' of the invited audience, did our utmost to be sensitive to how the opera was or was not at any given moment 'connecting' with them. It was a thrill to hear the work on its feet, as it were; it is moving to know that so many talented people are working together to realize one's vision. Although I have been down this road before, and have necessarily grown brutal about revising my work during the workshop process over the years, I felt afresh the subdued flush of communal satisfaction that only comes with collaboration. Hearing many people moved to tears helped fortify the illusion that I hold that I had as a composer succeeded pretty well in being 'of one mind' with them as they experienced our opera.

Although lots of skills are required, and an ability to intuitively discern logical structures and arguments, composing music isn’t a science any more than performing it is, and the possession of superior musical talent and musicality are not necessarily coupled with superior intelligence or insight into the human condition any more than being a 'good' person helps to make one a 'good' artist, or vice-versa.

Writing 'for fellow composers' supposes that there exists some sort of cabal of wizardly initiates that 'get it' and that everyone else doesn’t.

Writing 'for ordinary people' supposes that there are such things.

The idea that one’s music will ever be performed exactly as one imagined it (especially by oneself) is an hubristic illusion.

The idea that anyone (including oneself) will ever 'understand' exactly what one has written is an illusion. 'Meaning, after all,' is as indefinable, as elusive as 'truth.' We create these things on the fly, just behind our eyes.

What does it mean to write music 'for oneself?' Is this stance just a way to free oneself from the hard, grown up necessity of accepting that one has no control over what one creates, but rather must fashion one’s understanding of what one has created after the fact by combining one’s own opinion of what one expressed with what others (performers, listeners) tell one was expressed?

While the idea that music 'means' anything is an illusion, music can create emotional contexts; what the specific emotional contexts conjured are, however, is elusive, subjective.

That said, why do audience members tell me they feel the broad emotions I hoped they would feel as they listened to one of my pieces? How about the ones who felt something different or nothing at all? (They are usually kind enough simply to walk away.) As a composer, I 'feel' what I want to express, think of notes that 'are' that feeling to me, write them down, and see what happens. Is my feeling that I am pretty good at this as illusory as the feeling of control people have who, when shooting craps, tend to throw the dice harder when they want high numbers, and more softly when they want low ones?

I was aware during the workshop performance that the audience had been drawn in first and foremost by the dramatic situations, as conveyed by the words, because (one hopes, so long as the composer didn’t put himself at cross-purposes with the libretto) that’s the easiest part to 'get;' next by the performers (their facial expressions, the interpretations they gave to the words and music, the conductor’s choice of tempii), who — by way of those interpretations — helped guide the audience toward the desired emotional responses; and, finally, by my music, whose job it was and is to create a coherent musical universe in which the drama can unfold.

While a real-life opera composer must be (as Oscar Levant wrote of good conductors) "irrationally convinced that he is right," and convinced that he is "in control" of that "coherent musical universe," his artistic vision must also be reconciled with his cold-blooded, professional assessment of the relative "success" of his music with the audience's needs in creating the procession of psychological and emotional states required. He them must combine these with the assessments of the rest of the creative team, all of whom are monitoring the relative "success" of their contributions.

After the workshop, the very sane, very hard process of overcoming knee-jerk self-defense mechanisms by accepting criticism from the rest of the creative team recommenced, and together we continued to hone the collective reality, labored to enhance the audience's suspension of disbelief, so that Amelia’s 'coherent musical universe' might now be dressed by the costume designer, made corporeal by the set designer, and illuminated by the lighting designer, all under the supervision of the stage director. If I did not pause — after having composed two evening-long grand operas, two one-act operas, and two chamber operas — to indulge in an uncontrolled giggle of delight at my good fortune, it was not because I was ungrateful, or unmoved by the enthralling Process in which we were and continue to be involved, it was because I've had that moment before, and the stakes are even higher now that I am older and more experienced: it was and remains crucial that I keep my head clear, objective, and in the game.

If the Titanic really did sink because of the substandard ore that was smelted for the under-trained riveters, it is an excellent cautionary metaphor for why composers of grand opera (which is in countless ways like an enormous ocean liner) must possess a comprehensive musical skill set before writing one. The workshop process and the delegation of important components of the composer's job (like orchestration) to others can set off the "for want of a nail the shoe was lost" sequence of events that has sunk so many well-intentioned (and expensive) projects, just as surely as a romantic, sentimental faith that the composer's "inspiration" alone will carry the day.

‘The post!’ shrieked Frances, rushing out of the room. An expectant pause, a temporary truce. ‘Two for my mother, one for Sophie Bentinck with a sweet blue seal of cupid — no, it’s a goat with wings — and one for Di, franked. I can’t make out the frank. Who’s it from, Di?’ — Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian

First Letters. My father occasionally sent me letters from Chicago, where he worked, addressed to Master Daron Hagen, Esquire, when I was very young because he knew that, flipping down the door of the mailbox and — sacred joy! — finding a letter there addressed to me, never failed to send me over the moon.

