daron aric hagen

My generation of music copyists and composers shall have been the last to compose music and extract parts entirely by hand. It also has experienced the collapse of the record industry, the rise of digital downloading, and the end of traditional music publishing.

Theme

In September of 1988, not long after matriculating from Juilliard, I took on for the first time the role of teacher when I accepted a job teaching music composition, ear-training and theory for two days each week at a liberal arts school ninety minutes north of New York City called Bard (whose motto at the time was 'A Place to Think') College. In retrospect, it is altogether possible-because I never considered myself an Academic and had no interest in a career as one-that I may have learned during those years more about myself by teaching music than my students learned about music by studying with me.

I'd been convinced to take the job by a composer named Joan Tower during a very long van ride from Saint Louis to Kirksville. We had not met previously. Out of the blue she had telephoned, invited me to submit an orchestra piece to some reading and recording sessions by the St. Louis Symphony sponsored by what was then called the American Symphony Orchestra League. Evidently, someone else had failed to finish their piece in time. 'Joe Schwantner tells me you're a really fast composer,' she said. 'If you can get it done, we'll read it.' Over the course of about two weeks I wrote Fresh Ayre, orchestrated it, had the parts copied (I recall that Aaron Jay Kernis was my proof-reader, that Michael Torke copied some of them), and sent them off. An interview (lunch with the department chair Benjamin Boretz and talking about the Beatles; coffee afterwards with cellist Luis Garcia Renart and talking about chamber music) was arranged. I was hired, and remained for nine years-probably five years longer than I expected; certainly five years longer than I should have stayed.

Since 1988, I've taught at Bard, the City College of New York, the Curtis Institute, New York University, the Chicago Conservatory of Music at Roosevelt University, the Princeton Atelier, and given hundreds of master classes and lectures at various colleges and conservatories around the United States and in Europe. I enjoy teaching talented composers, because they intuitively understand when you're right. Technique is a must. Older, well-established composers with plenty of training who tell their students that they can be composers without developing craft are like wealthy people who opine that money isn't important.

Variation I

'In the life of every human being there is a point...,' wrote the European journalist Jean Améry, 'where each discovers that one is only what one is. All at once we realize that the world no longer concedes us credit for our future, it no longer wants to entertain seeing us in terms of what we could be ... We find ourselves ... to be creatures without potential.'

Because potential diminishes with age, the older the student, the harder he is to teach. Working with a wunderkind often feels like observing an infant picking up something unknown from the floor and, looking you right in the eye with immense panache, swallowing it. Their talent is like distant heat lightning, witnessed but not yet heard-intermittent, exciting, but obscured by fuzzy logic and lack of experience.

Young composers do not have the luxury of not finishing pieces, or of withdrawing them before they are performed. They are compelled to make their mistakes in front of audiences because nobody has yet figured out a better way to grow them. Not to worry - 'most of these pieces,' as Virgil Thomson quipped, 'withdraw themselves.'

Looking to the left and right at my fellow composers (many of whom seemed to feel they were talented because they were studying there) in the composition seminar at Juilliard during the early eighties, I knew that the majority would either end up doing something else entirely or toiling as orchestrators, full-time academics, arrangers, or performers-earning a living from what Virgil called the 'musical skills racket.'

Not just pieces withdraw themselves. Composers do, too; sometimes when their dreams don't come true in reality they convince themselves that they have. I don't blame them. Who, in middle age, hasn't asked himself whether he has done the work necessary to engage honestly with their deepest selves?

Variation II

Of all the subjects I've taught, my favorite is Counterpoint. The Process of studying and teaching Counterpoint is a perfect, pure metaphor for the process that is living the examined life. It all begins with the cantus firmus-the Song of the Earth, the Life Song, the New Song, first taught us by example, then created on our own by grafting inspiration to memory, training and common sense.

A composer knowingly, willfully chooses the agitation of dissonance over the consolation of consonance. The entire history of western music is replayed in courtly, stylized fashion each time one moves through the various 'species' of solutions-the lines grow more florid, dissonance is prolonged, tonality itself may become tenuous.

