daron aric hagen

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.