Returned Letters. A letter returned, unopened, is a poignant thing; one hardly knows what to make of correspondence returned in its entirety a decade or two after delivery. It has happened to me twice. During my first two years of college, I wrote a letter (sometimes two) every day to my high school sweetheart. (It helped that my student job was as a campus mailman for the University of Wisconsin, so I could frank the letters for free.) Years ago, she sent them all back to me. I’ve never opened the box, and probably never will; but they are safely stowed among my papers. Strangely, a few months before he died, my father sent me the two decades’ worth of the letters I had written to him and to my mother. I meant never to open that box either, but, just before placing it in the attic Upstate, I did; peered in, drew out at random four or five. Of course we scarcely see ourselves as others see us, or as we portray ourselves to our loved ones in prose, but the embarrassed, painful shock of recognition when I caught a whiff of the plucky, I’m-gonna-make-it tone, the rat-tat-tat enumeration of fleeting achievements, the callow attitudinizing, the ‘insider’ airs, was still as unexpected as it was acute. I quickly re-sealed the box and, shuddering, put it away.

Dead Letters. Every couple of days, the letter carrier puts in our box mail intended for the previous, now deceased, inhabitant of our apartment. Would it be more appropriate for me to write ‘Moved. Left no forwarding address’ on the envelopes (rather than the admittedly unsentimental ‘DEAD’ I customarily write in large, block letters) before placing them carefully atop the mailboxes for the carrier to take god-knows-where?

Colony Letters. How many times have I over the decades walked wistfully past the mail table in the linoleum room at Yaddo, pining for a letter? Who has not left a letter with a luminary’s return address on it sitting there for a few extra hours before retrieving it, hoping that the other guests will notice it? Or carried mail for others? (Once in Florida, Ned gave me a sheaf of letters to put into a mailbox just as we were about to drive somewhere, saying, 'In case we are killed on the road, these shall have been my last thoughts.' Summer after summer, at MacDowell and at Yaddo, charged by the deliciously acerbic Louise Talma with making sure that her letters went directly to the post office: ‘I don’t want people snooping into my affairs!’ she would grumble, Pall Mall dangling down from the side of her mouth.) That priceless epistolary commodity: a gossipy letter received while in residence from someone currently in residence at another colony.

Sung Letters. No wonder that opera composers, when looking for words of unimpeachable authenticity, first-person and emotionally-fraught, decidedly not meant for posterity, so often turn to letters: a clatch come to mind — Tatanya’s letter to Onegin; Baby Doe singing of her love for Horace; the letter aria in Tobias Picker’s Emmeline; Schoen’s letter to his fiancée in Lulu; the letter scene from Werther. I am not immune: my opera Amelia climaxes with the reading of a dead naval aviator’s ‘final letter’ to his daughter.

Lost Letters. Re-read so many times that it disintegrated in my hands, the most precious letter of my youth now exists only in memory. I’d loved her since the age of eight and had finally summoned the courage to tell her. I held her reply in my sweaty, ten-year-old fist. I turned the note over on its back, peeled it open, and read it, experienced for the first time how the entire universe can be transformed by three little words, written in the loopy handwriting of an eleven-year-old girl, I love you.

‘For this flautando pianissimo, would the first violins please lead from the back this time,’ said the gentle Voice of Authority, who sat next to me last weekend in a tiny room in the basement of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, wearing a set of headphones and leaning over the score of my Double Concerto, making quick little pencil notations over each measure as upstairs, on the stage, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson and the Vermont Orchestra, conducted by Troy Peters, performed.

The effect was as striking as it was instantaneous: listening through headphones myself, I now heard the violins in the back of my head instead of the front, and the sound, while being more ethereal, had more middle to it. I was astonished. Later, Troy explained to me that this is a fairly common request, made to elicit a little more evenness and heft from a section of strings, but it was new to me, and a revelation. ‘Concertmasters,’ he continued sensibly, ‘lead; it’s their job. So they tend to be a little ahead of the rest of the section, especially in super-loud, intense passages. This can take away a little bit from the center of the sound.’

Adam Abeshouse was the ideal producer and engineer for the Vermont project; he generously answered my questions as time permitted, and seemed to realize that I was truly enjoying the experience not just of hearing my concerto documented so beautifully but also of learning from him.

Every producer I’ve worked with has taught me things. Years ago, serving as conductor for an ultimately unreleased recording of my opera Shining Brow, I learned a lot about how to pace a session by inadvertently allowing, by being too willing to agree not to move on, a highly accomplished, well-intentioned producer to spend most of a ninety minute recording session putting the first ninety seconds of the piece in the can. In his defense, he probably couldn't be faulted, since critics do seem to form a large part of their opinion of an entire recording based on listening to the first few minutes, and he probably felt that he was protecting the project.

Serving as a producer myself for a disc of Henry Cowell art songs one evening in New York at Town Hall (lovely, but noisy space — because of the Times newspaper delivery trucks that roar down Forty-third Street late at night), I learned to be highly selective about what I ask the engineer to play back for the artists. I’m afraid that I made the process harder than necessary for the soprano by allowing her to listen to too many takes. By the end of that long evening, she seemed gallows-bound as she marched down to the basement to don the headphones like (her words) a crown of thorns.

On another occasion, producing a disc of my wind ensemble music in Texas, I was taught to stop overusing the talk-back switch by a pair of engineers who assembled a little box connected to nothing with a switch and a light on it labeled ‘conductor interrupter’ and presented it to me after the last session, saying, ‘See, Daron, now you can talk as much as you want and never stop the session!’

