daron aric hagen

'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.