daron aric hagen

A hot Manhattan autumn day in 1987. 'That's alright, baby,' she purred with that famous 'just put your lips together and blow' voice as I tripped on the stairs and fell to my knees at her feet. 'Oh my, I'm sorry!' I said, looking up at her. Chuckling, she asked, 'Are you on your way to Lenny's?' My vocal chords no longer worked. 'Rglksh,' I croaked. She smiled and patted me on the arm as she passed. A whiff of perfume. 'Have fun,' she said, rounding the corner.

As if being on my way to my first private lesson with Bernstein weren't nerve-wracking enough, I had literally run into one of my all-time favorite screen goddesses on the stairs. I hadn't bargained on that when I had drummed up the nerve to make the call, schedule the time with his assistant, thereby taking the maestro up on the invitation to study composition and conducting privately with him that he had extended a few weeks earlier at Tanglewood.

Nine years previously my mother, not knowing what to do with her son, who was composing up a storm, playing the piano all hours, singing, and conducting with a single-mindedness that was just plain unnerving (not to mention disappointing to my trigonometry and physics teachers, among others), wrote a mother's plea for advice to Bernstein's personal secretary, with a score and cassette tape of one of my orchestra pieces enclosed.

Mother never showed me the letter that she wrote in 1979. It must have been persuasive though, because Helen Coates passed the materials on to her boss, who (in an example of his extraordinary generosity of spirit) replied enthusiastically. I was allowed to read his reply after my mother, who looked slightly stunned, had finished. 'Yes,' I read, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen, 'your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.'

A letter was sent to Diamond, of whom we had never heard; he wrote back that it was too late in the season for me to come to Juilliard. Instead, I went to Madison, where for the next year I wrote poetry, composed, practiced, and enjoyed being a Midwestern undergraduate at a Big Ten school. When it came time to audition at Juilliard, I sent in my scores, flew to New York, and presented myself for an interview with the school's distinguished composition faculty.

As a building, Juilliard today is far more welcoming than it was in 1978. It seemed to me then to be a coldly modernist art bunker from the outside; the inside was a succession of airless, cement-walled rooms lit with nasty fluorescent fixtures and by thin windows that allowed in little light but which would have been useful as arrow holes. There was also a vague atmosphere of profound arrogance to the place that I couldn't put my finger on, one that put me off.

It was evident to me the moment I entered the room that I was to be sent packing. The men who were to determine my future—David Diamond, Elliot Carter, Milton Babbit and Vincent Persichetti—sat at a long table on one side of the room. I seated myself in a straight-backed chair on the other side, facing them. The scores I had submitted sat in a neat pile in front of Diamond.

'Lenny wrote to me about this young man,' began Diamond. A flicker of interest passed across Persichetti's face. 'Why do you want to be a composer?' asked Persichetti. 'Because,' I replied, 'it is the only thing I have ever done that I know I will never be as good at as I want to be.' My bravado was met with disapproval. Diamond moved to the piano and, moving from low to high, stabbed at six or seven pitches. 'Please sing the pitches back and name them,' he said. I started to sweat as I sang the first three or four and then trailed off. 'Your ear is not your strong suit,' he clucked, reseating himself.

Next, Persichetti moved to the piano. 'I am going to play a little medley for you of various themes. Just call out the name of each, if you can, as I play, and I'll move on to another.' The unmistakable pungency of the Tristan chord. 'Good,' he smiled warmly. I was dazzled as he segued directly into a Gershwin tune whose name I didn't recall, 'That's fine,' he said, continuing. Then I missed two, and he played something that was clearly Mozart, but what I didn't know. I began laughing nervously. 'What's that?' asked Persichetti. 'I've never seen someone do that before,' I effused. 'That was wonderful!'

'Yes, well,' said Diamond. 'Evidently the repertoire is not your strong suit either.' Carter looked out the window. Babbit looked at the table in front of him. Neither made eye contact with me or said a word. Diamond reached for one of my scores and flipped it open. After paging through it for a moment, he pushed it over to Babbit, who didn't look at it. 'Mr. Hagen,' said Diamond funereally, 'it is felt that you should go back to Wisconsin and develop your technique.'

Clad in a green leisure suit with a round-trip Milwaukee-New York-Milwaukee airplane ticket in the pocket, I thanked the gentlemen who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and violently threw up. After I had collected myself, I headed home and spent another year in Madison. When it came time to audition for Juilliard again I applied instead to Curtis, and was accepted. After three years in Philadelphia, I returned to Juilliard as a scholarship recipient, and concluded at last my formal education as a student of David's.

My years in Madison, at Curtis and at Juilliard behind me, and now my brush with Bacall behind me, I reached the second floor of the Dakota and knocked on Bernstein's door.