Over the years, producing pickup orchestras contracted to record my private students' works at the lovely old Kaufman Studios in Astoria where so many of the great silent films were shot, I figured out, with the laid back, expert help of Joe Castellon, how a producer can practically conduct the orchestra from the booth if necessary.

I learned that being a little bit sneaky is an important skill for a producer during another session with a pianist and singer. I asked the engineer to run tape (how I date myself, since now sessions go straight to a computer’s hard drive) during rehearsals and was rewarded for my deceit (and foresight) when I captured the singer effortlessly lofting a lovely, creamy high A that, during takes, he never surpassed.

Sneakiness notwithstanding, trust is a producer’s currency; without it, the process can be really unpleasant. Serving as conductor for the recording sessions of my opera Bandanna in Las Vegas a few years ago, I worked with an excellent young German tonmeister who performed a real-time mix to stereo of the dozens of microphones trained on the soloists, chorus, and orchestra. I trusted him, but knowing (and having to accept) that what I was hearing on the podium was serving not as the final product but rather as the raw material for someone else’s ears was anguishing.

As a collaborative pianist, I have learned to sympathize acutely with performers’ insecurity and feelings of over-exposure when compelled to listen to playbacks of myself accompanying baritone Paul Kreider on a disc we made together for Arsis. I loved Paul's performances, but, oh dear, how keenly I shall have liked to have fired that clumsy pianist! I was ultimately satisfied with the quality of my performance on the released disc, but during those sessions mine was the scalding self-loathing usually reserved for viewing oneself naked in the mirror after a season of unmitigated gluttony.

Working towards a recording session as a proofreader for a music preparation team that had just finished copying the new charts for a first-time read-through at Carroll's (that history-drenched warren of rehearsal studios on Fifty-fifth Street) by Liza Minelli and her big band during the late nineties, I learned an important lesson about musical charisma by witnessing an artist of her amazing caliber turning it on, dazzling and inspiring even the most hard-boiled of elite New York freelance players and then, just as suddenly, turning it back off.

Post production, the magical-mystical place where the temptation to achieve perfection at the loss of musicality, authenticity, and genuine feeling is literally at one's fingertips, is just as fascinating. Choreographing the mix-down from 32-tracks in real-time with the engineer and performing overdubs on my opera Vera of Las Vegas for CRI, I learned to alternately revel in and despair at recording technology’s ability to enable one both to ‘bury’ mistakes in the mix, and to suddenly lose a dozen hours of work by accidentally pushing the wrong button.

What producers and performers share, of course, is the joy of capturing lightning in a bottle. At one point in Vermont, Adam turned to me and with a happy, child-like smile, remarked, ‘You know, there are like a handful of people in the world who could have done what Jaime just did there.’ It was one of those moments that was at once musically and personally fulfilling. As the recording industry continues to metamorphose, I’ll keep my hopes pinned on the Process of 'making records,' hoping that it never moves too far away from that key on a kite string in a thunderstorm place.

A hot Manhattan autumn day in 1987. 'That's alright, baby,' she purred with that famous 'just put your lips together and blow' voice as I tripped on the stairs and fell to my knees at her feet. 'Oh my, I'm sorry!' I said, looking up at her. Chuckling, she asked, 'Are you on your way to Lenny's?' My vocal chords no longer worked. 'Rglksh,' I croaked. She smiled and patted me on the arm as she passed. A whiff of perfume. 'Have fun,' she said, rounding the corner.

As if being on my way to my first private lesson with Bernstein weren't nerve-wracking enough, I had literally run into one of my all-time favorite screen goddesses on the stairs. I hadn't bargained on that when I had drummed up the nerve to make the call, schedule the time with his assistant, thereby taking the maestro up on the invitation to study composition and conducting privately with him that he had extended a few weeks earlier at Tanglewood.

Nine years previously my mother, not knowing what to do with her son, who was composing up a storm, playing the piano all hours, singing, and conducting with a single-mindedness that was just plain unnerving (not to mention disappointing to my trigonometry and physics teachers, among others), wrote a mother's plea for advice to Bernstein's personal secretary, with a score and cassette tape of one of my orchestra pieces enclosed.

Mother never showed me the letter that she wrote in 1979. It must have been persuasive though, because Helen Coates passed the materials on to her boss, who (in an example of his extraordinary generosity of spirit) replied enthusiastically. I was allowed to read his reply after my mother, who looked slightly stunned, had finished. 'Yes,' I read, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen, 'your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.'

A letter was sent to Diamond, of whom we had never heard; he wrote back that it was too late in the season for me to come to Juilliard. Instead, I went to Madison, where for the next year I wrote poetry, composed, practiced, and enjoyed being a Midwestern undergraduate at a Big Ten school. When it came time to audition at Juilliard, I sent in my scores, flew to New York, and presented myself for an interview with the school's distinguished composition faculty.

As a building, Juilliard today is far more welcoming than it was in 1978. It seemed to me then to be a coldly modernist art bunker from the outside; the inside was a succession of airless, cement-walled rooms lit with nasty fluorescent fixtures and by thin windows that allowed in little light but which would have been useful as arrow holes. There was also a vague atmosphere of profound arrogance to the place that I couldn't put my finger on, one that put me off.

