daron aric hagen

'Music is never about anything,' wrote Bernstein. 'Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that's all it is.' Critics of words use words, as Ned quipped; so do critics of music. As long as a composer's craft is complete, he cannot (or should not) be criticized for the way it is expressed. Critics can attack the how but not the why of a piece. That's why program notes are so fraught. Virgil told me once that he felt there were three kinds: gossip, musical travelogue, and musicology. Each sort appeals to a different sort of listener, and each aggravates another. Alas, a composer must write them anyway, or others will, and they're bound to be even more misleading than one's own.

A music critic can think they understand your music enough to disagree with what you were saying, but since music is abstract, they're bound to be wrong. The only place a critic can really look for a clue to your intent is in your program note. Composer-written program notes (including mine) are inevitably just as misleading and trivializing as those by program annotators. Tim Page aptly described Bandanna as 'neither fish nor fowl ... as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care; a melding of church and cantina and Oxonian declamation.' A theater work about the liminal zone between Life and Death, Man and God, that consciously blended and juxtaposed high and low, Music Theater and opera, was destined to fall between stools and to be willfully mischaracterized by partisans on each side. Bandanna, mongrel that it is, is very close to my heart perhaps because it is so easily and frequently misused by critics.

Gossip

A re-casting of the Venetian tale of the Moor in a 1968 Tex-Mex border town, Bandanna was commissioned by a nationwide consortium of college band directors who stipulated only that I could not use strings (except for basses) in the orchestra. Neither fish nor fowl; neither opera nor musical, Bandanna was destined to please very few of its commissioners.

When, a few months before the premiere, I presented Frederick Fennell with a copy of the score, I asked him how he thought the piece would go over in the band world. Eyes twinkling, he told me that he felt that there were three kinds of band conductors: 'First, you have what I call the Educators: they teach high school band and play simplified arrangements of pop songs and movie themes; then there are the Spit and Polish Men: they play marches, and for them music history stalled around the time of Holst; finally, there are the Maestros: they could have been orchestra conductors but chose to conduct bands because they love them. These men and women are hungry for new repertoire, and can have a better grasp of the symphonic repertoire than their colleagues in the orchestra world. Almost none of them know anything about opera, my boy, so you are doomed.'

The gifted composer Eli Marshall, who stayed at my apartment during some of the period of its composition, tells me that during the weeks he was there my routine never changed: I composed for six hours, wailing away at the piano at the top of my lungs, went out to the same Mexican restaurant for dinner, brought home a bottle of wine, drank it while copying out the fair score of the day's work (I wasn't yet using Sibelius' engraving software in 1998) in the evening, passed out on the couch, repeated.

The way I 'felt' while composing Bandanna doesn't (or shouldn't) matter. Rumi describes my psychological and emotional state during the composition, orchestration, and first production of Bandanna as a 'sad neighborhood.' I suppose that my psychological distress (clinically diagnosed at the time as depression) could account for some of the opera's feverish intensity, but unhappy composers write happy music all the time, and vice-versa. William Styron's Darkness Visible was a great help to me in understanding not just what I was going through but how the characters in the opera felt. It was the raw practice of my craft though, that served as the most effective therapy-St. Thomas Aquinas: 'Why do you seek peace? You were only meant to labor.' So work continued; it was life that had become mezzotint.

In retrospect I recognize what a desperately sad, aggressive, and brutal piece Bandanna is, physically hard on the singers and intentionally crude in the way it slams together Muldoon's text and different styles of music, vulgar in its use of craft to force certain moments.

I had put my head down. I was 'toughing it out,' exactly as I had during the hours when my mother was unconscious during the last week of her life. The melancholia that had been deepening for some time continued to intensify its grip. The first production, by the University of Texas Austin Opera Theater, as centerpiece of the College Band Directors National Association's annual convention in 1999, didn't do anything to lift my spirits: it was only remotely representative of the work I had created, greeted with hostile incomprehension by most of the conventioneers; consequently extremely traumatic-exactly as Frederick had predicted, 'doomed.'

I did not find personal closure until the release, under my baton, thanks to the efforts of Michael Haithcock, Paul Kreider, Thomas Leslie and Robert Schuneman, among others, of the complete recording, in 2006.

Musicology

The idea I used to generate the compositional dialectic and aesthetic of the opera was the idea of demarcation, as well as the fact that on either side of an absolute 'dead line' exists what Wallace Stevens called a 'the liminal zone.' I strove at every step to manifest in music each character's emotional, metaphysical, and psychological state by finding a musical and aesthetic metaphor for that state.

