daron aric hagen

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.