It was evident to me the moment I entered the room that I was to be sent packing. The men who were to determine my future—David Diamond, Elliot Carter, Milton Babbit and Vincent Persichetti—sat at a long table on one side of the room. I seated myself in a straight-backed chair on the other side, facing them. The scores I had submitted sat in a neat pile in front of Diamond.

'Lenny wrote to me about this young man,' began Diamond. A flicker of interest passed across Persichetti's face. 'Why do you want to be a composer?' asked Persichetti. 'Because,' I replied, 'it is the only thing I have ever done that I know I will never be as good at as I want to be.' My bravado was met with disapproval. Diamond moved to the piano and, moving from low to high, stabbed at six or seven pitches. 'Please sing the pitches back and name them,' he said. I started to sweat as I sang the first three or four and then trailed off. 'Your ear is not your strong suit,' he clucked, reseating himself.

Next, Persichetti moved to the piano. 'I am going to play a little medley for you of various themes. Just call out the name of each, if you can, as I play, and I'll move on to another.' The unmistakable pungency of the Tristan chord. 'Good,' he smiled warmly. I was dazzled as he segued directly into a Gershwin tune whose name I didn't recall, 'That's fine,' he said, continuing. Then I missed two, and he played something that was clearly Mozart, but what I didn't know. I began laughing nervously. 'What's that?' asked Persichetti. 'I've never seen someone do that before,' I effused. 'That was wonderful!'

'Yes, well,' said Diamond. 'Evidently the repertoire is not your strong suit either.' Carter looked out the window. Babbit looked at the table in front of him. Neither made eye contact with me or said a word. Diamond reached for one of my scores and flipped it open. After paging through it for a moment, he pushed it over to Babbit, who didn't look at it. 'Mr. Hagen,' said Diamond funereally, 'it is felt that you should go back to Wisconsin and develop your technique.'

Clad in a green leisure suit with a round-trip Milwaukee-New York-Milwaukee airplane ticket in the pocket, I thanked the gentlemen who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and violently threw up. After I had collected myself, I headed home and spent another year in Madison. When it came time to audition for Juilliard again I applied instead to Curtis, and was accepted. After three years in Philadelphia, I returned to Juilliard as a scholarship recipient, and concluded at last my formal education as a student of David's.

My years in Madison, at Curtis and at Juilliard behind me, and now my brush with Bacall behind me, I reached the second floor of the Dakota and knocked on Bernstein's door.

I am — for better and for worse — a pianist. For about a year I was a very, very good one. Before that I was an amateur; after that I became what I am now, a composer who plays the piano.

This morning I awoke with the first few bars of Beethoven’s Opus 49, Number 1 in my head. Morning coffee made and carried into the music room, I pulled out the well-thumbed second volume of complete sonatas and placed it on the rack, turning, for the first time in twenty-eight years, to page 355.

It is said that this humble (some say even insignificant) sonata, probably the easiest of them all to play, was written to be learned by students, and that its publication was an accident — that Beethoven’s accountant took it upon himself to publish it during one of Beethoven’s periods of financial distress. No matter, there before me sat the first page of my old friend; for like so many fledgling pianists before me learn it I did. The music was covered with fingerings and lesson notes, even an oily discoloration in the lower right hand corner of the page from having been so often turned.

When I placed my hands on the keys, I felt first the flush of familiar pleasure as my thumb played the upbeat to the first bar. Then a rush of motor memories, life memories, and admonitions from my beloved teacher, Ms. Ross came to me as my pinky began the second bar. The row of descending thirds in the left hand that enters next provoked rueful gratitude for the weeks spent practicing fingered thirds I was assigned when it emerged that I had never practiced them before.

And then, in the third bar, the crossed out fingerings (this was the Schenker edition) and the Schnabel fingerings that my teacher preferred I learn. ‘Why Schnabel’s?’ I asked. ‘Because he studied with Leschetitzky, who studied with Czerny, who studied with Beethoven,’ she answered.

The familiar outward rotation of the right hand in the second movement once carefully rehearsed as a teenager to serve as a moment of relaxation prior to a difficult passage triggered not just the thought ‘relax here’ but also a warm, clear memory of being stopped at that point during a lesson and being asked how much sleep I had had. I confessed that I had been for the past thirty-six hours copying the parts to a new orchestra piece. ‘Then, my dear,’ my teacher sighed, ‘go home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow, because you can’t possibly expect your hands to do what your head and heart tell them to in this state. Not just the lack of sleep but the gripping of the pen for all that time has clearly short-circuited your coordination.’

Double bar reached, I closed the volume and placed if back on the shelf, thinking unsetimentally that there is for me an intense satisfaction to be taken in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven’s did two centuries ago. Musicians all know that muscles remember, that motor memory is fashioned over time through the repetition of a given collection of motor skills and the ability of the brain to internalize it such that they become automatic; that once muscle memory is created and retained, there is no longer need to actively think about the movement and capacity is freed up for interpretation and expressivity.

This is the place I love the best — where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free, and the exhilarating music ‘sans commencement, sans fin,’ which this morning sounded to me like the Opus 49, Number 1, fills the the air.

'Fugue subjects,' said David Diamond, expertly sketching one on the sheet of music paper on the piano rack in front of us, 'are like snakes.' Over his shoulder I could see snowflakes whirling outside through a tall sliver of window. 'Every one of them has a head, a body, and a tail.' Chop, he slashed a line between the head and the body; chop, he slashed another between the body and the tail.