In the broadest sense, this led me to equate tonal centeredness with moral centeredness. Tonality itself was presented as sacred; everything else was secular by degree. Bitonality and polytonality were used to evoke a state of amorality. Highly chromatic passages were used to evoke the transitions between various states. Octatonic and twelve-tone passages were used to evoke a state of moral confusion, even anomie. I was writing from an emotionally extreme place manic music that was about emotional extremes, racing back and forth along technical and aesthetic continua, looking for balance. The figure below evolved on a large piece of paper over the piano as I composed:

Emotional States:
Life - Innocence/Simplicity - Bandanna Chord - (Hyper-Complexity)/Decadence - Afterlife

Moral States:
'Good' - Moral Absolutism - Moral Relativism - Amorality - Immorality - 'Evil'

Emotional Intensity:
Everyday Emotions - Heightened Reality - Emotional Crisis - Madness

Singing Styles:
Spoken Word - Recitative/Dialogue - Pop - Musical Theater - Parlando - 'New Music' - Opera

Musical Forms:
Spoken Theater - Musical/Singspiel - Art Song/Aria - Parola Scenica

Harmonic Language:
No Music - Simple Tonality - Bi/Polytonality - Chromaticism - Octatonicism - Dodecaphony

Libretto Styles:
Simple Prose - Indirect or Allusive Language - Poetry - Deliberate Obfuscation or Ambiguity

Orchestration:
Solo Voices - Mariachi Musicians - Winds/Brass - Idiophones - Orchestral Tutti - Saxophones

An octatonic idée fixe was associated throughout the opera with both the handkerchief/bandanna MacGuffin and the idea of the 'liminal zone' itself. This melodic motive and its verticalization as a chord struck me as the notated 'death-cry' of tonality; associating Mona's death cry with the death of tonality was, for me, an important touchstone-it helped me to anchor the opera's musical argument.

Musical Travelogue

As in Brow, I associated each character with a different array of instrumental colors. As their characters evolved, so did the orchestration that accompanied them. At the same time, emotional, psychological and moral states were evoked by the orchestration that-when juxtaposed with or superimposed upon a character's self-professed emotions-commented upon what each character was going through.

The idea of breath itself became a central orchestrational metaphor. Wind players need to breathe-for me, this fact is a powerful metaphor for life itself. For over ninety minutes, the audience listened to wind orchestra. Unveiling the three mariachi violinists-who did not have to 'breathe' as they 'haloed' the doomed Mona as she said her prayers-at the end, allowed the orchestra to tell the audience that Mona already knew that she was going to be killed, that breath itself was at an end. Following ten minutes of sustained violins, Mona's husband Morales strangled her with her bandanna, and the winds returned-as she fought for her final breaths of air-in a wheezing 'air attack' statement of the octatonic 'bandanna chord.'

I also employed procedures and formal structures customarily used by commercial and Broadway songwriters, including so-called 'first and second eights', various kinds of introductions, verses, bridges, and choruses, using the 'release' of a melodic phrase to highlight the libretto's central image, and so forth. I chose musical/lyrical structures that would best underpin or frame each dramatic event and asked Paul to execute the scene using the verse (or lyric) structures customarily associated with those musical structures, describing what I wanted by way of lyrics when possible, sending him actual examples from the song lyric canon of what I wanted when necessary.

I built upon what I was trying to accomplish in Vera by attempting to create (or dissipate) dramatic tension by causing a sub-strata of song and dance forms to proceed 'below' in the orchestra-both in accord with and in opposition to the onstage drama-whilst the demands and expectations of through-composed drama proceeding 'above' in the voices. Imposition of musical forms were used to 'slow down' the action (I:ii - 'Double Duet'), or to provide cohesion to an otherwise sprawling expositional scene (I:i) or to 'speed up' the action (all of the 'Dialogue' sections scattered throughout the opera, which in the orchestral fabric serve as variations on the 'bandanna' motive).

I adhered to this maxim (and its corollary): the longer an audience is in the theater, the slower it perceives 'time' as passing and the more important a dramatic event is, the more time the audience should spend experiencing it. Consequently, as with Shining Brow, Paul and I began by co-writing a highly-detailed, 'filmic' treatment. Dramatic events were mapped out and the amount of time-to the second-to be spent on each was decided before I had composed a note.