daron aric hagen

The opening movement, Mazurka, is marked 'gracious, charming,' and is in seven, rather than the customary three beats per bar. An Aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn; this one is marked 'breezy' and lasts but sixty seconds. Meditation begins with the marking 'extroverted' and continues with a contrasting section marked 'introverted' before concluding with a section that combines the two moods. In the twilight hours known as Owl Light (marked 'scarcely heard, veiled') — that dusky uncertain time of day that hovers between light and dark — the world takes on a mystical quality. The sixty-second companion movement to Aubade follows: the other shoe drops in the quizzical Finding Out, a terse collage of three discrete ideas. The Divertimento wraps up with Riffs for Les, which rings changes on an eight bar 'head' by my first composition teacher, Les Thimmig. The Divertimento was written mainly in Philadelphia, but finished on Christmas Day, 1983, in Madison, Wisconsin. It was written for percussionist Charles Ross, harpist Therese Elder, and violist Lisa Ponton, who premiered it at the Curtis Institute of Music on April 13th, 1984.