'Or like people,' I replied, 'with a head, a body, and a tale.' He laughed pleasantly. January of 1986 — the Regency Theater just around the corner was in the middle of its three week Truffaut retrospective; Marc Blitzstein’s Piano Concerto had just received its first performance in fifty years; I was one of David’s students, having a lesson at Juilliard.

'Or a Life,' he frowned, 'with a memorable Beginning, a Middle ripe for development, and an End….' He stopped writing. 'Now sketch a counter-subject.' I took the pencil from him and began adding my squiggles to the line above his. He pursed his lips. A sharp intake of breath: 'Something memorable,' he said, 'not ... mechanical.' I tried again, but all I could think was that Life, like 'a Pretty Girl, is like a Melody.' I giggled nervously.

'What’s so funny?' he asked.

'If Life is a Melody, then Energy must be the human compulsion to organize sound into Song,' I rallied, half-serious.

'And Force is the application of creative energy,' he smiled.

'And composition is Birth?' I asked.

'And pulse is Gravity,' he answered. 'Which makes entropy, or the lack of pulse, Death,' he said, taking the pencil. 'Look,' he circled the head of my counter-subject, 'this is memorable, so why not just take the tail of the subject, invert it, and use that as the head of the counter-subject?'

Chop, I thought: the snake devouring its tail. Chop. 'In my beginning is my end. Eliot,' I risked.

He chuckled. 'Right. The Ouroborus. My end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of the Scots. Earlier. Better,' he replied with finality as through the door the three light knocks of his next student indicated that my lesson was nearly up.

I carefully placed the enormous pages of my manuscript into the elephant portfolio in which I had brought it.

'Mr. Hagen,' he said, gravely, as I reached for the doorknob. 'Don’t let gravity win.'

My generation of music copyists and composers shall have been the last to compose music and extract parts entirely by hand. It also has experienced the collapse of the record industry, the rise of digital downloading, and the end of traditional music publishing.

Theme

In September of 1988, not long after matriculating from Juilliard, I took on for the first time the role of teacher when I accepted a job teaching music composition, ear-training and theory for two days each week at a liberal arts school ninety minutes north of New York City called Bard (whose motto at the time was 'A Place to Think') College. In retrospect, it is altogether possible-because I never considered myself an Academic and had no interest in a career as one-that I may have learned during those years more about myself by teaching music than my students learned about music by studying with me.

I'd been convinced to take the job by a composer named Joan Tower during a very long van ride from Saint Louis to Kirksville. We had not met previously. Out of the blue she had telephoned, invited me to submit an orchestra piece to some reading and recording sessions by the St. Louis Symphony sponsored by what was then called the American Symphony Orchestra League. Evidently, someone else had failed to finish their piece in time. 'Joe Schwantner tells me you're a really fast composer,' she said. 'If you can get it done, we'll read it.' Over the course of about two weeks I wrote Fresh Ayre, orchestrated it, had the parts copied (I recall that Aaron Jay Kernis was my proof-reader, that Michael Torke copied some of them), and sent them off. An interview (lunch with the department chair Benjamin Boretz and talking about the Beatles; coffee afterwards with cellist Luis Garcia Renart and talking about chamber music) was arranged. I was hired, and remained for nine years-probably five years longer than I expected; certainly five years longer than I should have stayed.

Since 1988, I've taught at Bard, the City College of New York, the Curtis Institute, New York University, the Chicago Conservatory of Music at Roosevelt University, the Princeton Atelier, and given hundreds of master classes and lectures at various colleges and conservatories around the United States and in Europe. I enjoy teaching talented composers, because they intuitively understand when you're right. Technique is a must. Older, well-established composers with plenty of training who tell their students that they can be composers without developing craft are like wealthy people who opine that money isn't important.

Variation I

'In the life of every human being there is a point...,' wrote the European journalist Jean Améry, 'where each discovers that one is only what one is. All at once we realize that the world no longer concedes us credit for our future, it no longer wants to entertain seeing us in terms of what we could be ... We find ourselves ... to be creatures without potential.'

Because potential diminishes with age, the older the student, the harder he is to teach. Working with a wunderkind often feels like observing an infant picking up something unknown from the floor and, looking you right in the eye with immense panache, swallowing it. Their talent is like distant heat lightning, witnessed but not yet heard-intermittent, exciting, but obscured by fuzzy logic and lack of experience.

Young composers do not have the luxury of not finishing pieces, or of withdrawing them before they are performed. They are compelled to make their mistakes in front of audiences because nobody has yet figured out a better way to grow them. Not to worry - 'most of these pieces,' as Virgil Thomson quipped, 'withdraw themselves.'

Looking to the left and right at my fellow composers (many of whom seemed to feel they were talented because they were studying there) in the composition seminar at Juilliard during the early eighties, I knew that the majority would either end up doing something else entirely or toiling as orchestrators, full-time academics, arrangers, or performers-earning a living from what Virgil called the 'musical skills racket.'

Not just pieces withdraw themselves. Composers do, too; sometimes when their dreams don't come true in reality they convince themselves that they have. I don't blame them. Who, in middle age, hasn't asked himself whether he has done the work necessary to engage honestly with their deepest selves?

