daron aric hagen

13 February 1984. Except for the occasional note that I checked on the piano, the house was utterly silent. 'As if none of us had ever been here before,' I sang, under my breath, jotting the notes quickly. 'And are not now:' I continued, and heard the painfully simple single line ritornello in the piano that followed in my head as I wrote it. I had been composing for over six hours. I was on. I knew I would finish the piece in a few moments.

I heard my friend Karen Hale's voice in my mind's ear, singing, 'in this shallow spectacle,' and raced ahead of her to get the phrase down on paper so that the next could be heard clearly. 'This invisible activity,' she continued. Ah.

I heard the final piano ritornello that would follow in a couple of bars, ending the piece, skipped ahead, and wrote it down. 'this sense.' I heard one long note. A critical voice piped up, said, 'Nobody will understand the sense of sense if you set it, a one syllable word, on a long note.' The other voice asked, 'But isn't that the point?' I slashed the final double bars down, signed my name, set down the date, sat back, and sighed.

My 'farewell piece' to life in Philadelphia, Three Silent Things, a song cycle dedicated to my friends (Karen Hale, soprano, Michaela Paetsch, violin, Lisa Ponton, viola, Robert La Rue, violoncello, with whom in a few weeks I would premiere it in Curtis Hall) and housemates, was done. The last song, a setting of Wallace Stevens' A Clear Day and No Memories, had come in one stream over the course of the past seven hours.

I rose from the piano and poured myself another cup of coffee. Unnoticed, the sun had long since set. I looked out the tall windows of the third floor room facing out on Delancey Place and saw in the windowpane my reflection. Ned had told me a few days earlier that, with my beard gone and just the mustache remaining, I looked like Marc Blitzstein. I toasted myself: 'To New York,' I said quietly. 'And ... to getting on with it.' Clara mewed plaintively from her perch atop the piano. I rubbed her behind the ear. No bigger than my fist, she purred appreciatively and went back to sleep.

I slid out into the hallway as quietly as I could. The light had burnt out again. Pitch dark. Michaela began playing the mournful opening phrase of the chaconne of Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin. An audience of one, I listened through the door as she performed the entire piece for herself.

In the silence that followed, 'No thoughts of people now dead,' sang in my mind. I continued gingerly down the hall to the steps. 'Young and living in a live air.' Reaching the second floor landing I heard through Lisa's door Shostakovich's melancholy Sonata opus 147—his final musical thoughts. Time seemed to slow even more. I sat down on the step, placed my head on my arm, listened as the noble, eloquent adagio in memory of Beethoven unfolded, remembered that the distinguished violist Fyodor Druzhinin once said that Shostakovich—his health shattered—told  him that he could hardly write down the notes, his hand was shaking so badly.

Silence again. 'Today the mind is not part of the weather,' I heard, lontanamente. Dust suspended in midair seemed to cease its constant random motion. My diaphragm kicked; I had forgotten to breathe. As I gasped, from behind the next closed door Robert began to play the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. Palms to forehead, I entered into the moment, and could only think 'Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.'