daron aric hagen

‘For this flautando pianissimo, would the first violins please lead from the back this time,’ said the gentle Voice of Authority, who sat next to me last weekend in a tiny room in the basement of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, wearing a set of headphones and leaning over the score of my Double Concerto, making quick little pencil notations over each measure as upstairs, on the stage, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson and the Vermont Orchestra, conducted by Troy Peters, performed.

The effect was as striking as it was instantaneous: listening through headphones myself, I now heard the violins in the back of my head instead of the front, and the sound, while being more ethereal, had more middle to it. I was astonished. Later, Troy explained to me that this is a fairly common request, made to elicit a little more evenness and heft from a section of strings, but it was new to me, and a revelation. ‘Concertmasters,’ he continued sensibly, ‘lead; it’s their job. So they tend to be a little ahead of the rest of the section, especially in super-loud, intense passages. This can take away a little bit from the center of the sound.’

Adam Abeshouse was the ideal producer and engineer for the Vermont project; he generously answered my questions as time permitted, and seemed to realize that I was truly enjoying the experience not just of hearing my concerto documented so beautifully but also of learning from him.

Every producer I’ve worked with has taught me things. Years ago, serving as conductor for an ultimately unreleased recording of my opera Shining Brow, I learned a lot about how to pace a session by inadvertently allowing, by being too willing to agree not to move on, a highly accomplished, well-intentioned producer to spend most of a ninety minute recording session putting the first ninety seconds of the piece in the can. In his defense, he probably couldn't be faulted, since critics do seem to form a large part of their opinion of an entire recording based on listening to the first few minutes, and he probably felt that he was protecting the project.

Serving as a producer myself for a disc of Henry Cowell art songs one evening in New York at Town Hall (lovely, but noisy space — because of the Times newspaper delivery trucks that roar down Forty-third Street late at night), I learned to be highly selective about what I ask the engineer to play back for the artists. I’m afraid that I made the process harder than necessary for the soprano by allowing her to listen to too many takes. By the end of that long evening, she seemed gallows-bound as she marched down to the basement to don the headphones like (her words) a crown of thorns.

On another occasion, producing a disc of my wind ensemble music in Texas, I was taught to stop overusing the talk-back switch by a pair of engineers who assembled a little box connected to nothing with a switch and a light on it labeled ‘conductor interrupter’ and presented it to me after the last session, saying, ‘See, Daron, now you can talk as much as you want and never stop the session!’

Over the years, producing pickup orchestras contracted to record my private students' works at the lovely old Kaufman Studios in Astoria where so many of the great silent films were shot, I figured out, with the laid back, expert help of Joe Castellon, how a producer can practically conduct the orchestra from the booth if necessary.

I learned that being a little bit sneaky is an important skill for a producer during another session with a pianist and singer. I asked the engineer to run tape (how I date myself, since now sessions go straight to a computer’s hard drive) during rehearsals and was rewarded for my deceit (and foresight) when I captured the singer effortlessly lofting a lovely, creamy high A that, during takes, he never surpassed.

Sneakiness notwithstanding, trust is a producer’s currency; without it, the process can be really unpleasant. Serving as conductor for the recording sessions of my opera Bandanna in Las Vegas a few years ago, I worked with an excellent young German tonmeister who performed a real-time mix to stereo of the dozens of microphones trained on the soloists, chorus, and orchestra. I trusted him, but knowing (and having to accept) that what I was hearing on the podium was serving not as the final product but rather as the raw material for someone else’s ears was anguishing.

As a collaborative pianist, I have learned to sympathize acutely with performers’ insecurity and feelings of over-exposure when compelled to listen to playbacks of myself accompanying baritone Paul Kreider on a disc we made together for Arsis. I loved Paul's performances, but, oh dear, how keenly I shall have liked to have fired that clumsy pianist! I was ultimately satisfied with the quality of my performance on the released disc, but during those sessions mine was the scalding self-loathing usually reserved for viewing oneself naked in the mirror after a season of unmitigated gluttony.

Working towards a recording session as a proofreader for a music preparation team that had just finished copying the new charts for a first-time read-through at Carroll's (that history-drenched warren of rehearsal studios on Fifty-fifth Street) by Liza Minelli and her big band during the late nineties, I learned an important lesson about musical charisma by witnessing an artist of her amazing caliber turning it on, dazzling and inspiring even the most hard-boiled of elite New York freelance players and then, just as suddenly, turning it back off.

Post production, the magical-mystical place where the temptation to achieve perfection at the loss of musicality, authenticity, and genuine feeling is literally at one's fingertips, is just as fascinating. Choreographing the mix-down from 32-tracks in real-time with the engineer and performing overdubs on my opera Vera of Las Vegas for CRI, I learned to alternately revel in and despair at recording technology’s ability to enable one both to ‘bury’ mistakes in the mix, and to suddenly lose a dozen hours of work by accidentally pushing the wrong button.

What producers and performers share, of course, is the joy of capturing lightning in a bottle. At one point in Vermont, Adam turned to me and with a happy, child-like smile, remarked, ‘You know, there are like a handful of people in the world who could have done what Jaime just did there.’ It was one of those moments that was at once musically and personally fulfilling. As the recording industry continues to metamorphose, I’ll keep my hopes pinned on the Process of 'making records,' hoping that it never moves too far away from that key on a kite string in a thunderstorm place.