Variation II

Of all the subjects I've taught, my favorite is Counterpoint. The Process of studying and teaching Counterpoint is a perfect, pure metaphor for the process that is living the examined life. It all begins with the cantus firmus-the Song of the Earth, the Life Song, the New Song, first taught us by example, then created on our own by grafting inspiration to memory, training and common sense.

A composer knowingly, willfully chooses the agitation of dissonance over the consolation of consonance. The entire history of western music is replayed in courtly, stylized fashion each time one moves through the various 'species' of solutions-the lines grow more florid, dissonance is prolonged, tonality itself may become tenuous.

Studying Counterpoint develops the skills required to pursue the painfully exquisite, life-long process of linking ear, heart, and intellect together to compose melodic lines to join life's cantus firmus. Is it too grand to suggest that this is life: one's endless striving for the effortless-sounding perfect solution; the inevitability of one's failure to find it; the requisite picking of oneself up and trying again; the sudden, unexpected flash of grace / inspiration that reveals a way forward; the coming to terms with compromise; the search for climax; the cruciform elegance of the interplay between melody's horizontal demands and harmony's vertical demands; the acceptance that melody generates harmony and not the other way around; the inevitable, disappointing cliché of the final cadence.

Variation III

'Writing is like prostitution,' wrote Moliere in the 1600's. 'First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.' Of being a professional composer, in 1989, Aaron Copland wrote, 'The rewards are likely to be small from a practical point of view. No money in the bank. No good reviews in the paper the next day. You really have to be strong. By that I mean in the sense that you must be sure that what you are doing is absolutely what you mean to do.... Composing is a lonely occupation, and perhaps there is some advantage in the fact that many composers must add other more social activities to their schedules in order to make a living.'

Lord deliver me from more 'corporate music'-music that is just 'ugly' enough and just 'pretty' enough, that sustains a predictable rhythm for just long enough, that throws in something novel like a turntable or a laptop triggering sound-effects, that throws in just enough 'wrong notes' to the chords to obscure triadic harmony just enough to make it seem ambiguous (read: sophisticated and progressive), that lasts just long enough, that sounds 'smart' enough to appease the expectations of self-appointed aficionados and 'dumb' enough to entertain. This is music entirely without risk, and it is a waste of time.

Some teachers prepare their students for academic life, others for corporate life; a few encourage them to choose the riskiest, most subversive path-being themselves.

It does require courage (or temerity, lack of self-awareness, or benign narcissism) to write something down and then pass it to one's brothers and sisters with the expectation of a performance. A composer who creates pieces he wants carefully listened to has asked for the privilege of spending other peoples' time; if he spends that time with a certain degree of sensitivity not just to his own but also to his listener's needs, then he accumulates authority and sometimes even a reputation for authenticity.

Oh, so you are a composer my daughter plays the flute. I haven't heard of you or your music. I thought all composers were dead. You compose music that's sweet what do you do for a living? How much money do you make? So you write symphonies like Paul McCartney? That's nice honey but when are you going to get a job? Oh, so you write ... tonal music, how quaint ... do serious people still do that?

'Only the hand that erases,' said Meister Eckhart, 'writes the true thing.' We're all just looking at the dots we've put on the piece of paper or computer screen in front of us and reaching for everything we've learned, everything we've read, everything we've heard, everything we know we don't know and / or understand yet to quietly (or not), respectfully (or not-writing, erasing, erasing some more, and writing something different), 'pushing the notes around' until we feel the subtle electric thrill that comes with the realization that the notes are finally just so. And then we have to let them go.

Variation IV

My favorite cantus firmuses include a really tricky one by Fux, a feisty one by Mozart, a puzzling one by Bach, and one by Ockeghem to which I doubt I'll ever manage a decent solution. Twenty years ago in Venice I bought a small sketch book that I still carry with me; on airplanes, in taxis, on buses, in hotel rooms, I've given these and countless other exercises a go. Every time I try, Music and I begin our dance anew-the familiar strains, useful shortcuts, unpleasant surprises, trends, old habits, new moves, strategies, failures. Counterpoint 'solutions' are to their cantus firmuses what music is to my life.

Every note I've ever written derives somehow from something I've heard before; every one of my counterpoint solutions has probably flowed at some time from the pen of a musician in Vienna or Beijing, Los Angeles or Tokyo, London or Johannesburg, Moscow or Managua. Over the years, a slew of my notes have ended up in my students' works-some intentionally suggested by me for the sake of argument. I am aware that every opinion I've just written has been tendered by someone sometime somewhere else-in their opinion, better. What do I know?

Sooner or later, it will be your turn to sing: seize that moment. Then again, since everything repeats, you'll probably be given another chance if you mess up, so keep trying. It is in the ritual retelling of the story, the working of the solution out for oneself that truth begins to emerge. I know that I have never reached this particular solution before, never said these things in quite this way, never before strung together my garland of pitches in exactly this sequence. Many can read my words and music, but only I can braid together my past and present to create my story, my truth, my song.

When a line of music and text is sung well by a gifted singer, the intricate interplay of training and technique, and the physical and emotional risk of live performance combine to shine a light on why all music must somehow arise from the composer's compulsion to sing.

