daron aric hagen

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.