Studying Counterpoint develops the skills required to pursue the painfully exquisite, life-long process of linking ear, heart, and intellect together to compose melodic lines to join life's cantus firmus. Is it too grand to suggest that this is life: one's endless striving for the effortless-sounding perfect solution; the inevitability of one's failure to find it; the requisite picking of oneself up and trying again; the sudden, unexpected flash of grace / inspiration that reveals a way forward; the coming to terms with compromise; the search for climax; the cruciform elegance of the interplay between melody's horizontal demands and harmony's vertical demands; the acceptance that melody generates harmony and not the other way around; the inevitable, disappointing cliché of the final cadence.

Variation III

'Writing is like prostitution,' wrote Moliere in the 1600's. 'First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.' Of being a professional composer, in 1989, Aaron Copland wrote, 'The rewards 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.'

Lord deliver me from more 'corporate music'-music that is just 'ugly' enough and just 'pretty' enough, that sustains a predictable rhythm for just long enough, that throws in something novel like a turntable or a laptop triggering sound-effects, that throws in just enough 'wrong notes' to the chords to obscure triadic harmony just enough to make it seem ambiguous (read: sophisticated and progressive), that lasts just long enough, that sounds 'smart' enough to appease the expectations of self-appointed aficionados and 'dumb' enough to entertain. This is music entirely without risk, and it is a waste of time.

Some teachers prepare their students for academic life, others for corporate life; a few encourage them to choose the riskiest, most subversive path-being themselves.

It does require courage (or temerity, lack of self-awareness, or benign narcissism) to write something down and then pass it to one's brothers and sisters with the expectation of a performance. A composer who creates pieces he wants carefully listened to has asked for the privilege of spending other peoples' time; if he spends that time with a certain degree of sensitivity not just to his own but also to his listener's needs, then he accumulates authority and sometimes even a reputation for authenticity.

Oh, so you are a composer my daughter plays the flute. I haven't heard of you or your music. I thought all composers were dead. You compose music that's sweet what do you do for a living? How much money do you make? So you write symphonies like Paul McCartney? That's nice honey but when are you going to get a job? Oh, so you write ... tonal music, how quaint ... do serious people still do that?

'Only the hand that erases,' said Meister Eckhart, 'writes the true thing.' We're all just looking at the dots we've put on the piece of paper or computer screen in front of us and reaching for everything we've learned, everything we've read, everything we've heard, everything we know we don't know and / or understand yet to quietly (or not), respectfully (or not-writing, erasing, erasing some more, and writing something different), 'pushing the notes around' until we feel the subtle electric thrill that comes with the realization that the notes are finally just so. And then we have to let them go.

Variation IV

My favorite cantus firmuses include a really tricky one by Fux, a feisty one by Mozart, a puzzling one by Bach, and one by Ockeghem to which I doubt I'll ever manage a decent solution. Twenty years ago in Venice I bought a small sketch book that I still carry with me; on airplanes, in taxis, on buses, in hotel rooms, I've given these and countless other exercises a go. Every time I try, Music and I begin our dance anew-the familiar strains, useful shortcuts, unpleasant surprises, trends, old habits, new moves, strategies, failures. Counterpoint 'solutions' are to their cantus firmuses what music is to my life.

Every note I've ever written derives somehow from something I've heard before; every one of my counterpoint solutions has probably flowed at some time from the pen of a musician in Vienna or Beijing, Los Angeles or Tokyo, London or Johannesburg, Moscow or Managua. Over the years, a slew of my notes have ended up in my students' works-some intentionally suggested by me for the sake of argument. I am aware that every opinion I've just written has been tendered by someone sometime somewhere else-in their opinion, better. What do I know?

Sooner or later, it will be your turn to sing: seize that moment. Then again, since everything repeats, you'll probably be given another chance if you mess up, so keep trying. It is in the ritual retelling of the story, the working of the solution out for oneself that truth begins to emerge. I know that I have never reached this particular solution before, never said these things in quite this way, never before strung together my garland of pitches in exactly this sequence. Many can read my words and music, but only I can braid together my past and present to create my story, my truth, my song.