The other evening I worked with some excellent young Chicago Conservatory musicians who were rehearsing 'The Picture Graved Into My Heart,' a song from my 1990 cycle Dear Youth, which is based on letters and diary entries written during the American civil war. I coached the final line ('Oh, the wondrous manly beauty') of it as follows:

The line should start low and soft as the singer sings the word 'oh' in a normal voice. She shouldn't try to project the low C# — it's a pillow-talk intimacy. She should only add volume as she pushes the voice into the chest while sliding upwards through the minor ninth in a moaning portamento to the fermata-lengthened D.

A full-voiced throb should enter the voice then, when the singer can feel the diaphragm beginning to tug because her air is running out. We should feel some risk there: the audience intuits that she's running out of air as she shifts the voice into her head with the last of her breath; her body and the audience's bodies share not just the reflexive response to the human moan, but the terror of running out of air.

The flute should enter just at that moment, matching the timbre of the singer's voice. The wail should pass without fuss, normal voice and diction taking over as a breath is taken and the words 'the wondrous manly' are clearly enunciated ('wondrous' is a word that speaks for itself; it doesn't need any help from the composer or the singer); there should be a slight stress, a little vibrato on the word 'beauty,' like the woody, thick vibrato you get high on the violin's G string, even a sob, before the last of the singer's air is gone and the line ends, not tapered off, but snuffed out.

Just as much and more is happening in eight good seconds of any well-wrought, well-performed piece of music.

‘Ahi, caso acerbo! Ahi, fat’empio crudele!’ he implored, face livid with passion: ‘You’ve got to feel the music! Do you have any idea what these words mean? You’ve got to make them real!’ The six of us were crammed into a tiny practice room with our junior high school choir director, Wallace Tomchek. He was terrifying and inspiring, possibly mad. We sang some more, and disappointed him again. ‘Monteverdi lives. He is right here with us. This isn’t just music. This is something more. If you can’t understand that, I don’t want to hear you!’ Frustrated, he flew out of the room, swept to his office, slammed the door, and left us in silence.

Thirty years later, sequestered in rural Virginia, and working on my new opera, Amelia, the invitation to attend a concert performance at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the version orchestrated by Respighi for La Scala in the early thirties was simply too good to pass up. As the Nymphs and Shepherds sang ‘Ahi, stele ingiuriose! Ahi, cielo avaro!’ I thought of that extraordinary teacher, his rages, and his silences.

As the soloists sang ‘Non si fidi uom mortale dib en caduco e frale…’ and the orchestra and audience listened, we sang the same words as children in my memory: ‘Let not mortal man trust in fleeting and frail happiness, for soon it flies away…’ It occured to me as I listened that it is in the hundreds of pages of manuscript paper sitting on the piano back in my studio that I put my trust.

As the second act ended, I couldn't help admiring the enormous love Respighi showed Monteverdi by limning Monteverdi’s original intentions with his own in the way composers traditionally have for learning and demonstrating their regard for each other’s work.

‘Art,’ Wally would rail to a roomful of adolescents craving acceptance, ‘is not a popularity contest!’ ‘…che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso.’ ‘… and often the precipice is close to the highest summit.’

My father brought Wally (who I had not seen for two decades) to Chicago to attend a revival there of my Shining Brow during the nineties and we visited beforehand — I snapped his portrait (left) as we had tea at the Hilton. I’ll forever treasure hugging him afterwards at the stage door, both of us weeping, and his words, ‘I am so proud of you.’ He swept away into eternal silence shortly thereafter, but I think about him every time I compose a few measures of music that remind me of Norman Dello Joio’s lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind, which he taught me in 1974, introducing me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined.

And I thought of him with profound gratitude this afternoon, as the seed of understanding and love of opera that he planted in me thirty years ago blossomed on a Blue Ridge mountaintop, a decade after his death, and exactly four hundred years after Monteverdi composed it.

I.

Festival of San Sebastián, Diriamba, Nicaragua, 2005. We were privileged to be able to view the Mass from the choir loft above the front door of the basilica. Over three thousand singing people stood hip to hip inside, another three thousand shoulder to shoulder in the plaza outside. The statues of the saints covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by elaborately costumed dancers cutting intricate steps, huge colorful flags waved by proud, immaculately dressed young men, deafening drummers, and pipers.

The air trembled, despite the amazing heat and humidity. The hair on my neck and arms rose and stayed that way as, sixty feet above us, the bells began to peal. Below, the procession passed through the doors. I was permitted to help ring the bells. Ecstatically clutching the rope, flying a dozen feet up and down, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they passed in the plaza, then another to see the huge clappers inside the bells, and then another to see the old bullet holes pocking the belfry’s inner walls.

II.

December night, Philadelphia, 1981. Complete Quaker silence within the little empty diner at the corner of Eleventh and Spruce and in the weather-stilled city without. I sat at a table alone by the plate glass window, looking out at the enormous snowflakes falling straight down, holding open in my left hand a copy of Le Père Goriot and cupping a mug of hot coffee in my right. At midnight, a pre-war electric trolley skimmed soundlessly by on its tracks, windows steamed up by the passengers, giving them the color and texture of Hopper Nighthawks. A spray of sparks erupted from the point at which the wires above met the contact arm. In this silence I heard my own voice. If mother’s cancer had been diagnosed, I didn’t yet know it; the whole world was opening before me, and I did know that.

Kenneth Schermerhorn was conducting the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; they were performing the Largo of Antonin Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony. Although I didn’t yet know I would become a composer (it took my family’s gift to me of the score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd a few years later to seal my fate), I did decide that day, at the age of seven, in 1968, to become a musician.

Thirty-five years after that beautiful English Horn solo (the melody of which I sing to my son when I rock him to sleep) changed my life, Kenneth and I enjoyed a lovely lunch together prior to his conducting my cinematic blow-out for orchestra Much Ado with his Nashville Symphony. I related to him how I had been taken on a school trip to hear him conduct the Milwaukee Symphony and how I had determined then and there to become a musician. He smiled as I thanked him, and then shared with me the moment he had first decided to become one. We reminisced about Phi Beta Studio at the MacDowell Colony, in which we had both toiled as composers, and about Bernstein, with whom we had both worked — both experiences exactly thirty years apart — at Tanglewood.

’How like coming home it feels to finally work together,’ he mused.

’And how ironic, under the circumstances,’ I replied, ‘that the Largo was adapted into a song by Harry Burleigh called Going Home.’

‘Indeed,’ he agreed, smiling.

Did he remember the fan letter from the dazzled child who couldn't find a word big enough to describe how moved he had been by the experience? He laughed and said no. I told him what I had written: ‘Dear Maestro, your performance last week was just superfluous!’

He exploded in grainy, slightly rueful laughter. What a wonderful man he was to me that day. I worked hard to keep him laughing; and we both did, until there were tears in our eyes.

’I am neither a young nor a healthy man,’ he sighed, ‘but I am glad that we are finally sitting together now at this table.’

Once, during a childhood piano lesson, I noticed that the digits tattooed on my teacher’s forearm were the same color as the inspection brand on a side of ham; they flitted in and out of the cuff of his immaculately white starched shirt when he crossed hands at the keyboard like crabs scuttling sideways on the beach here, just before dawn this morning, at our small house nestled in the crotch of sonsoquite created by the meeting of the Pacific Ocean and a river on the Nicaraguan coast.

I am watching the sun as it slides from the east to the west, admiring our chickens and guinea hens, enumerating the bird calls before sunrise and not trying to notate them, following with interest the progress of the sweet-faced old chancha as she twirls her tail and processes towards me up the beach after her wallow in the river, stopping to nibble on a scrap of leftover cabbage.

The greater herons look on, aristocratic and methodical in their movements even in the moment they throw their heads into the water to snatch a fish. Harold casts his gleaming ivory circular net into the water like a lariat, pulls it out, repeats, his left leg rising gracefully with each throw. Harold’s wedding dress net snares a Lisa, which he’ll use to catch a bigger fish that he’ll try to sell down the road for enough cordobas to afford the bus to Managua to attend a day’s worth of classes at the University.

A few minutes ago, my wife thought she heard the ecstatic hosannas of the elderly African American man back in Manhattan who walks up and down Broadway in every sort of weather with his Bible clutched in his left hand and his right arm waving wildly between 84th and 98th Streets chanting Gloria! Gloria! but it was only a bird singing on the same pitch. I first misidentified the sound as a bumblebee, which I swatted—same pitch, wrong class.

I’m told that I had perfect pitch back when I studied with my Polish piano teacher and wonder periodically where it went. I remember seeing the tattoo when I made a mistake because he would raise his arm to swat the offending digits with his pencil when I erred. Did I err because I noticed the numbers or did I notice them because I had erred?

Just now, my tio dipped his knuckle into my belly button, drew it out, and announced: gordo. I will follow the progress of the holy man as he walks towards Harlem and hope that Harold catches his fish.

II.

In a dream sometime before dawn, Kurtz’s last words from Heart of Darkness came out of my dead brother Britt’s mouth. Entering my dream, I responded, Some Rosebud, pal and realized that we were driving somewhere, looking for my dead mother. Of course, that never happened, but my father driving himself and me to the hospital twenty years ago and my holding up from the back seat my brilliant mother’s head as it lolled from side to side, dumb blank eyes leering first at my father, then at me, did.

Running just as the sun set, the coastline between Huehuete and Casares several miles north was a long narrow ribbon of lava suspended between the towering, mustard-yellow sheer cliffs over which it once poured, and the ocean, which, when met, froze it in place. The drama of time and tide played out on my left as the sun sank into the Pacific and each seventh wave climbed higher, slamming millions of metric tons of seawater into the strand of lava and filling my running shoes, since being trapped here at high tide between the water and the land will get you squashed, then drowned. I felt more alive than I have felt in years, exhilarated by the space and the exercise, the feel of my muscles working together as I negotiated the positas — sweat mingling with spindrift on my lips.

After having used precious potable water from the tank to shave and to clean the scrapes on my legs picked up through inattention at the run’s antipode near the base of the sixty-foot-high cross placed in memory of the drowned at the end of the sandy beach in Casares, I slept, and dreamt of the white horse I call Rosebud, whom my wife described rolling over on the riverbank yesterday, scratching her back in the sand, and of the afternoon in New York a few years ago when, unaware that I was in the middle of an attack of appendicitis, I set to music Philip Larkin’s To Write One Poem with its beautiful image of wave crests as galloping horses.